International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics Volume 1 Number 3.

Intellect Ltd 2005. Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/macp.1.3.263/1

I love myself when I am dancing and
carrying on: refiguring the agency of
black womens creative expression in
Jamaican Dancehall culture
Bibi Bakare-Yusuf
Abstract
This paper develops an account of black womens contribution to the development
and continuity of Jamaican Dancehall culture. It focuses on what lies beyond a
view dominated by oppression or a male viewpoint. I explore how lower class
women bring creative expressions to bear on their experience of pain, negation
and oppression, by insisting on the priority of their bodys erotic agency. Through
a combination of place, corporeal practices and imaginative display of the body, I
suggest that existential pain is eroticized, re-membered and re-figured as joy.
Rather than studying the lyrical content of deejays or the activities of men (which
has dominated the debate on the culture) I attempt to write black women into the
history of Dancehall culture and at the same time show how as active agents they
pose a radical challenge to the puritanical bourgeois logic and accepted ideas of
femininity pervasive in Jamaican society.
Although my focus is on the transfigurative moment of the dancing body,
this should not be taken to imply that dance is the only contribution that
women continue to make to the culture.
1
Rather, I focus on dance as an
element of creative agency because dancing is a poetic and powerfully
embodied way of being-with-others. It is also a way of gathering together
experiences, rejoicing and celebrating existence, even in its most painful
form. In this sense, my paper strongly contests any consideration that dance
is a secondary or peripheral form within this aspect of Jamaican culture. The
location of dance within different cultures varies enormously from place to
place. Again, dance is differently located within a culture, according to dif-
ferent gender and class positions. We should be careful to note that reading
Dancehall from an external perspective might cause us to doubt its signifi-
cance, or provoke claims of romanticization. A core element of my argu-
ment is that with limited access to literate or bourgeois forms of expression,
women in Dancehall use the one resource they can call their own - their
bodies - using the one form they can claim as their own - dance. In this
sense, my paper rejects in advance any claims of romanticization, and ques-
tions the projections and assumptions that produce such forms of critique.
The key theme of this paper is that of power and agency in the context
of everyday life. Black women are not and have never been absolutely pow-
Keywords
creative agency
dance
erotics of pain
corporeal
everyday life
bourgeois logic
uptownies
263 MCP 1 (3) 263276 Intellect Ltd 2005
1. It has been said that
womens greatest con-
tribution to Dancehall
has been through
fashion. According to
Carolyn Cooper, the
dances or sessions
are the social space
in which the smell of
female power is
exuded in the extrava-
gant display of flashy
jewellery, expensive
clothes [and]
elaborate hairstyles
(1993: 155).
MCP_1-3_Layout(withmelzer).qxd 14/12/05 3:30 pm Page 263
erless in the face of their sociological and existential situation. Hardship
and misery demands alternative and meaningful communal expressions,
and a sense of self beyond the daily experience of injustice (Beckles 1989,
Reddock 1985). Making this point does not involve romanticization of
black lives. For every mode of redemption and agency, there is self-inflicted
abuse in black communities - addiction, vicious black-on-black violence,
vulgar materialism and self-hatred. Still, I do not read even these afflic-
tions as forms of passivity - they are rather signs of black agency gone
awry. It is as if the imagination has responded to the crisis of selfhood by
being infected with it. This notwithstanding, imaginative processes are
also the very medium by which black cultures continually re-energize the
body politic, despite the destructive blows of the last five hundred years.
