GREATER THAN THEM
POPCAAN
PHOTOGRAPHY BY BOLADE BANJO
OUT NOW
ISSUE 43 FW23
KALEIDOSCOPE's Fall/Winter 2023 issue launches with a set of six covers. Featuring Sampha, Alex Katz, Harmony Korine, a report into the metamorphosis of denim, a photo reportage by Dexter Navy, and a limited-edition cover by Isa Genzken.
Also featured in this issue: London-based band Bar Italia (photography by Jessica Madavo and interview by Conor McTernan), the archives of Hysteric Glamour (photography by Lorenzo Dalbosco and interview by Akio Kunisawa), Japanese underground illustrator Yoshitaka Amano (words by Alex Shulan), Marseille-based artist Sara Sadik (photography by Nicolas Poillot and interview by Daria Miricola), a survey about Japan’s new hip-hop scene starring Tohji (photography by Taito Itateyama and words by Ashley Ogawa Clarke), Richard Prince’s new book “The Entertainers” (words by Brad Phillips), “New Art: London” (featuring Adam Farah-Saad, Lenard Giller, Charlie Osborne, R.I.P. Germain, and Olukemi Ljiadu photographed by Bolade Banjo and interviewed by Ben Broome).
FROM THE CURRENT ISSUE
ESCAPE TO MIAMI
The most southernly city in the US, Miami exists in the tropical recesses of the American imagination: land of celebrity, thunderstorms, Tony Montana, and Art Deco architecture. Here, we meet the latest generation of Miamians—committed radicals in the fields of art, fashion, and music, who are dreaming up new narratives for the city they call home.
NEW ART: LONDON
The art world’s compulsion to categorize by the yardstick of “hot or not” has historically been the driving force behind the market and the gallery system. Commerce is intertwined with this metric, spurred on by the insatiable appetite to find talented young things to build up. This system is uninteresting: what’s in vogue rarely reflects those operating at the cutting edge. Who are those young emerging artists making work against all odds—work that is difficult and costly to make, store, exhibit, move, and sell? These five individuals typify this path. Working across video, sound, installation, and sculpture, they march onwards, carving out their own niche—exhibiting in empty shop spaces one day and major institutions the next. For them, making is guided by urgency, and persistence is motivated by blind faith.
SARA SADIK
KALEIDOSCOPE hosted a solo exhibition by Marseille-based artist Sara Sadik (b. 1994, Bordeaux), in November 2023 at Spazio Maiocchi in Milan, with the support of Slam Jam. Inspired by videogames, anime, science fiction, and French rap, Sara Sadik’s work explores the reality and fantasies of France’s Maghrebi youth, addressing issues of adolescence, masculinity, and social mythologies. Her work across video, performance, and installation often centers on male characters, using computer-generated scenarios to transform their condition of marginalization into something optimistic and poetic.
FROM THE SHOP
FROM THE ARCHIVE
MANIFESTO
In 2023, from June 22 to June 24 during Men’s Fashion Week in Paris, KALEIDOSCOPE and GOAT presented the new edition of our annual arts and culture festival, MANIFESTO. Against the unique setting of the French Communist Party building, a modern architectural landmark designed by legendary Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, the festival will bring together visionary creators from different areas of culture across three days of art, fashion and sound. The 2024 edition will run from June 21 to June 23.
CAPSULE PLAZA
In April 2023, a year after the launch of the magazine, Capsule introduced Capsule Plaza, a new initiative that infuses new energy into Milan Design Week by redefining the design showcase format. A hybrid between a fair and a collective exhibition, Capsule Plaza brings together designers and companies from various creative fields, bridging industry and culture with a bold curation that spans interiors and architecture, beauty and technology, ecology and craft. The 2024 edition will run from April 15 to April 21.
Undoubtedly the biggest dancehall star in Jamaica, Popcaan is also one of the rising pop stars in the world. Since his 2014 debut, he’s been the reigning king of the scene, exporting his sound around the world and collaborating with everyone from Jamie XX to Drake. His latest album, Great Is He, tells the rags-to-riches tale of his life.
Born Andrae Hugh Sutherland in Jamaica, Popcaan rose to stardom under the tutelage of Vybz Kartel, one of dancehall’s most celebrated and controversial figures. His talent was immediately visible on his first single with Vybz, “Clarks,” a tribute to the British shoe brand beloved by the island’s dancehall stars.
