306 p., Investigates the shifts in gender constructions currently taking place in Jamaica, a peripheral nation-state, during a period which is characterized by hegemonic dissolution in the world-system. These shifts are defined by class- and gender-based conflicts over the norms, values and aesthetics associated with the traditional bourgeois classes. The fulcrum for investigation is Jamaica's Dancehall culture, which currently exhibits changes in the field of masculinity, in which clashes over the body occur constantly. These conflicts center around dress, gendered dancing styles and adornment.
205 p., Analyzes the poetry of the African American Langston Hughes and the Jamaican Louise Bennett during the 1940s. Through an examination of the unique similarities of their poetic projects, namely their engagement of performance to build their audiences, their experiments with poetic personae to represent vernacular social voices, their doubleness as national and transnational figures, their circulation of poetry in radio and print journalism and their use of poetry as pedagogy to promote reading, this dissertation establishes a new perspective on the role of poetry in decolonizing language practices. While Hughes and Bennett are often celebrated for their representation of oral language and folk culture, this project reframes these critical discussions by drawing attention to how they engage performance to foster an embodied form of reading that draws on Creole knowledge systems.
112 p., On Wednesday October 11th, 1865, a group of malcontented men and women in Jamaica, a British colony, began a rebellion whose aftershocks echoed well beyond the confines of Morant Bay, the small town where it started. Although the initial rebellion lasted for just a few days, its brutal suppression and the implications that it held for the British Empire sparked a controversy that touched on some of the deepest fissures in British society at that time. At its heart, the rebellion highlighted the contested notions of power within the British imperial system. In Jamaica, disenfranchised local peasants rebelled to challenge a political system that excluded and oppressed them.
155 p., Explores the interweaving of colonial and post-colonial British and Jamaican Laws and the interpretive legalities of sexuality, compulsory heterosexuality, and queerness. The research project begins by exploring the ways in which the gendered colonial law produces black sexualities as excessive and in need of discipline while also noticing how Caribbean peoples negotiate and subvert these legalities. The work then turns to dancehall and its enmeshment with landscape (which reflects theatre-in-the round and African spiritual ceremonies), psycho scape (which retains African uses of marronage and pageantry as personhood), and musicscape (which deploys homophobia to demand heterosexuality), in order to tease out the complexities of Caribbean sexualities and queer practices.