This endless desire for transformative reworking emerges through every-
day ritualized performances such as the self-stylisation of the bodys move-
ment, gesture, speech pattern, adornment, performance and plastic art,
culinary practices, and habits of being and taking-up space. Through
these mediums, the black diaspora communicate stories of anguish,
resentment, longing, resistance, joy and most importantly celebrate the
joy of life (Rohlehr 1990, Davies 1994). Though important, the romantic
heroism of revolutionary figures is not the most central or transformative
aspect of black life. Rather, it is through daily intersubjective encounters
and engagement with local and global cultures that resistance and trans-
figurative praxis take effect. Everyday life, as a form of black resistance,
should not be viewed as irrelevant or banal, but as a form of renewal and
self-fashioning. The everyday is a site of reproduction, maintenance, spon-
taneous action and parodic sociality. It is here that we assume a personal
identity through bodily location in various overlapping networks of rela-
tions (Burkitt 1999: 20). A focus on demotic activities such as dancing
and adorning the body returns the aesthetic to its somatic grounding in
the daily life of the community rather than in the lofty realm of the soli-
tary heroic figure.
Situating Dancehall culture
Dancehall is a generic term for a whole array of cultural phenomena that
emerged in the ghettos of Kingston Jamaica at the end of the 1970s (Bilby
1995, Potash 1997). This includes music, (locally known as Dancehall
or internationally, ragga) distinctive fashion, argot, film, drinks, attitude
and gestural patterns. Central to Dancehall culture is the social event of
going to a dance (generally called sessions or bashment) held in open
concrete spaces (known as Lawns), in nightclubs and community centres
in areas generally associated with the urban poor. Different posses of
deejays, Selectors and their sound systems compete with each other in
what is known in Jamaica as clashes (Perreira 1994). The purpose of
these events is to entertain and solicit group loyalties and identification
around an array of issues (from the celebration of machismo, female eroti-
cism and economic independence to fascistic, homophobic and gun-toting
rhetoric). It is on these occasions that the aural and the somatic rework
themselves according to the very latest styles of movement, adornment
and song. The locus of the body-place as re-figuring human activities is
264 Bibi Bakare-Yusuf
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therefore encapsulated in the term Dancehall, grounding as it does bodily
activity with architectural form. Although the culture pays homage to the
body and the power of the place that allows it, Dancehall does not however
always provide a safe space for its participants. The threat of gang
shootouts spilling over onto the dance floor, police raids, acid attacks and
other senseless acts of violence are a constant reality; becoming a space
where crime and violence in the wider society get played out and some-
times (re)channelled.
The phenomena of Dancehall cannot be understood outside of a
changing socio-political and economic context in Jamaica. Dancehall
emerged in the move from Michael Manleys democratic socialist admin-
istration to Edward Seagas neo-liberal free enterprise government,
amidst much political violence. Seagas pro-capitalist orientation and
acceptance of stringent measures from the IMF gave rise to increased
unemployment, a dramatic rise in costs of living and reduction in govern-
ment expenditure on social services (Antrobus 1989: 20). The social con-
sequences of this included a boom in international drug trafficking,
widespread use of guns, drug abuse and violence, including violence
against women and children.
This socio-political and economic milieu brought about a sea change in
the musical taste of the Jamaican masses. The Rastafarian-inspired reggae
of the 1960s and 1970s with its radical critique of global capitalism, its
chronicle of grinding poverty and deprivation in Jamaica and its connec-
tion to the suffering of black people globally via its soteriological and
eschatological return to Africa, no longer held sway for a generation disil-
lusioned and traumatized by the social upheavals of the seventies
(Fairweather-Wilson 1994). Instead, Jamaican popular culture appeared
to be more concerned with having the best time possible in the here and
now ...(Stolzoff 2000: 99). Deejays became more introspective, narrowing
down their interest from official politics and spiritual redemption to mate-
rialism, sexuality, gangsterism, hedonism and their own verbal prowess.
Musically, reggaes melodic lyrics were replaced with a more percussive
delivery style that favoured sophisticated digital recording, remixing and
sampling from diverse and seemingly incongruous sources, such as the
theme song to the film Mission Impossible. Ironically, this movement away
from Pan-Africanist liberation theology in lyrics was accompanied by a
movement towards African tropes of bodily retention, dispensing with the
strictures of Christian morality through dance movements, and polyrhyth-
mic drum patterns. The shift in popular culture also included the use of
talk-over artists chanting on a rhythm that has parallels with Jamaican
dub poetry and North American hip hop. This retreat to the local should
not however be viewed as a gesture of insularity or ethnic absolutism, as is
often claimed by critics lamenting the demise of the diasporic black soli-
darity of reggae music (e.g. Gilroy 1987). Ragga music and Dancehall is
better seen as a transformative return to the rich wells of Jamaican culture
(such as the rhythms of Afro-Jamaican religion - Pocomania and Kumina
and the musical forms of mento and burru using drum machines) and the
new cultural confidence among the youth to raid diverse aesthetic forms
to make it relevant for their own lived experience.