Over the last decade, he’s worked with ever one from Jamie XX to Pusha T and Drake, eventually signing for the Canadian rapper’s label. He has, following Vybz’s imprisonment in 2014 for murder, cemented his place as the most famous dancehall star in the world. His 2014 single “EverythingNice” has become an inescapable summer anthem, and he’s built his career on mixing the energy of pop with the verbal dexterity of rap and the attitude of dancehall.
His rise has coincided with dancehall’s splintering and fusion into pop music in the US, blending into the prevailing mainstream sounds of hip-hop, trap, and R&B, and leading the latest generation of dancehall stars from Jamaica around the world. Dancehall definitively emerged with Wayne Smith’s “Sleng Teng” in 1985, made with a present sample from a Casiotone MT-40 keyboard; with its shuddering, rhythmic, digitized beat full of hypnotic swagger, it used the nascent technologyto propel Jamaican culture forward: brashly mod- ernist and futuristic, it was a reaction against the conservative political culture of the island at the time—and a reaction, too, to the more holistic energy of roots reggae.
Proudly working-class, dancehall spread to England’s clubs, becoming ragga, but also sowing the seeds of what would become grime a decade later, another genre full of male braggadocio, female swagger, sound clashes, toasting, high energy rhythms, and lyrics exploring the self-made glamour, excess, and hardness of urban life.
But dancehall also became an international pop lingua franca, the music of Rihanna and Drake and US arena tours. It has maintained its resolute Jamaicanness even in its diasporic reflections, full of sex, extravaganzas of female style, and a cacophony of fashion and sound as a form of utopian self-reinvention, dance as a form of profane religion. Dancehall, most importantly, turns history upside down. Instead of colonized subjects, dancehall is the story of Jamaica imposing its culture on the world.
ALL CLOTHES: BOTTEGA VENETA
PHOTOGRAPHY: BOLADE BANJO
STYLING: CALVIN HOW
CREATIVE DIRECTION: ALESSIO ASCARI
PHOTO ASSISTANT: BRADLEY POLKINGHORNE; BEATRIZ PUPPOAMO
HAIR: TAIBA AKHUETIE
SET DESIGN: JOSH JAMES
PRODUCTION: ANNABEL FERNANDES
BODY LANGUAGE
Jamaican writer and academic Carolyn Cooper and Anglo-Jamaican curator Carol Tulloch discuss the interweaving of the dancehall story across the two countries over the last 30 years, tracing the homegrown and diasporic evolutions of the music, style, and culture that has defined Jamaica’s recent cultural history.
FELIX PETTY
Dancehall and Jamaican style is a very broad subject. But I guess we can start speaking and see where we end up. I wanted to focus not so much just on the music but on the style, the context, the culture—and also, with both of you, the relationship between Jamaica and England and these different currents of influence between the two countries, the two various scenes and styles. The easiest place to start, I think, is with the emergence of dancehall in Jamaica and the context it came from, what it was a reaction against, what it was for, and what was happening in Jamaica at the time.
CAROLYN COOPER
I would say that Jamaican dancehall culture emerged in the 1970s. It was a turbulent time, a time of political upheaval in Jamaica, when the society was experimenting with democratic socialism. For some people, dancehall is a whole spectrum of dance music produced in Jamaica, but we also know that dancehall is this particular mode, where the rhythm seems to become dominant and it really expresses the vibrancy of a youth culture that emerged in the late 70s. Dancehall was a challenge to the existing norms and standards of propriety, and so on. It was a mood of rebellion and resistance. Sleng Teng Riddim is conceived as the first defining moment, when dancehall rhythms emerged in Jamaica, electronically generated by a synthesizer.
One of the ironies of the emergence of dancehall is that the conservatives in culture keep saying that dancehall was such a break with the high cultural values of reggae, because dancehall tended to focus on sensuality and violence. They conveniently forget that, in the early days of reggae, that is exactly how reggae was dismissed. Reggae was called vulgar, was the music of the inner city, too; it was not respectable. So one generation’s vulgarity becomes the next generation’s culture. It is also important to note that new versions of Jamaican music constantly emerge. That morphing is particularly relevant as we talk about the culture flows between Jamaica and England. Grime, for an example, could be seen as a variant of dancehall.
FP
Very much so. It’s interesting the way it becomes more than just music—the style, the lyrics, the cultural context, the way the form morphs into other forms.
