Sonjah Stanley-Niaah

The Presses of the University of Ottawa, August 2010

DanceHall combines the cultural geography, performance studies and cultural studies to examine the culture of performance across the black Atlantic.

Taking the dancehall music, jamaican as his main example, DanceHall reveals a complex network of cultural practices, policies, rituals, philosophies and strategies of survival that link the performance of the diaspora of caribbean, african and african.

Combining the rhythms of reggae, digital sounds and words of DJ quick, dancehall music has been popularized in Jamaica at the end of the last century by artists such as Shabba Ranks, Shaggy, Beenie Man and Buju Banton. Even if its popularity is growing in the world, a detailed understanding of the space of performance of the dancehall, lifestyle and meanings associated with it is missing. The author Sinjah Stanley-Niaah tells the story of how the dancehall emerged from the culture of marginalized youth of the ghettos of Kingston, and how it remains inextricably linked to the ghetto, giving its culture and its spaces of performance with a distinct identity. It reveals how the networks of migration, the practice embodied, institutional frameworks, and the ritual practices of the dancehall connect with other music styles, such as the american blues, the kwaito south african and the reggaetòn Latin american. It shows that the dancehall is part of a legacy that goes out of the bushes dance plantations in the west indies and the first churches negroes, to taxi dancehalls of Chicago and the ballrooms of Manhattan. In fact,DanceHall extends over the whole of the geography and history of the black Atlantic to produce its detailed portrait of the dancehall in its space of performance in local, regional, and transnational.