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The cultural-political shift within popular culture disturbed class rela-
tions on the island. Instead of reggae, which the middle class and light-
skinned Jamaicans later came to accept as part of Jamaican national
culture and its biggest cultural export, Dancehall culture was perceived by
the ruling class as the antithesis of culture and civilization. Dancehall
music was seen by the local elites and the foreign press as unintelligible
and pure noise (Cooper 1993: 136). The apparent guttural unintelligibil-
ity of Dancehall music together with the bare-as-you-dare fashion and
overtly sexual movements of the dancers, further confirmed to the ruling
elite the cultural inferiority and vulgar immorality of the lower class
(Stolzoff 2000).
As I will show, this sociological context gave rise to the desire among
women participants to assert and to claim their agency within a social
context that viewed the poor with arrogant indifference. The desire to
assert agency was expressed in the unification of voice and body, where
performers and audience engaged in a (re)reading of the Jamaican body
politic through the erotics of the carnal. Michel Serres writes that we all
come to dance in order to read without speaking, to understand without
language (1995: 40). In Dancehall, the singing voice and the dancing
body, alongside the pained and defiant body, engage in a secret dialogue
that is at once banal and profound (Lefebvre 1991: 395). The oral dex-
terity of the deejays and the disciplined, derisive laughter of the dancers
body, are offered as canvasses of representation (Hall 1993) that refuse to
be defeated by poverty, ghetto violence, gang warfare and the pseudo-
Victorian watchful eye of middle-class moral norms. In its place, excessive
forms of adornment, and song and dance engender a healing balm to
soothe the blows of dereliction.
Writing over 30 years ago on rudies (the precursor to contemporary
Dancehall), Garth White wrote that, dance provides relaxation which
takes the form of a muscular orgy, in which the most acute aggressiveness
and the most impelling violence are carnalized, transformed and conjured
away (1967: 42). Within Dancehall culture, dancing becomes a way of
releasing tension and pressure, constituting and asserting an intersubjec-
tive being-in-the-world in a society that views the culture with contempt.
This embodied agency offers one of the few means of voicing/dancing the
conditions of oppression at a time when the masses have become disillu-
sioned with the post-colonial promise of a better life.
The space of women
Writing on Dancehall culture has tended to focus on the music, economies
of production and the verbal art form of deejaying. All these activities are
generally aligned with black male transcendence and offer themselves to a
postmodern textual analysis. While textual analysis deserves continued
attention, it also creates its own blind spots. An over-emphasis on discur-
sive and representational regimes cannot adequately address that which is
visceral, invisible or pre-/extra-discursive. Continued focus on the lyrics
occludes an account of womens contribution to and experience of the
culture. Although writers such as Carolyn Cooper and Norma Stolzoff
have alluded to womens participation in Dancehall in terms of fashion
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and dance, it remains marginal compared to the attention placed on
lyrical analysis and deejaying. Therefore, what I find potentially subversive
is less what Cooper calls the verbal maroonage of the deejays manipula-
tion of language or the misogyny and homophobia in the culture, than
women flouting conventions and refusing to be civilised (Skeggs 1994) as
they transform the dancehall space into a gynocentric space. This trans-
formation of space according to Carole Boyce Davies becomes [womens]
own version of the carnival of resistance (1998: 339).
