Mapping "Independent" as Feminist Empowerment via the Musical Cross-Pollination between the U.S. and Jamaica

Abstract

Mapping "Independent" as Feminist Empowerment via the Musical Cross-Pollination between the U.S. and Jamaica Elton Johnson (bio) The people of the African diasporas in the New World converged in Panama to build a canal that would better connect our region physically. However, so too was a cross-cultural connection created. The metaphoric "Bridges of Sound" Brathwaite conjures in his poem "Jah" locates and centres the construction of the Panama Canal as a space of convergence—the convergence where many African diasporic cultures reunited after the divide that commenced with the middle passage (Cooper 2004). Music and music culture was a central element of the connection and the resultant exchange continued outside of the physical and temporal locality that was the building of the Panama Canal. This exchange fostered connections between the subalternized women in the African diaspora that have catalyzed the indigenous feminisms emerging from their communities. Importantly, it includes one emergent feminism indigenous to Jamaica. This feminism our paper terms dancehall feminism and frames as feminist thought that is intertextually embedded in the scribal-oral text of dancehall music. With intertextuality as our theoretic frame, this paper will map the music and music cultural exchanges between the US and Jamaica using the word "independent," including its popular use as a marker for women's empowerment and its signposting of greater exchanges in feminist thought between both localities that was instigated by the great exchange of the Panama Canal. A Summary of Musical Cross-Pollination between the US and Jamaica Discussions of cultural exchange across international borders quite often summon trepidations about the erasure of local cultures through globalization. The impact of global cultural exchange on local cultures of small island nations has been devastating. The cultural exchange between Jamaica and the US, specifically, conjures fears of Americanization, which researchers Ferguson and Bornstein (2012) frame thus: Although globalization is not necessarily Americanization, Americanization may be considered a type of cultural globalization in which there is a stronger unidirectional flow of cultural influence and products from the USA to another society than vice versa. [T]he increasing influx of U.S. culture into Jamaica sets the stage for remote acculturation. … (168–169) [End Page 23] Since the 1920s, in the aftermath of the Panama Canal, there has been an active formal exchange of music and cultures between the US and Jamaica. In other areas of cultural exchange, the fear of Americanization has been great, but musical exchange has been the exception. Exchanges in this area have largely been egalitarian. This can be accredited to the resilience of dancehall music and music culture. The nature of musical cultural exchanges between Jamaica and the US, Semaj-Hall (2021) frames as "American imitation" and "Jamaican refashioning" (45), foregrounding dancehall culture's penchant to borrow from black American music and culture but indigenise it. She highlights this process of indigenization using the career of the legendary Jamaican musician U Roy and his formative contributions to dancehall music. Influenced by the confidence of the scat-rhyming, jazzy African American radio jockeys, U Roy injected indigenous confidence into the Jamaican dance halls. With the aid of the sound system, U Roy made the dance hall into a space not only for dialect- and patwatalking Jamaicans to speak in their own everyday voices, but also for these voices to be heard loudly, which we can still hear in the music of today. (Semaj-Hall 2021, 46) Much like the Panama Canal, the two World Wars catalyzed many changes across the globe and impacted the development of music in Jamaica. Globally, the wars increased the rate at which women were entering the workforce even more than it had during the Industrial Revolution. Men were being shipped off to war and women took their place in the workforce (Griffis Johnson 1925, 612). In Jamaica, our obligations to Britain meant that many of our young men, including some of our most talented live musicians, were being haemorrhaged from the dancehall cultural space for the purpose of fighting. However, unlike the other areas of work, women did not replace men as musicians. This left a significant gap in our live music industry (Stolzoff 2000, 38). At the same time, with...