This study explores Jamaican popular music's changing engagement with globally networked media technologies. It combines ethnographic analysis of the street dance as a site of urban poor and Black resistance to colonial institutions with an analysis of song lyrics about video cameras at street dances. Newly networked technologies for circulating visual media in global networks affect how Jamaicans perform identity. These technologies also affect street dances' social function, evoking race-and gender-related pressures that reinforce existing and historic inequalities, reshaping and limiting street dances' traditional function as a site of autonomy and resistance to colonial inequality. A better understanding of local practices can offer an alternative conceptual framework to help practitioners, scholars, and policy and technology designers avoid reinforcing those inequalities.
Any DJ could tell you that you don't know what music really means until you see it in people's bodies. A DJ establishes a relationship between audio recordings and the crowd, responding to the speed and intensity of their movements, the symbolism of physical attitudes and gestures, their vocalizations, and the simple presence or absence of different people at the site of musical engagement. Forging this dynamic relationship is neither curation nor translation, nor encoding/decoding of music: it is knowledge, recognition, and affirmation of a shared moment of trust and intimacy. Such collaborative accountability to a living audience provides a useful framework for understanding the value of ethnographic work in media studies.Addressing bodies' political and historical aspects allows a researcher to evaluate how particular physical actions and interactions situate actors in relation to power. When working in the global South, where gendered and racialized dynamics shape the interpretive tools of scholarship, properly situating people's bodies helps to avoid replicating a colonial dynamic that defines the body by its use value, as an inchoate object to be counted and catalogued.While engaging with popular music practitioners in Jamaica, the birthplace of DJ culture, my 13 years of DJ experience has been central to my ability to understand how people make meaning with music. My own practice, heavily shaped by the aesthetic approach of Jamaicans themselves, leads me beyond observation into collaboration and co-presence.I focus on my embodied engagement with street dances: free, late-night musical events that occur on the sidewalks and streets of poor neighborhoods. As I traverse them in time and space, my own and others' emotions during the course of fieldwork are a primary "interpretive resource" (Bhardwa 41 citing; Wilkins). The longer I spent in Jamaica-in recording studios and musical events but also riding buses, traveling through rich and poor neighborhoods, watching local television, and listening to the radio-the more I gathered resources that helped me make sense of particular musical moments. Combining these resources with material, embodied engagement with music reveals the meaning of particular musical C 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.