I now want to explore the rituals the women construct, the patterns of
movement they choreograph and how they use their body to dance a little
about the realities of the age, to leave some sort of magical record of what
they saw and dreamt while they were alive (because they cant really do it
in the same way when dead) (Okri 1997: 60). In this way, that which has
been invisible gets written into history.
As with Richard Sennetts (1994) recovery of the history of female
pleasure, rituals and festivals in Ancient Athens and Davies account of
black womens body in carnival, I too want to contribute to the writing of
a black female history that is not entirely determined by oppression, negat-
ing practices or a male gaze. In Flesh and Stone (1994), Sennett argues that
because so much emphasis was placed on male activities such as the sym-
posium and civic festivals, female festivals such as the Adonia did not reg-
ister in the official festival calendar and were therefore consigned to
historical footnotes. During the Adonia, a festival dedicated to the youthful
god of sensual pleasure Adonis, women created a space on the suburban
rooftops where they made anonymous contact with each other as they
danced, drank, and sang for and with each other in celebration of the
carnal. During Adonia, women shielded themselves from the eye of power
and recovered their powers of speech, [and] spoke their desires (Sennett
1994: 78). Sennett writes, dancing and drinking [took] the place of com-
plaint, or of analysis of the condition of women in Athens (1994: 79-80).
Like the Adonia, the space created by women in Dancehall is neither a
political space nor a launching pad for rebellion (1994: 80); nor does it
necessarily transform the sociocultural order in a radical and obvious way.
Rather, it is a marginal space that women transformed into a productive
environment in which they momentarily and bodily stepped out of the
conditions imposed on them by the dominant order of the city (Sennett
1994: 80). Both the Adonia and Dancehall are festivals of female eroti-
cism, sensual self-pleasuring and a celebration of desires not otherwise
fulfilled in womens lives (1994: 77). Through the joy in dancing apart or
together, women made love to and with the space they had created, to an
ideal, absent-present lover. In this zone, the restrictions and restraints nor-
mally exercised are abandoned as the body is transformed into a locus of
action.
Recognizing that they have limited access to official culture and the
production of music, Dancehall women turn to the thing they have rights
over: their body. The body is the ground of experience, a mode of being-
with-others and the materialization of class taste and distinction
(Bourdieu 1989). It is also the locus - and the pre-text - of action
(Hastrup 1995: 89). Through dancing, adornment and vocal encourage-
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ment, women in Dancehall use their body to control and shape the lyrical
content of the music that in turn shapes the career and popularity of the
deejays and their sound-systems. The centrality of the body in this culture
and in diasporic black cultures in general has led Stuart Hall to argue that
black people use the body as if it was, and it often was, the only cultural
capital we had. We have worked on ourselves as the canvasses of represen-
tation (Hall 1992: 27). The primacy of the body is part of an effort to resi-
tuate the black female body as a site of resistance, a mutable energetic
force, a locus of pleasurable disruption and multiple desires where every-
day performances and stereotypes are challenged, deconstructed and
negotiated.
The black female body, commodified, excluded or exoticized in the
white male imaginary (and its replicated black counterpart) as obscenely
pornographic is reconstituted as an embodied agency. Self-consciously
vulgar, women flaunt their bodies in glorious recklessness, unperturbed by
the image of the slender ideal that haunts every woman in occidental con-
temporary culture (and their uptown middle-class sisters) (Bordo 1989),
unmoved by Christian patriarchal righteousness and the discourse of rep-
utation and respectability (Wilson 1969, Besson 1993). Dancehall women
freely expose and display physical excess with irreverent playfulness,
redefining the body as a site of beauty, power and sensuality as they pay
homage to the goddess of cellulite. In her column in the Gleaner, Norma
Soas writes:
For dancehall mavens there is no such thing as a figure fault. Not for them
are life-threatening diets, gruelling work-outs at the gym, or constricting
corsets. They exhale with abandon. What some women remove with liposuc-
tion, the dancehallers expose, aided by spandex tights, cycle shorts and
midriff tops, determined to let nature run its course.
(Soas 1998: 15)
Full membership to this cult of black womanhood is signalled by the
desire to display, to flaunt, to exhibit and enjoy flouting conventions.
