Transatlantic linguistic ties: The impact of Jamaican on African youth language practices

This contribution seeks to shed light on global dimensions of language contact and language change with regard to African youth languages. Looking at the influences of Jamaican speech forms on youth language practices in Africa, the focus will be on transatlantic linguistic ties that link Africa and its Diaspora. As the case studies will illustrate, Jamaican has a huge impact on youths in Africa and is used extensively in their communicative practices. Music, in this regard, plays an important role: Reggae and Dancehall music are highly popular in many (especially Anglophone) African countries, and these Jamaican music genres are quite influential with regard to language practices among African youth and beyond. Music thus represents an important site of language contact, and also serves as a means to learn the Jamaican language. In our paper we will draw on examples from different African countries to illustrate the wide spread of Jamaican influences. Our focus will be on case studies in Kenya, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Ethiopia, South Africa and the Gambia. We will discuss selected song examples from a sociolinguistic perspective that takes these various language practices as a base and then looks at the contexts and motivations for the use of Jamaican speech forms.

Battyboy must die! Dancehall, class and religion in Jamaican homophobia

Homophobia is ingrained in Jamaica, and homophobic violence is rampant. This study, developed from 30 interviews with gay Jamaicans, unravels the nation’s complex ideological issues surrounding political and social discrimination. Few empirical researchers have explored homophobia in Jamaica. This study is the first that includes interviews exclusively from the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, queer and asexual communities. These interviews, combined with an examination of media reporting and cultural phenomena, reveal the deep interconnections between three predictors of homophobic sentiment: dancehall music, gender and religiosity. Since dancehall culture so thoroughly implicates the other predictive factors, I use it as the primary object of analysis in this essay. Furthermore, since all three predictive factors – religiosity, dancehall music and even masculine identity – are cultural phenomena articulated through social conventions and texts, this essay examines them through a cultural studies lens.

Zimbabwe Dancehall Music as a Site of Resistance

The popularity and consumption of dancehall music in Zimbabwe has grown exponentially over the past few years. However, despite its popularity, Zimdancehall has attracted controversy for promoting violence and vulgar behavior among other ills. This chapter casts aside society's moral judgements in order to investigate Zimdancehall music's role as an alternative public sphere. Using Fraser's alternative public sphere and Bakhtin's carnivalesque as its conceptual framework, and Norman Fairclough's approach to Critical Discourse Analysis as its methodology, the study analysed the discourses that underpin Zimdancehall music. The chapter argues that Zimdancehall music has become a counter public that provides marginalised youths with a platform to resist the dominant state-sponsored patriotic discourse. The music genre has opened a liberating alternative communicative space, outside of state control and ZANU-PF's patriotic discourse, where marginalised youths can symbolically invert their reality, protest as well as articulate their needs and aspirations freely.

Death in the Arena

This essay decodes how Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings uses the history of Jamaican music, culminating in the conflict between roots reggae and dancehall, to chart the Cold War’s temporality, futurity, and ideological conflicts over time, temporality, and futurity. A Brief History of Seven Killings points readers to a jaded, subaltern temporality encoded in a dancehall music that rejects the revolutionary utopianism woven into postindependence Jamaican music. The novel stages this temporal conflict at the center of Jamaican popular music through the status of revolutionary Cuba and the riddim-based technique of dancehall song composition, both of which converge in the itinerary of the “Death in the Arena” riddim. The novel thus invites readers to process the Cold War’s conflict over time and space through the lens of Jamaican music, attuned both to how geopolitics inflected that music and to how that music inflected geopolitics. Reading the evolution of Jamaican music since independence, this essay reveals how the form of James’s novel replicates the spectral and shattered assemblages of dancehall music in order to borrow some of its fugitive, subaltern autonomy.

Maybe it's a grime [t]ing:th-stopping among urban British youth

This article examines how voicelessth-stopping (e.g.tingforthing) is used by a group of adolescents in Manchester, UK. The data come from an ethnographic project into the speech of fourteen to sixteen year olds who have been excluded from mainstream education. Althoughth-stopping is often strongly associated with black varieties of English, multiple regression analysis finds ethnicity not to be a statistically significant factor in its production. Instead, conversational context and involvement in aspects of particular social practices—grime (rap) and dancehall music—emerge as potentially more relevant. Subsequent interactional analysis adds support to this interpretation, illustrating how the feature is being used more or less strategically (and more or less successfully) by individuals in this context in order to adopt particular stances, thereby enacting particular identities that are only tangentially related to ethnicity. I argue that use ofth-stopping in this context indexes a particular street identity that is made more available through participation in grime especially. (th-stopping, youth language, identity, ethnography, grime, hip hop)*

Soul rebels and dubby conquerors. Reggae and dancehall music in Germany in the 1990s and early 2000s

In the 1990s, a vibrant reggae and dancehall scene emerged in several German cities, and in the early 2000s songs of reggae artists such as Gentleman, Seeed or Jan Delay rose to the top of the German pop charts. In this article, the German reggae scene of this time is depicted in respect to its formation, infrastructure, transnational relationships and sub-genres, and is related to general social and cultural developments in reunited Germany, e.g. a new national self-consciousness, tendencies towards a multi-ethnic society and new kinds of youth scenes. These findings are illustrated by a close reading of two songs from the seminal albumsSearching for the Jan Soul Rebelsby Jan Delay andNew Dubby Conquerorsby Seeed, both released in 2001. While Jan Delay's lyrics reflect the singer's commitment to the antifascist youth scene, Seeed celebrates a hedonistic lifestyle in the new capital Berlin.

Zimbabwe Dancehall Music as a Site of Resistance

The popularity and consumption of dancehall music in Zimbabwe has grown exponentially over the past few years. However, despite its popularity, Zimdancehall has attracted controversy for promoting violence and vulgar behavior among other ills. This chapter casts aside society's moral judgements in order to investigate Zimdancehall music's role as an alternative public sphere. Using Fraser's alternative public sphere and Bakhtin's carnivalesque as its conceptual framework, and Norman Fairclough's approach to Critical Discourse Analysis as its methodology, the study analysed the discourses that underpin Zimdancehall music. The chapter argues that Zimdancehall music has become a counter public that provides marginalised youths with a platform to resist the dominant state-sponsored patriotic discourse. The music genre has opened a liberating alternative communicative space, outside of state control and ZANU-PF's patriotic discourse, where marginalised youths can symbolically invert their reality, protest as well as articulate their needs and aspirations freely.

Dancehall music and urban identities in Zimbabwe – A constructive postmodern perspective

Dancehall music may be seen as a commentary over the socio-political events that are unfolding in Zimbabwe since 2008, a period characterised by political and economic uncertainty. The study focuses on how this genre of music reflects identities that emerge from the context characterised by the disintegrating state institutions and fragile households. With such a context, dancehall music may be interpreted as offering hope and courage. Notably, the music carries a unique theological injunction where God is called upon to witness and offer strength, not to punish or change the status quo. I call this genre of music wilderness music to explain that the music provides spaces of hope and courage to fragile and less certain identities.