CC
Yes. It’s music; it’s politics; it’s fashion. And dancehall style is seen by the elite in Jamaica as a contestation of good taste. I think in every hospital in Jamaica there’s a sign prohibiting dancehall dress. And I wrote a chapter called “Dancehall Dress: Competing Codes of Decency in Jamaica” for Carol’s book Black Style (2004). There, I made the point that if a parent is coming to the hospital in an emergency and what she’s wearing is her dancehall clothes, I really don’t see how it can be appropriate for the hospital administration to tell her that she can’t wear dancehall dress. And they say that it’s about health, but it’s just nonsense. It’s really a rejection of working-class style. Because dancehall style is predominantly working-class; although, with people like Rihanna and their adoption of dancehall, it’s become a global cultural signifier. But dancehall has emerged from the Jamaican inner city. That’s its context.
FP
Maybe we could talk a bit about what that style is specifically.
CC
All right, let me give you a classic example: Carlene, the original dancehall queen. At the Reggae Sumfest, 30 years ago, her rear was completely exposed, barely covered with mesh that was masquerading as clothing. The look appeared in The Sunday Gleaner newspaper, the height of respectability —legacy media. It was published with the heading, “Peek-A-Boo,” and the description was: “Carlene, leader of the dancehall models, was caught backstage at Reggae Sumfest last week. As is the norm, her revealing fashion was a showstopper.”
And that is the first thing we can say about dancehall style: it’s a showstopper; it’s revealing. We know about the batty riders, those very short shorts. I saw a photo of Lady Saw recently in an ad for a reggae festival in New York,“Groovin in the park,”and she was wearing a lovely outfit in which her midriff is barely covered—again by mesh—with the top of her breasts showing. Dancehall style is all about sensuality, carnality, exposing and celebrating the body.
The way in which the female body is represented in dancehall could be seen as a manifestation of West African female fertility rituals in the Diaspora. The Western anxiety about the body—all of those Victorian notions of respectability—are being challenged by an Afro-centered spirituality—which I conceive as “embodied.” The body and the spirit are organically connected. Spirituality is not immaterial. You manifest spirituality in the body. And that is why, in many traditional religions, dancing is such an important ritual. It is through dance that the spirits possess believers. You dance your way into your spiritual understanding. I would also like to make the point that the pelvic gyrations that dancehall culture is famous for have their genesis in religious dance in Jamaica.
They have a movement in Kumina— which is a traditional Jamaican religion—where the male and the female come together and they hit each other’s pelvis. That is the same body language as daggering in dancehall. The primary difference is dress. And some of daggering moves are quite dangerous. In traditional religious performance, the body is covered: the women wear floor-length skirts. In dancehall, they wear batty riders and the pelvic movements are exaggerated because there is less clothing. So the context is everything. One is religious, one is secular; one is sacred, one is vulgar, but it’s the same movement. And if you are willing to set aside some of your, let’s call it prejudices, your prejudgments, you’ll be able to see that there is continuity. Dancehall is essentially a contemporary expression of traditional African dance forms.
This is a sign of the way in which spirituality and quote unquote "carnality" are organically connected in African diasporic culture. And I think it comes from the continent of Africa, where this Western divide between the sacred and the secular does not exist. I keep making the point: it’s a continuum.
CT
Well, interestingly, that image that Carolyn showed of Carlene—I remember the “Street Style” exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum—it would’ve been 1994 to 1995—and there was a section on ragga—ragga being the British expression of dancehall. There was this image is of a woman in chaps, and then underneath it’s stretch tulle shorts, you can see her bottom; the outfit was made and worn by Pascale for Against All Oz.
CC
Yeah. Oh, same aesthetic.
CT
And that’s 1994. And you were saying that—
CC
Yes, and Carlene’s was 1993.
CT
Pascale said, “We wanted a kind of cowboy look, so we made the chaps and carried the dancehall style through with gold buttons. Girls were wearing things like Wonderbras, so we decided to make it in a Chanel-style quilted fabric with a bustier top. I’d wear it with a pair of black shorts, but a lot of girls would wear it with just a G-string under the netting.”
I remember when I was doing my postgraduate certificate in education—this was 1992—ragga was really just taking over, well, England, but in London, specifically. I was living in Hackney then and I doing teacher training in Newham. And there was this guy called Danny Edwards, who was a mature student. I’d say he was in his late 20s, doing fashion design. And I remember he’d be wearing a white denim shirt, denim jeans. But they’re completely ripped up—I think they used to call them "gunshot" trousers because you’d have the holes in it and leather boots. He used to shave his eyebrows with lines going through them. His haircut was cropped at the back and higher on the top.