According to Mary Russo (1986), within a Eurocentric aesthetic, to
display the protruding, open and oversize female body is to make a specta-
cle of oneself, to be outside normative ideals of femininity: slender, sleek,
restrained, calm and rational. It is precisely this spectacle that these lower
class women reclaim and valorize as they reject middle class Jamaican
acceptance of the White Western civilising system which attempts to
contain the expression of womens sexuality through the moralising dis-
courses of conduct: politeness, respectability, caring, duty and responsibil-
ity (Skeggs 1994: 108). Instead, Dancehall women mock, exaggerate and
re-create the Europeanized cult of femininity through strategies of vulgar-
ized mimicry and over-dramatized commentary on ideal femininity.
Paulette McDonalds description of Dancehall fashion is worth quoting at
length:
... women come out in outfits that show their bellies; they cut out holes at
strategic parts in their shorts (called batty-riders in the language of Erotica);
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and they wear tight, body hugging dresses with cut-out designs all the way
up their armpits, suggesting that they have nothing underneath ... It does
not matter if the women are fat. Black-skinned women go in for blonde wigs.
They dye their hair in a combination of colours - burgundy, green and
orange. They wear chunky jewellery - earrings designed in the shape of the
Jamaican map, a dollar sign, a razor blade.
(McDonald 1993: 8)
In this way, Dancehall women allow their bodies to communicate desire
and anger in order to publicize their own unique aesthetic judgement and
experience. In this self-conscious display, they powerfully subvert conven-
tion and jam bourgeois logic. Returning to the class dynamics that struc-
ture Jamaica, it is necessary to understand that the Dancehall complex in
general, and the female body in particular, encapsulate upper class
anxiety over the moral status of the black lower class. The extravagant
display of the adorned body and bawdy celebration of the protruding,
voluptuous and ample body in Dancehall continues to defy upper class
ideals about appropriate and acceptable modes of feminine behaviour,
conduct and appearance. Such display raises ontological issues concern-
ing active and passive agency. Some readers might view the display of the
body in this culture as capitulating to that Sadian imagination (Carter
1979) which objectifies and exoticizes the black female body in occidental
culture. In contrast, I suggest that rather than seeing objectification as
first of all the activity of the voyeurs gaze or imagination, it is more accu-
rate to say that it is a process that originates with the women. In the
context of dance, Sondra Horton Fraleigh (1987) has argued that like any
object of art, dance is also an object performed for others. However, unlike
the plastic arts, the dancing body is also an I, a living, dynamic material,
moving through time and space. The body in movement therefore cannot
be totally objectified or captured by the gaze of the other because the
dancer and the dance are inseparable (Fraleigh 1987: 36). For Fraleigh,
while the audience may view the dance as a dynamic object, the learn-
ing, disciplining and presenting of the dance requires the dancer to objec-
tify her body. Part of the dancers power lies in her ability to objectify, to
visualize herself as she may appear to others, to make herself into the
dance she visualizes (1987: 37). Therefore, the incarnated, intentional,
lived self is the precondition for objectification (or creation) of the body in
dance (1987: 37). From this account, we can say that rather than being
a victim of the objectifying male/bourgeois gaze, Dancehall women
actively open and surrender themselves to the eye of power by playing
with it, challenging and appropriating the gaze in a way that enables them
to present and maintain their subject position. This is not to deny that a
sort of Sartrean scopic capture may be at work here, rather, it is to suggest
that scopic capture is always overlaid with what Davies (1998) in another
context refers to as the politics of resistance, agency and enjoyment. I
suggest then that women are aware of their objectification and use their
objectified status as a strategy to assert their subjectivity as they (re)con-
struct themselves as incarnated agents. In the moment of dancing, the
apparent vulgar self-enactment of the adorned body of Dancehall women
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not only recasts the male scopic economy; it is at the same time, an over-
coding of the entire social field of normativity. Thus, objectification does
not inherently mark scopic mastery, nor does it validate hegemonic valori-
sation; rather, it becomes the prelude for their demolition and disruption.
