Collapsing the ‘Oral-Literary’ Continuum: Jamaican Dancehall and Anglophone Caribbean Literary Culture

Abstract

In this paper I investigate the potential for a relationship between Jamaican dancehall and anglophone Caribbean literary culture by examining the productive, receptive and generic obstacles to their union. Interactions between the oral and literary traditions in the Caribbean are frequent and productive enough to allow critics to propose a continuum between our oral and literary expressive traditions and even to speak of an ‘oraliterature’ (Brathwaite 1984; Brown et al. 1989; Cooper 1995). There are at least two justifications for collapsing the continuum between the oral and the literary to yoke this (typically) working-class popular cultural form with its elite canonical relative. The first is that numerous studies exist that do justice to each tradition on its own terms: several in the literary tradition and a growing body of work on dancehall (Cooper 1994; Hope 2001; Stolzoff 2000). The second is that collapsing the oral-literary continuum in order to view both ends at the same time puts into starker perspective the challenges and opportunities for Caribbean cultural crossover. I begin by locating Jamaican dancehall and anglophone Caribbean literary producers and audiences in their respective social contexts in order to identify fields of possible interaction. This situating of the respective cultural products highlights the role of the social and literary critical apparatus in the reception of Jamaican dancehall and the making of anglophone Caribbean literary traditions. Then Walter Ong’s differentiation of ‘oral’ and ‘literate’ expression provides a structure for the investigation of some of the formal constraints on any encounter between Jamaican dancehall productions and their anglophone Caribbean literary counterparts. I examine these encounters by way of readings of dancehall lyrics and a selective assessment of their ‘literary’ techniques. I conclude with an analysis of specific uses of dancehall in the Caribbean literary tradition.