An outfit of Danny’s was also included in the V&A “Street Style” exhibition. Danny wore these garments as an outfit in 1993. He acquired the shirt from his uncle’s shop Stars in Dalston in 1984. The jeans were by Exhaust, a favorite label of ragga-muffins, and were bought whilst he was in Kingston in Jamaica in 1992. The boots came from Camden Town Market.
So this was really the style in the UK at that time. This young woman called Cheroni Wiltshire, in the Black Style book is in an outfit that she wore to the Notting Hill Carnival, London, 2004; we, Shaun Cole and me, actually had this image in the V&A “Black British Style” exhibition. She’s wearing a bra, a pink mesh vest, and short shorts.
When Cheroni saw the image again, when we met up so we could borrow the outfit for the “Black British Style” exhibition, she said she hadn’t realized how daring the look was at the time. It’s a look that she wanted to wear to Notting Hill Carnival. But now worried about what her dad’s going to say because he’s a practicing Rasta. What will he think about her outfit? But she still lent it to us for the exhibition, which was amazing.
It was interesting that you spoke first, Carolyn, and talked about the batty riders and some of the clothing being more revealing, body conscious. And it’s the same thing that was happening in Britain.
CC
Same thing.
CT
And it’s the same thing, in a way, with the men. You would have guys wearing shirts that would have lace on the back so it was more revealing. So blurring the lines of what is masculine, what is feminine.
But then, going to Jamaica, I do remember going to Spanish Town, and I think it was my nephews who told me about a guy who had a stall there that would sell clothes, CDs, tapes. The guy at the stall, he was incredible. Because all his hair was twisted, and he had gold jewelry hanging from the ends of his hair. He was dressed all in black. And the smile he gave me, I’ll never forget. His mouth, a mouth of gold. I had never seen that before. It was incredible. And it was actually very different from the UK. I lived just down the road from Dalston Market. So, for me, it was part of the aesthetic of our area. Do you know what I mean? It was part and parcel of all the different range of looks that you could see in that part of East London.
The last time I was in Jamaica was in 2017. And I was quite surprised that my older sister, who is in the church, was wearing clothes that were super body conscious, with that celebration of the body and the wearing of clothing that follows the body line regardless of the shape.
To me, that means it had become part of the mainstream. I think it was something really interesting that Carolyn said about how one generation defines a particular musical style or dress style and then the next generation. So when Carolyn was saying that reggae was seen as vulgar, well, even at one point they saw ska as vulgar because of the dance styles. Then it becomes accepted by another generation, perhaps because of the way that it’s taken on across the world by different groups—and the cultural value.
Those images I mentioned were both exhibited at the V&A, and Danny’s outfit was included in the V&A’s “Black British Style” exhibition I co-curated. So, what I’m saying is that it was a testament to the cultural value of ragga as part of Black British style. Then it’s part of Black British culture, and Black culture in Britain. And British culture generally. Then it’s connecting with Jamaica.
And there was a review I remember, of the “Black British Style” exhibition, and the journalist said it was worth the entry fee alone to see batty riders at the V&A. He never thought he’d see the day. These were Cheroni’s Banshee Batty Riders that she wore to the Notting Hill Carnival!
CC
The empire is falling; it’s falling! Poor Miss Vicky must have been so distressed, rolling in her grave.
CT
And the other thing I was going to say is that ... I think Carolyn was referring to seeing grime as a legacy, a continuation of ragga. And in the sense of, with grime, it’s part of storytelling about life as lived by some, which, for me, dancehall is part of that. For me, the clothing is a kind of storytelling too about life in Jamaica or the States or in Britain.
CC
I just wanted to reference a poem by the distinguished Jamaican poet Louise Bennett, called “Colonization in Reverse,” which deals exactly with what you have been talking about with the journalist going into the V&A and seeing batty riders.
She says, we turning history upside down. That Jamaican people, instead of now being the colonized subjects, are the colonizers.
And we have turned history upside down by imposing Jamaican culture on Britain.
CT
Exactly. Exactly. Sometimes it’s not even consciously. On the tube in London coming back from Rose Sinclair’s exhibition on Althea McNish, I saw a young Black woman get on the tube and I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Because, basically, it was like all the images that she had in her bedroom that represented Blackness, she wore on her body. I can’t even explain it. It was so amazing
CC
Did she allow you to take a picture?