Dance and eros in Dancehall
While the music deck at a Dancehall event is usually coded in the lan-
guage of maleness, as we have seen, in contrast, the dance floor is the
arena where women exercise control over their body, stimulate sexual
desire and call themselves into being. On the dance floor, women allow
themselves to feel, to emote, and to enjoy the freedom of their body, as they
dance themselves into a feeling state. Dance has always been central to the
cultural and psychic survival of the African diaspora, telling the story of
struggle in the New World and the continuation of African musicality and
rhythm (Nettleford 1985). At a time when the enslaved communities were
denied public use of their African languages, they communicated their
pain, sorrow and jubilation through music and dance. According to Rex
Nettleford, dance in the New World is one of the most effective means of
communication, revealing many profound truths about complex social
forces operative in a society groping toward both material and spiritual
betterment (1985: 19). Dance offered a way of momentarily transcending
everyday life and challenging normative structures. Against laws that leg-
islated against ownership, the body in rhythmic movement was an impor-
tant source of autonomy and living through the dread and chaos of
slavery. By training and disciplining the body, enslaved Africans retained
control over their body and its disalienation through cultural and histori-
cal continuity. Therefore, when we talk about the relief brought about
through dancing in Dancehall, this should not be interpreted as merely
egocentric or in terms of the genius of an individual. Rather, in dancing,
the community itself in the present and across time gets gathered and re-
membered against all forces of disintegration. Dance is an expressive com-
munion with an-other, therefore, it is always inter-subjective, an example
of being-with-the-other. According to Fraleigh, dance closes the distance
between self and other. As the dancer dances for others, she instantiates
others in her dance and dances the body-of-everyone (1987: 61).
Dancehall is therefore in the broadest sense a form of historical and social
remembrance - a cultural genetic repetition of pain that avoids the path
of disintegration and dismemberment by gathering the past and the reality
of existential dread joyfully: re-membering, putting it together in the
context of the dance with desire and incarnated intentionality.
In this wordless, rhythmic space of movement, Dancehall women use
their dancing to return them to the eroticism of their body by drawing
attention to the fire that burns through their loins. Whether this is the
popular dance known as the butterfly, a rhythmic opening and closing of
the legs (in some cases with two fingers pressed against the vagina as
though stimulating the clitoris) or the skettel drop, the dances become a
speaking through the body, a way of conveying to the partner and the
community its bodily desires, anger, fears and needs that need not move
beyond the dance floor. Dancing can reconnect us to our erotic potential.
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The erotic, as Audre Lorde reminds us, must not be conflated with pornog-
raphy which emphasizes sensation without feeling (1984: 54). The erotic
is an expression of sexual arousal and desire, as well as a life-giving force
that can energize and nurture us in our life, in our work toward changes
and in our communion with the world. For Lorde, the erotic can be
healing and empowering. It is not confined to our beds; it is that and more.
It is essentially a movement towards the other - past, present and the yet to
come. Understood in this way, the dancing female in Dancehall gathers
and embodies the complexities of Eros in her muscles in a way that cannot
be easily reduced to a mating game between the sexes. Instead, the
dancing body gathers and preserves communal stories and values and re-
presents them anew. Dancing thus becomes a fulfilment of communal
value (Fraleigh 1987: 58) as the dancer becomes aware of her limit and
capacity.
The culture of Dancehall is about sex and sexuality, of course, but to
reduce it to sex is to fail in absolute terms to understand the complex
healing, aesthetic and record-keeping functions the culture plays within
Jamaican society. It is also to repeat the Eurocentric (and nihilistic) reduc-
tion of black creativity to sex. In rejection of this, we can say that the
erotic reveals the gaps and void ... within our sexual discourse (ONeil
1989: 70). As Audre Lorde suggested, once we recognize the power of the
erotic in our lives we begin to give up ... being satisfied with suffering
and self-negation. Our acts against oppression become integral with self,
motivated and empowered from within (1984: 58). Such a poly-erotic
reading of Eros has led Eileen ONeil to speak of the eroticization of pain.
