Syllabus

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Course Meeting Times

Lectures: 2 sessions / week, 1.5 hours / session

Course Description

Reggae is incontestably one of the most popular musics in the world. Despite its origins in the working-class urban culture of the relatively small country of Jamaica, reggae artists have powerfully projected their voices outward (in part via the imperial networks of the UK and USA) and one can hear reggae today in almost any corner of the globe—not just Jamaican reggae, but local versions and fusions with nearly every other conceivable genre. Reggae precedes the global reach of its progeny, hip-hop, but, in its dancehall guise, it has also in turn piggybacked on hip-hop's own impressive international spread. As remix approaches and massive sound systems have become increasingly common worldwide, reggae stands as a remarkably influential template for world music, electronic dance music, and popular music more generally. Itself constituted by international flows of music and musicians but increasingly produced outside of Jamaica, reggae thus offers a rich resource for the examination of today's global circulations of music and media.

This course considers reggae, or Jamaican popular music more generally—in its various forms (ska, rocksteady, roots, dancehall)—as constituted by international movements and exchanges and as a product that circulates globally in complex ways, cast variously as Jamaican, Caribbean, Afrodiasporic, and/or black, and recast through the cultural logics of the new spaces it enters, the new soundscapes it permeates. By reading across the reggae literature, as well as considering reggae texts themselves (songs, films, videos, and images), we will scrutinize the different interpretations of reggae's significance and the implications of different interpretations of the story of Jamaica and its music. We will attend in particular to how reggae informs notions of selfhood and nationhood, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, religion and politics—in particular places and at particular times.

Although Bob Marley still serves as the most ubiquitous symbol of reggae (and, indeed, of Jamaica), the reggae tradition and repertory go far deeper and represent a great deal to listeners and practitioners. In its shifting shapes and forms the genre has served for four decades as a potent symbol of independence and social critique, communitarian commitment as well as rugged individualism. While certain core values appear regularly in reggae, the genre also offers a rather flexible palette for a wide range of ideological positions, from Pan-Africanism and other forms of transnationalism to utterly provincial nationalism, from peaceful and respectful postures to aggressive machismo and militancy, from tolerance to its own forms of oppression. Perhaps most notably, reggae has made such scripts of personhood and nationhood available not only to Jamaicans but to people around the world who have adopted the genre's gestures as their own.

Beginning with a consideration of how Jamaica's popular music industry emerged out of transnational exchanges, the course will proceed to focus on reggae's circulation outside of Jamaica via diasporic networks and commercial mediascapes. Attending to how the genre's pliable but distinct forms have been, in turn, transformed in particular localities, the course will help to illuminate ongoing dynamics between the global and local. Among other sites, we will consider reggae's resonance and impact elsewhere in the Anglo Caribbean (e.g., Trinidad, Barbados), the United Kingdom (including British reggae styles but also such progeny as jungle, grime, and dubstep), the United States (both as reggae per se and in hip-hop), Panama and Puerto Rico and other Latin American locales (e.g., Brazil), Japan and Australia, as well as West, South, and East Africa (Côte d'Ivoire, Tanzania, Uganda).

Course Requirements

Short papers should be no more than two double-spaced pages, and they can take a variety of forms: 1) a brief response to one of the readings, including a brief summary of the author's central thesis and a clear position on your part; 2) a critique of a relevant Wikipedia entry (with extra credit available for implementing improvements/edits); 3) a review of a local reggae event, giving attention to questions of context (where? who was there? what sort of vibe?) and content (what sort of reggae was played? what kind of dancing was done? how did the crowd react/behave?).

Final papers will take the form of a sustained argument about some global dimension of reggae. Students will have a fair amount of freedom in choosing and crafting a topic. Later in the term a "final paper handout" will provide further instruction.

Grading Distribution

Required Books

Rivera, Raquel Z., Wayne Marshall, and Deborah Pacini-Hernandez. Reggaeton. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. ISBN: 9780822343837.

Sterling, Marvin D. Babylon East: Performing Dancehall, Roots Reggae, and Rastafari in Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. ISBN: 9780822347224.

Calendar

A partial list of video and audio used in each unit is included below. Reading assignments for each session are available on the Readings page.