NEGOTIATING A COMMON TRANSNATIONAL SPACE

Abstract

At the interstices of cultural geography and performance studies, this article continues the author's earlier research and writing on Jamaica's Dancehall culture, and analyzes the applicability of insights gained to other black performance genres, most notably South African Kwaito. Through research methods including interviews and participant observation, a comparative perspective on Dancehall and Kwaito reveals unexplored parallels, particularly ideological and spatial ones. I therefore expand the focus beyond musical and symbolic elements by privileging the spatial category. This focus reveals striking similarities across nations and their diasporas, and how identity, ideology and history merge in the articulation of self for the disenfranchised youth in a cross-cultural context. Ultimately, this article contributes to a broader project of mapping New World performance geographies, in this instance using Dancehall and Kwaito as its main cases.