CT
Somehow, I didn’t even want to take a photo. You know, you live in London, you live in England, you live all over the world, you’ve seen images, images, and images. But I’ve not seen anything like that for a long time, an image like that.
CC
Tell us a bit about it. Tell us about it.
CT
So her hair was beautifully slicked into a tight bun. Of course she had lots of gold jewelry, big jewelry. Then she had these Ladette baggy trousers, like cargo pants with the patch pockets on the side of the trousers. The trainers, I can remember, were red and black. She had a vest on, her big earphones. Her makeup was meticulous. She was probably in her mid to late teens, but she’d pulled all the references, all these different kinds of cultural references that she might have had on her wall, the make-up on her dressing table, design of her bedroom, her space, her identity—that’s how I viewed it. And you couldn’t help but look, because she was carrying it all. And for me, with dancehall, and particularly because I’m getting a broader sense of dancehall, a lot of the women there were doing the same thing, pulling all these various references together. And I always think of that photograph. Let me see if I can find it; it was in the Black Style book and it accompanied Carolyn’s chapter, “Dancehall Dress: Competing Codes of Decency in Jamaica.”
When I saw the works included in [Akeem Smith’s exhibition] “No Gyal Can Test,” I realized that the space where those dancehall looks were created are as important as the looks; it’s all these things that contribute to what dancehall is. So the image portrayed a woman, a double-page spread photograph of a woman in the process of getting dressed and the finished dancehall look: long platinum blonde wig, a style reminiscent of Raquel Welch’s hair in the poster for the film One Million Years B.C., super-tight bra with rhinestones, and matching skimpy bikini knickers, large mesh white tights and over-the-knee silver boots. There is also a photograph of Akeem Smith’s aunt, Paula Ouch, in spangled dungaree short shorts.
CC
Yes. That is the Ouch crew.
CT
Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know. There’s a bit of footage on Instagram, where Akeem is speaking to Sandra Lee about the exhibition and archive, and she’s totally lost for words, because what they did wasn’t considered worthy of being archived, of being an exhibition; it was undervalued, and Akeem has reversed that mindset.
CC
I quoted her in the chapter of Sound Clash in which I analyzed the films Dancehall Queen and Babymother. I found a lovely statement by her about the glamorous effect of hair weaves: “The extensions add a movie look to us ... is like a disguise. I want to look different tomorrow.” In the dancehall world of make-believe, old roles can be contested and new identities assumed. Indeed, the elaborate styling of both hair and clothes is a permissive expression of the pleasures of disguise.
CT
It’s clothing as a form of freedom. It is the outfits as a disguise, a form of self-invention.
CC
Yes. That is it.
CT
You know what, Carolyn? You reading that quote from Sandra Lee, it just makes me think about—and I say this in quotation mark—about "professionals" or "leaders" of organizations and their obsession with having a uniform so that they look the same every single working day.
CC
Wonderful point.
CT
But I’ve always thought: But what about your own expression? Dancehall is about “creating,” quote, so you can express yourself in different ways at different times.
So that point that you’ve just read that Sandra Lee says, that tomorrow they can be someone different, they’ve got all those same references for dancehall aesthetic. But within those different references are those vast range of elements, tools, accessories, garments.
Akeem said that the Ouch Crew would also be a consultant when they were creating a look. That is what some artists would call the “right to performance,” to be who you want to be, how you feel on that particular day.
CC
Uniform signifies uniformity, and it doesn’t allow any kind of aesthetic variation from the norm.
It’s the same problem we have with schools in Jamaica and the school uniform and regulating hair: not allowing dreadlocks in school, because dreadlocks are going to harbor lice, and the boys can’t have a mohawk.
And, as I keep saying when I write about this: you want young men in particular to feel as though they can express their identity. This is how their creativity is being nourished. But the school system doesn’t want that. It just tries to erase difference.
And so, it alienates young men. Why should it matter if I want to come to school with a mohawk? How is my mohawk going to stop me from learning?
FP
Is it true also then that dancehall is a space—we talked about the women of dancehall, but also for men within the scene—is this a place where dressing up, this kind of self-expression in a society where this is not often seen as the most traditionally masculine thing, where it can come out?
CC
Men do dress up. And the men move around in crews, even though these are not homosexual crews. They are homosocial.
It’s men going out in a crowd, and many of them are part of the entourage of an artist. Men dressing up in dancehall is an issue of style too. So the men do dress up, but the women are the ones who are the primary bearers of the style.
