UWI lecturer Stanley-Niaah traces ... 'Dancehall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto'

Mel Cooke, Gleaner Writer

The title of Dr Sonjah Stanley-Niaah's new book, Dancehall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto, immediately explains the topic and movement of music and people. And Stanley-Niaah, currently a senior lecturer at the University of the West Indies, explains to The Sunday Gleaner that a thread of limbo runs through the movement across oceans and is critical to her research.

Stanley-Niaah says her book, published by the University of Ottawa Press, "looks at over 400 years of history, with its starting point as the first recorded dance in the New World, the limbo, a slave ship dance".

It was one of the first dances recorded in the New World for the slaves in 1664, reappearing as a major move in Jamaica's dancehalls as recently as 1994 and 2007.

That connection apart, the book also takes an ecological perspective on dancehall and Stanley-Niaah explains that "ecology is looking at a community and its component parts, the relationship between them that's giving value to each of them, knowing that they are all important to the balance of that community".

So, in her approach, Stanley-Niaah said she was "starting from the community, starting from the space, looking at the components, giving each of them credence".

Thesis

And in another connection, Stanley-Niaah says Dancehall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto, builds on her Ph.D thesis Kingston's Dancehall: A Story of Space and Celebration.

However, she says it "expands on the thesis to involve performance practices that have influenced dancehall, such as the blues, and those that have been influenced by dancehall, such as reggaeton".

Dancehall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto is organised into seven chapters: 'Out of Many ... One Dancehall'; 'Introducing Performance Geography'; 'Performing Geography in Kingston's Dancehall Spaces'; 'Ritual Space, Celebratory Space'; 'Geographies of Embodiment - Dance, Style, Status'; 'Performing Boundarylessness'; and 'A Common Transnational Space'.

Stanley-Niaah says she used the motto in the opening chapter "to signify that Jamaica is a country made up of many, but the many ethnicities do not really acknowledge that the country is 98 or 99 per cent people of African descent.

"It also highlights the way in which the many who are marginalised are the ones who are struggling to keep their practices alive. Dancehall is the most persecuted culture. It is one of the noisiest, but one way to get around that is to have zones and venues."

Performance geography

She explains performance geography as a sub-field of cultural geography that looks at the way performance gives space identity. Stanley-Niaah says, "I also look at the way performance is characterised by rituals performed in the context of certain spaces. It looks at the way spaces across time show parallels or similarities."

Dancehall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto, lists a number of dance moves and dancehall events from the late 1980s to later years of the past decade, Stanley-Niaah pointing out that not only was there research, but there is also her personal involvement in dancehall for well over 20 years. And there is also a listing of stops for an extensive Buju Banton tour, Stanley-Niaah saying that when she heard Buju Banton's story, she thought it important to tell the struggles that artistes go through when they "traverse boundaries, when they leave home".

In addition, she says, "It shows that dancehall is not Jamaica anymore. I am concerned about events such as reggae festivals outside Jamaica having few Jamaicans on their line-up. So artistes really struggle to maintain their viability in an industry where, increasingly, Jamaican artistes are not being consistently requested. There are only some artistes who are consistently requested."

And there will be consistency with Dancehall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto and her next two books. The next will focus on international reggae festivals and the concept of pilgrimage, while the third centres on various forms of spirituality that have been influenced by the Jamaican space or have been cradled in Jamaica.

"I want to look at the intangible spiritual heritage," Stanley-Niaah said.