Carolyn Cooper 

“Welcome to Jamrock:” Reggae Tourism and the Politics of Identity in Jamaica

Friday October 2, 2009 4.00pm Kreindler Auditorium Haldeman 041

Free and open to the public 

Damien ‘Junior Gong’ Marley’s apocalyptic battle cry, “Welcome to Jamrock,” with its implosive, ominous sound track, subverts touristic constructions of Jamaican society as an island paradise. Damien Marley militantly contests the Jamaica Tourist Board’s appropriation of his father’s disquieting “One Love” as an unambiguous anthem of social harmony: “Come to Jamaica and feel alright.” For much of Jamaica is all wrong. The chilling Ini Kamoze sample, “out on the streets they call it murther,” which functions as a grim refrain, is a reverberating reminder of the dread soundscape that is Jamaica. But Damien Marley also attests that “Rastafari stands alone” as the embodiment of an alternative conception of Jamaican cultural identity. Historically marginalized, Rastafari articulate a redemptive vision of Jamaican society that has its genesis in Marcus Garvey’s pan-Africanist politics. Damien Marley’s resounding critique of social injustice in Jamaica affirms the role of the reggae singer/DJ as prophet who both calls down judgment and proclaims the prospect of repentance and redemption.

Carolyn Cooper is professor of literary and cultural studies at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. She is the author of Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the ‘Vulgar’ Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (1993) and Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large (2004). She initiated the establishment of the University’s Reggae Studies Unit which, since 1994, has hosted numerous forums, symposia and conferences on reggae, the most far-reaching of which was the Global Reggae Conference convened in 2008. With Dr. Donna Hope-Marquis, lecturer in Reggae Studies at the University of the West Indies and chair of the Global Reggae Conference programme committee, Professor Cooper is co-editing a book, comprising the plenary lectures, which will be published by the University of the West Indies Press in 2010. An outspoken public intellectual, Professor Cooper writes a weekly column for the Jamaica Gleaner and hosts a television show, “Big People Sup’m” [Adult affairs], for the Public Broadcasting Corporation of Jamaica.