This is the capacity to express sadness and simultaneously to eroticize it
(ONeil 1989: 70). The notion of the eroticization of pain clarifies how
through dance, women in Dancehall culture fuse the reality of pain,
oppression and everyday pressures that threatens to engulf them into a
joyous celebration of the body and the erotics of the community past and
present. Rather than historical and existential pain being responded to
with destruction through nihilistic expressions (which sometimes
happens), it is embraced and channelled pre-reflectively into dancing and
imaginative modes of embodiment. The dancing woman does not forget
or suppress the pain of her life-world, rather she attempts to inflect it with
joy and move towards bodily integrity and somatic re-membering. The
eroticization of pain in dance then involves integration, a return for the
hundredth time, [to] that same pain and that same pleasure (Ellison
1961: 23).
A question that might be developing in the readers mind is this: Surely
the activities in Dancehall culture are less about pain and more about
pleasure and the escapist affirmation of pleasure and consumer lifestyle?
My response is that no black diasporic cultural practice or activity (as yet)
can be discussed outside the history of slavery and the ongoing structural
inequalities that animate and modify it. As such, one of the key precondi-
tions for the manifestation of Dancehall in its current form has to be the
urgency to conquer or tame the social/moral/economic destitution that
wreaks havoc on daily life. This approach avoids the luxury of reading
Dancehall as solely the pursuit and affirmation of hedonism or a pleasur-
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able form of letting-it-all-hang-out. Of course, hedonism and conspicuous
consumption play a central role in the culture; the point here is to show
that there is something else at work in the culture - a history of creative
practices and a dynamic taking up and reworking of different aesthetic
traditions in the context of ongoing oppression and existential dread.
Further still, any form of creativity to my mind seems to require a back-
ground of some sort of pain or existential problematic in order to flourish.
As James Baldwin wrote not so long ago, ... people who cannot suffer can
never grow up, can never discover who they are (1962: 376). It is in this
light that we can begin to appreciate the diversity, richness and deficit of
black diasporic expressive cultures in the context of the suffused torture of
white supremacist hegemonic values and the weakness of black leader-
ship. Many women in Dancehall are confronted daily with the cheapness
and insignificance of their lives. This lack of value is often externalized and
turned into creative practice - the overture to transcendence, improvisa-
tion and new configurations. Therefore, to say that the performance of the
body in Dancehall culture is the affirmation of pure pleasure is not only
reductive but to fall yet again into one of the key aporias of western
thought: the denial of the body as the fundamental principle of existence,
printing and imprinting historical and social meaning upon itself and out
into the world. This blind spot can never acknowledge that by fusing the
reality of pain with Eros, the lived-body can revitalise itself in order to
face long bouts of struggle by being put in touch with its own undeniable
sources of pleasure within itself (ONeil 1989: 70).
I am therefore suggesting that in the moment of dancing, the destruc-
tive narrative which positions black women as vulgar and impure bodies
is deconstructed and unbalanced, only for it to be reconstructed, rebal-
anced (Schechner 1993) and transformed into a creative agency. In the
moment of dancing the status quo is challenged as women momentarily
assume a different persona, reframing the mundane world and re-chan-
nelling the pressures of daily life. Dancehall is therefore as much about
the power of place and practice in the constitution of transgressive libera-
tory actions as it is about a motile body in a dialogue with itself, the com-
munity and the outside that continues to be the source of profound
inspiration and despair. Women in Dancehall culture use a variety of dif-
ferent dance repertoires to communicate their personal experience, the
history of the black female body in Jamaican society, as they continually
search for a new way of inflecting the socio-politics of the everyday with
poetic expressions.