I invited Vybz Kartel to give a talk at the university, much to the dismay of the administration. More than 5,000 people showed up. The university had never had any event like that before with so many people. One of my colleagues told me that, for all the time he had been teaching at the University of the West Indies, this was the first time his child asked if he could come to anything at the university.
During his talk, Kartel spoke about bleaching his skin. And he said he did it for his tattoos, so he could use his skin as a canvas; he said bleaching has nothing to do with low self-esteem or anything like that. It’s about creating this artistic space for him to be able to now add these layers of tattoos. I think tattooing is one of the main ways in which men in dancehall decorate the body.
CT
I’m going to come back to where you were talking about what’s happening with school uniforms and you’re raising the importance of difference, and whereas, with dancehall, it’s that exploration of possibilities of how different you can change your body. There’s some that are wearing corsets, and then they have spikes sticking out of the side of these corsets and all of that.
And it was really weird—I had completely forgotten, and I might be going right out on a limb here, but this photograph, I found it in an antique shop. I’ve never seen women in Jamaica dressed that way. They’re beautifully dressed; they’d gone to market, and the photograph is from 1895. But for a long time,
I couldn’t work out when the photograph was taken.
Because one woman was wearing an outfit that referenced different eras, times. They’d kind of patchworked garment details together—the sleeve, the bodice, the skirt—all from different eras. And that’s what I was saying about with dancehall taking references of things that they like, that they’re into, that creates the look that they want to achieve. And that’s what had happened. And this is late 19th century. So that thing of creating your own look, creating your own possibility of who you can be, was as far back as then. For me, dancehall is just like a continuation.
CC
Absolutely brilliant, Carol. And even though, when we talk about the colonization of the African continent and people selling their precious artwork for baubles, we must remember that these the baubles were new decorative objects that they were able to now incorporate into traditional designs. I think we need to recognize that eclecticism is an essential element of the African aesthetic. And when I say the African aesthetic, I don’t mean to suggest that there’s only one African aesthetic. It’s African aesthetics, plural. And, in our context in the Diaspora, sometimes it’s poverty that forces us to be creative. We have a Jamaican expression—“turn your hand make fashion.” You create out of what is at hand. You may not have everything that you need, but you just have to use what you have to create what you want. So there’s that sense that not having what you need becomes a motivator for creativity.
CT
You’ve just reminded me about a phrase that my mum used: “Every mistake is a fashion.”
CC
Yes. And I think of the verb “to fashion” as in “to create.”
So fashion as design for clothing is one thing, but this whole idea of fashioning yourself, creating yourself, you’re creating images that are now going to articulate who you are. So we need to look at dress as language and ask, what does your dress say about who you are? And dancehall dress says, “Me don’t care what they think of me.” I don’t care what they think about me; here I am. Just take me—take it or leave it.
That’s the essence of dancehall. I remember one of my friends going to the filming of a dancehall movie, and he said he saw a woman whose dress was resisting exposure. The dress was so—it was so impossible for the dress to cover her, but you couldn’t tell her that she wasn’t sexy. Her dress may be resisting exposure, but she was not. The dress was really a fig leaf—a figment of her imagination.
It was how she imagined herself. And you know, you see these woman with these tight clothes, and they know that they’re sexy. You cannot tell them that they’re not sexy. They know they are sexy. Sexy is in the eye of the beholder, but sexy is also in the head of the beholden.
CC
Absolutely. Disguise again. Disguise yourself to pass.
CT
Exactly. And I think there is a courage there in saying, “This is who I want to be.
This is what I want to wear. I’m going to do it.”
CC
The articulate body language of dancehall culture is equivalent to the literal Jamaican language which is constantly devalued by elite. The school system routinely dismisses the Jamaican language as nothing but a corruption of English. But for the vast majority of Jamaicans, our language is a celebration of the verbal creativity of our ancestors. Like the Jamaican language, dancehall culture embodies a revolutionary reclamation of identity. It is a dance
of emancipation.
Felix Petty (b. 1987) is a London-based writer, editor, and head of content at KALEIDOSCOPE.
Carol Tulloch is a writer, curator, and Professor of Dress, Diaspora and Transnationalism at UAL, London. She is also the author of the book The Birth of Cool: Style Narratives of the African Diaspora.
Carolyn Cooper is a Jamaican author, essayist, and former professor of literary and cultural studies at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica.