Barefoot language: representation of the alter/native aesthetic in Jamaican popular culture

McDonald, Wendy Donaree (2022): Barefoot language: representation of the alter/native aesthetic in Jamaican popular culture. Dissertation, LMU München: Fakultät für Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaften

Abstract

The main concern of a new generation of Caribbean literary and cultural critics since the 1960s has been the historical distortions and omissions in critical approaches applied to ‘Third World’ literature. This dissertation ‘Barefoot Language: Representation of the Alter/Native Aesthetic in Jamaican Popular Culture’ traces the engagement with the oral tradition with the creative and transformative forces of Afro-Jamaican popular culture, focusing on acts of resistance in performance poetry. The result then is not a reduction of dominant literary discourses but a refinement specifically geared toward articulating the lived experiences in postcolonial Jamaica, wherein marginalised voices become increasingly audible in English literature. The study draws upon 27 performance texts to revisit transgressive practices in Jamaican popular culture as part of the de-colonial praxis. Louise Bennett’s dramatic monologues are interwoven with that of the Roots Reggae songs of Capleton, Buju Banton, and Sizzla Kalonji, representing some of the ‘noise’ in Afro-Jamaican tradition. The focus on dramatic monologues and songs enables us to examine them together as poetry and recapture the oral dialogic exchanges in a common language that ultimately destabilises and undermines hegemonic systems of signification. A postcolonial critical analysis enables us to identify how the performance poets try to articulate their feelings in socially meaningful ways. This approach helps ensure consistency in their examination and hence the soundness of the conclusions drawn. The study is organised into six chapters and the textual analysis is presented in themes centred around postcolonial encounters, cultural dominance, fragmented identity, and language. One of the central arguments of this research is that a shift needs to occur from a normative conception of literature toward more embodied practices engaging a broad array of creative expressions from historically underrepresented groups. Hence, this study offers a new framework for understanding Jamaican popular culture, long engaged with racialised constructions of colonial subjects and deconstructing the boundaries that give meaning to colonising discourses. By exploring non-traditional texts this study presents a new perspective on Jamaican popular culture bringing to the fore the postcolonial space in which dominant configurations begin to disappear and from which subaltern articulations and challenges to Western forms of knowledge might emerge.

• Dokumententyp: Dissertationen (Dissertation, LMU München)
• Keywords: Caribbean, Jamaica, colonisation/decolonisation, empire, postcolonial literature, transgression, mother tongue, orality, performance poetry, national consciousness
• Themengebiete: 800 Literatur ; 800 Literatur > 810 Englische Literatur Amerikas ; 900 Geschichte und Geografie ; 900 Geschichte und Geografie > 990 Geschichte anderer Gebiete
• Fakultäten: Fakultät für Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaften
• Sprache der Hochschulschrift: Englisch
• Datum der mündlichen Prüfung: 22. November 2022
• 1. Bericht­erstatter:in: Nowak, Helge