Dance not only releases and reconnects these women to their erotic
possibilities; it also re-establishes the female bodys capacity to be both
gentle and powerful. No more is the passive, muted female of earlier times,
when Rastafarian ideology had a powerful influence on Jamaican popular
culture; Dancehall women stubbornly assert their own powerful embodied
agency. This show of public agency is reflected in their extravagant cele-
bration of the carnivalesque excess and movements that manage to
combine slow sensuous movement of the hips with strong, energetic, and
often athletic movements. These forms show that the female body is both
gentle and strong all at once. In one dance known as head-top dancing,
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we see women in half-headstand with knees slightly bent, buttocks thrust
upwards gyrating dreams of a new relationship with defiled buttocks. The
image of protruding black buttocks that renders black females in western
pornographic imagination as hypersexual and inferior (Bush 1990,
Gilman 1980) is re-emphasized and over-emphasized, exhibited as a sign
of beauty to be marvelled at. The buttocks, are displayed as playful cul-
tural nationalist resistance, they challenge assumptions that the black
body, its skin colour and shape, is a mark of shame (hooks 1992: 63).
They force us to return and look at the contradictions in the black under-
class body, a body that is ample and strong, sensuous and vulgar and yet,
capable of the most staggering excesses and the most exacting physical
discipline and assertion of will (Ellison 1962: 230). It is in this instance
that we can begin to understand how the violated and oppressed body can
become a defiant and cherished body. This body, deconstructs, exaggerates
and destabilizes the distinction between the high and the low, object and
subject, pain and pleasure, the vulgar and the pure by showing how inter-
twined these distinctions are in reality. As such, Dancehall women refuse
to be a matter out of place (Douglas 1966) by showing that their bodies
and their world matters.
Dancing becomes a kind of exercise that permits the dancers to become
more aware of the limits and possibilities of their bodies and the way their
bodies are distorted and deformed by their socio-historical experiences. As
much as the dance deconstructs and reconstructs the body, dancing also
reconnects the body (if only sub-consciously) to its own capacities as it
struggles to deal with the pains and pleasures of life. This relation is some-
times reflected in the facial expressions of the women as they dance. On
the one hand, the facial expressions can sometimes appear strained,
serious, distant and grimacing; on the other, as the body is enveloped in
the sound, the painful and detached look becomes more blissful and serene
as the women give themselves over to the music, letting their bodies
become the vehicle to imagine and communicate inexpressible rage. But
this rage is softened by the possibilities of joy in dancing in a somatic
transfer and transformation of the world-historical situation, and the
beauty that may arise from it.
On a global scale, black people within the diaspora continue to be
oppressed by white supremacy in its myriad forms. Closer in however,
black communities are often vulnerable to internalizing white supremacy -
as shadism intertwines with class and gender distinctions to reproduce
historic oppressions on the inside. It is this context of ongoing sociological
inequalities wedded to existential dread that is the backcloth to the ener-
getic deployment of black creativity. Black expressive communities take up
any number of creative expressions, fusing local and global cultural pat-
terns and making them relevant to and expressive of each new context, in
the midst of addiction, abuse and impoverished spirits. The energetic con-
tribution of women to the transformative continuity of Dancehall puts
such ambiguities in stark detail; in the midst of gross materialism and a
society sharply at odds with itself in class, racial, sexual and gender terms,
a form of life has emerged that allows women to celebrate their own
embodied agency in the midst of destructive chaos.
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Suggested citation
Bakare-Yusuf, B. (2005), I love myself when I am dancing and carrying on: refig-
uring the agency of black womens creative expression in Jamaican Dancehall
culture, International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics 1: 3, pp. 263276,
doi: 10.1386/macp.1.3.263/1
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Contributor details
Bibi Bakare-Yusuf has a PhD from the University of Warwick. Her thesis examined
embodiment, agency and memory in the African world. She relocated to Nigeria
from the UK in 2003, where she works as an independent scholar. Her research
interests include exploring the phenomenology of African experience, love and sex-
uality, as well as mapping African expressive and gendered culture. Contact: 26a
Papys Road, London SE14 5SB, UK.
Email: bibi@bakareweate.com
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