In 2008, a new style in Jamaican dancehall music and dance culture known as "Daggering" emerged. Daggering music and dancing, which included lyrics that graphically referred to sexual activities and a dance which has been described as "dry sex" on the dance floor, took Jamaica by storm. The Broadcasting Commission of Jamaica was forced to crack down on broadcasting and cable stations preventing them from playing any Daggering content. This article focuses on the subsequent clash between the government and the dancehall, and seeks to identify an appropriate method for monitoring and enforcing these new standards.
Attempts to understand what the presence of Black music means in the absence of Black people. Is this an expression of a global circulation of Afro-Caribbean cultural trends as symbols of belonging and difference among urban youngsters? Does it take us back to the history of Quintana Roo as a Caribbean region and the Black Atlantic? Is it a form of revision of Mexican national ethnic mixture and inclusion of other population groups? Adapted from the source document.
Reads Carnival-related performances in relationship to the colonial and national histories of the circulation of Indian and black women's bodies in Trinidad and Tobago, asking what is at stake in these occupations of genre, form, and performative presence in the latest global scenes of late capitalism (where image and sound, as cultural productions, are always in circulation beyond the scope of the nation, and their own "original" referents).
Discussion of the books Caribbean currents: Caribbean music from rumba to reggae (1995), by Peter Manuel, with Kenneth Bilby and Michael Largey; Bachata: a social history of a Dominican popular music (1995), by Deborah Pacini Hernández; and Merengue: Dominican music and Dominican identity (1995), by Paul Austerlitz.
Special journal issue: New Perspectives on the Black Music Diaspora: Focus on the Caribbean., Includes Roger D. Abrahams, Questions of competency and performance in the black musical diaspora; Rose Mary Allen, Music in diasporic context: The case of Curaçao and intro-Caribbean migration; Nanette T. De Jong, Curaçao and the folding diaspora: Contesting the party tambú in the Netherlands; Elizabeth Mcalister, Listening for geographies: Music as sonic compass pointing toward African and Christian diasporic horizons in the Caribbean; and Raquel Z. Rivera, New York Afro-Puerto Rican and Afro-Dominican roots music: Liberation mythologies and overlapping diasporas.
"Dominican culture and society can be characterized as a hybrid whose nature is expressed in various domains. For example, folk or popular Catholicism, the religion of some 90 percent of the national population, is in summary a cultural amalgamation. But deconstructed, it can be seen to retain elements of the various contributors to its eclectic configuration: Spanish of different regions, classes, Catholic religious orders, and even religions with regard to Judaic and Islamic features retained in Spanish folk Catholicism; West and Central African of various ethnic origins; continuities of native Taíno beliefs and practices; and other origins, such as the possible East Indian origin of the vodú deity of the “black” Guedé family, Santa Marta la Dominadora." -The Author
Develops a theoretical framework of biopolitical performance with which to approach the 1957 televised broadcast of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn's A Drum Is a Woman. Presented on the drama anthology program The United States Steel Hour, this theater-music-dance suite fused elements of Afro-Caribbean rhythm with swing and bebop to tell a history of jazz, featuring acclaimed performers such as Carmen de Lavallade, Margaret Tynes, Joya Sherrill, and Talley Beatty. Argues that through their experimentation Ellington and Strayhorn created a hybrid performance in the mode of "calypso theater": a formal and thematic engagement with an Afro-Caribbean performance history.
