Memories in Playback
by Tanika I. Williams, M. Div
Bran’ New Stile.
(Originally written August 2005)
In a culture marred by unrest and impermanence, memory assumes sacred meaning. Dancehall, a product of Downtown Kington’s socio-economic frustration and historic blackness, is a site of recognition and recollection. The dance exists wherever the boxes of drinks are stacked high, the men post-up, the women bruck out, the soundmen clash, and the speakers create a wall of sound. To the initiated, there is instant familiarity in the cued moving of hips, waiving of hands, and pointing of fingers. To the initiated, wherever the space lands is where memory unfolds.
Dancehall is a new and exciting cultural minefield. Over the last decade scholars have dissected dancehall under various theoretical lenses in an effort to contextualize the socio-economic, gender, lyrical/lingual, performative and stylistic aspects of this phenomenon. Even though work on dancehall is continuously evolving, critical visual critiques are consistently missing from the greater body of scholarship. This brief paper is an attempt to expand the dialogue to include the astonishing video-based corps which has developed within dancehall. This essay will also investigate the role this image corps has played in reinforcing dancehall’s influence as a cultural phenomenon.
I wish to note the methodological obstacles I had in writing this text. Visual critique of dancehall imagery is virtually non-existent, the critical text dealing with coloured bodies owning imaging technologies focus almost exclusively on film and/or photography, and scholarship on video is generally unpoliticized in respect to coloured bodies.