Like other major music genres, ska reflects, reveals, and reacts to the genesis and migration from its Afro-Caribbean roots and colonial origins to the shores of England and back across the Atlantic to the United States. Without ska music, there would be no reggae or Bob Marley, no British punk and pop blends, no American soundtrack to its various subcultures. In Ska: The Rhythm of Liberation, Heather Augustyn examines how ska music first emerged in Jamaica as a fusion of popular, traditional, and even classical musical forms. As a genre, it was a connection to Africa, a means of expression and protest, and a respite from the struggles of colonization and grinding poverty. Ska would later travel with West Indian immigrants to the United Kingdom, where British youth embraced the music, blending it with punk and pop and working its origins as a music of protest and escape into their present lives. The fervor of the music matched the energy of the streets as racism, poverty, and violence ran rampant. But ska called for brotherhood and unity. As series editor and pop music scholar Scott Calhoun notes: “Like a cultural barometer, the rise of ska indicates when and where social, political, and economic institutions disappoint their people and push them to re-invent the process for making meaning out of life. When a people or group embark on this process, it becomes even more necessary to embrace expressive, liberating forms of art for help during the struggle. In its history as a music of freedom, ska has itself flowed freely to wherever people are celebrating the rhythms and sounds of hope.” Ska: The Rhythm Liberation should appeal to fans and scholars alike—indeed, any enthusiast of popular music and Caribbean, American, and British history seeking to understand the fascinating relationship between indigenous popular music and cultural and political history. Devotees of reggae, jazz, pop, Latin music, hip hop, rock, techno, dance, and world beat will find their appreciation of this remarkable genre deepened by this survey of the origins and spread of ska. 0810884496

Megawattage sound systems have blasted the electronically enhanced riddims and tongue-twisting lyrics of Jamaica's dancehall DJs across the globe. This high-energy raggamuffin music is often dissed by old-school roots reggae fans as a raucous degeneration of classic Jamaican popular music. In this provocative study of dancehall culture Carolyn Cooper, Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, offers a sympathetic account of the philosophy of a wide range of dancehall DJs: Shabba Ranks, Lady Saw, Ninjaman, Capleton, Buju Banton, Anthony B, Apache Indian. She demonstrates the ways in which the language of dancehall culture, often devalued as mere 'noise,' articulates a complex understanding of the border clashes that characterise Jamaican society. Cooper also analyses the sound clashes that erupt in the movement of Jamaican dancehall culture across national borders. [Carolyn_Cooper]_Sound_Clash_Jamaican_Dancehall_C_BookZZ.org_

This book is a companion to Neither Led nor Driven, published in 2004. It examines the secular aspects of culture in Jamaica, namely, material culture (architecture and home furnishings, dress, and food), rites of passage, language and oral culture, creative and performance arts, popular entertainment, sports and games, social clubs and fraternities, and the issues of drinking and gambling. It also examines the lifestyle cultures of Indian and Chinese immigrants who were new arrivals in Jamaica. The book argues that although a vibrant and fully functional creole culture existed in Jamaica, after Morant Bay, diverse elements within the upper and middle classes (the cultural elites) formed a coalition to eradicate that “barbaric” culture which they believed had contributed to the uprising, and to replace it with “superior” cultural items imported from Victorian Britain in order to “civilize” and anglicize the people. It reinforces the prime thesis of Neither Led nor Driven that the lower classes, the main targets of this campaign, drew on their own Afro-Creole cultural heritage to resist and ignore the new elite cultural agenda; but they did selectively embrace some aspects of the imported Victorian culture which they creolized to fit their own cultural matrix. Ultimately, the cultural elite efforts at “reform” were hampered by their own ambivalence, hypocrisy and disunity, and they actually impeded the sponsored process of anglicization. This book advances our understanding of the concept and process of creolization. It extends the pioneering work of Kamau Brathwaite and reassesses the theories of other scholars, particularly Richard Burton and Nigel Bolland. [Brian_L._Moore__Michele_A._Johnson]_They_Do_as_Th_BookZZ.org_

"Of the hundreds of logbooks and journals I have examined, this is the most valuable for the slave trade in western Africa.... [Mouser’s] exhaustive background research and editing are exemplary." —George Brooks Captain Samuel Gamble’s log contains the record of a slaving venture to Africa and Jamaica that nearly failed. It is one of the best firsthand narratives of the slave trade to survive. Bruce Mouser’s faithfully transcribed and carefully annotated edition of Gamble’s log provides a haunting perspective on slave trading at the end of the 18th century. Gamble was captain of the British merchant Sandown. During 1793–1794, the ship embarked on a commercial venture from England to Upper Guinea in West Africa to buy slaves and transport them for sale in Kingston, Jamaica. Gamble describes shipping at the beginning of the Anglo-French war in 1793, naval and nautical procedures for the English-African-West Indian trade, and the slave-trading patterns and institutions on the African coast and at Kingston, Jamaica. He recounts as well a yellow fever epidemic that swept the Atlantic and crippled commerce on both sides of the ocean. Mouser’s extensive annotations place Gamble’s account in historical context and explain for the reader Gamble’s observations on commerce, disease, and African peoples along the Upper Guinea coast. [Bruce_L._Mouser__Samuel_Gamble]_A_Slaving_Voyage__bookos-z1.org_