“Balls at Kingston to the ‘Brown Girls’,”1: A Palimpsest for Bleached-Brown Skins in Jamaican Dancehall

Abstract

The spectacle of brown skin in Jamaica emerged in the late eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century with the “balls at Kingston to the ‘Brown Girls’” (Lewis 382), referred to as the “Brown Girls Balls.” “Brown Girls” referred to mulatto women or mulatress, infantilized as “girls,” who were off-springs of Europeans and enslaved Africans. Brown women were considered the “fair sex” by Eurocentric standards, known for their beauty and elegance, and sponsored by the British Royal Navy ranks of Admiral of the Red and Admiral of the Blue. By the early nineteenth century, the Brown Girls Balls started going out into the streets in processions in “sets” of skin color by the gradation or shade of skin, costumed in matching dresses and parasols as they danced and sang through the streets. Later, the Set Girls parades joined annual John Canoe masquerades, celebrated from Christmas to the New Year. A contemporary brown skin spectacle reemerged in dancehall in the 1990s with a bleached-brown appearance with skin bleaching creams, critiquing colorism. I see masquerades like the Brown Girls Balls and derivative masquerades as palimpsests for skin bleaching to play “brown” in dancehall today. I argue that references to brown skin spectacles in the late eighteenth century “balls at Kingston to the ‘Brown Girls’” and derivative masquerades are palimpsests for the bleached-brown skins in contemporary dancehall that still haunts the society’s consciousness about its past, and recontextualizes the seeming paradox of bleached-brown skin masquerade in dancehall to denounce racism and colorism.