Barber, James Henry (30 October 2021). The Historical Circularity of Jamaican and African+/American Cultural Practice: Re-Framing the Jamaican Influence on Hip-Hop in New York (Submitted). In: Hip-Hop Transcultural: Constructing and Contesting Identity, Space, and Place in the Americas and Beyond. Online. October 28th-30th 2021.
Full text not available from this repository. (Request a copy)The framing of hybridity debates in Hip-Hop Studies, that is the discussion of non-African American minority cultural influences on hip-hop in the United States, have hitherto occupied a difficult position in the literature because of a suggestion that hybridity theorists have in some cases made “strange claims” to the cultural “ownership” of the form (Perry). I argue that we need to move beyond framing hybrid cultural influences in terms of the debate of originalism, and show how the most illuminating discussions of the Jamaican and Caribbean influence on hip-hop, where I focus on the former, in fact reflect new ways of seeing, and indeed “hearing”, the dialogic relationship between Jamaican and African+/American cultural practice, in particular flows between reggae and hip-hop as cultural forms.
I highlight the ‘paradox’ of the Jamaican and Caribbean influence on hip-hop in the United States, which thus far have tended to be most widely centred around these influences in New York in particular. I principally explore the relationship of the Jamaican cultural influence on hip-hop (and vice versa) in New York (1965-1995), drawing attention to a case study based on primary interviews with the architects of a peak era of reggae and hip-hop fusion in the form of the raggamuffin hip-hop subgenre (1987-1995). I further draw on musical analyses of songs from this era, as examples of reggae and hip-hop’s reciprocal dialogue
Using the framework of circularity I orient my exploration from the point of view of how Jamaican culture, through its increasingly global diaspora has travelled. In particular, I cite an oft-used notion from Stuart Hall, highlighting the “routes” of Jamaican popular music culture and reggae music through the central catalyst and conduit of reggae music, the Jamaican dancehall and sound system ‘nexus’, a sphere which has historically indigenized and creolized hybrid cultural and musical influences in its development as a technological and musical sphere since the 1950s.
Item Type: |
Conference or Workshop Item (Paper) |
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Division/Institute: |
06 Faculty of Humanities > Other Institutions > Walter Benjamin Kolleg (WBKolleg) 06 Faculty of Humanities > Other Institutions > Walter Benjamin Kolleg (WBKolleg) > Center for Global Studies (CGS) 06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of History and Archaeology > Institute of History > Institute of History, Iberian and Latin American History 06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Art and Cultural Studies > Institute of Musicology |
UniBE Contributor: |
Barber, James Henry |
Subjects: |
300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology 700 Arts > 780 Music 900 History > 970 History of North America 900 History > 980 History of South America |
Submitter: |
James Henry Barber |
Date Deposited: |
07 Mar 2022 15:07 |
Last Modified: |
05 Dec 2022 16:09 |
Related URLs: |
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URI: |
https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/165694 |
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