Respectability and the dancehall space: bodies, fashion and the law

The recurring 'respectability' frame through which middle-class and institutional Jamaica has judged dancehall's lyrics, dress and dance, a central analytic lens in the scholarship of Carolyn Cooper, Donna P. Hope and others for reading the culture's controversies.

Professor Carolyn Cooper is a Jamaican literary and cultural-studies scholar whose work reclaimed Jamaican popular culture, orality and "slackness" from dismissal as vulgar and reframed dancehall as a legitimate object of scholarship — work that has led her to be described as the "queen of dancehall and reggae studies." Born 20 November 1950 in Kingston and raised in a Seventh-day Adventist household, she attended St Hugh's High School and won the Jamaica Scholarship (Girls) in 1968. She holds a BA in English (1971) from The University of the West Indies, Mona, and an MA and PhD (1977) in English from the University of Toronto, where she studied on a Canadian International Development Agency fellowship. After teaching at Atlantic Union College in Massachusetts (1975-1980), Cooper joined the Department of Literatures in English at UWI Mona in 1980, rising from Lecturer to Professor over 37 years there before retiring in 2017. She was Campus Coordinator of the Women's Studies Working Group (1982-1992), Head of the Department of Literatures in English (2000-2003), and Director of the Institute of Caribbean Studies (2005-2008). In 1994 she established the Reggae Studies Unit at UWI Mona and led it for more than a decade, and in 1997 she founded the annual Bob Marley Lecture. Her first major book, Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the "Vulgar" Body of Jamaican Popular Culture, argued that Jamaican popular forms long dismissed as crude — dancehall lyrics, proverbs, Anansi stories — carry serious cultural and political meaning. Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) extended this reading to the sound-clash arena and dancehall's global reach. She co-edited Bob Marley: The Man and His Music (2003) with Eleanor Wint, and edited the collection Global Reggae (2012). Beyond the university, Cooper was a long-running weekly columnist for the Sunday Gleaner and co-hosted broadcast programmes including Man and Woman Story on the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation, Question Time on CVM Television and Big People Sup'm on PBC Jamaica. In August 2013 she was made a Commander of the Order of Distinction for outstanding contribution to education. Also known as Carolyn Joy Cooper.

The tension between street dances and sound-system sessions and their residential neighbours over noise, late hours and public space, the everyday backdrop to Jamaica's Noise Abatement Act enforcement and the 'lock-off' debates.

The class and geography divide, 'uptown' versus 'downtown' Kingston, that shapes how dancehall is received, defended and disowned within Jamaica, a frame widely used to explain the culture's respectability battles.

Public record: the Noise Abatement Act, in force from 1997, empowers police to curtail amplified sound events in response to complaints and sets cut-off times for entertainment sessions, and its enforcement has been widely documented as affecting street dances and dancehall events (Laws of Jamaica; Jamaica Gleaner; Jamaica Observer).

The dancehall 'video light', the bright camera or videographer's light that dancers and stylish patrons perform toward at sessions such as Passa Passa, a practice tied to visibility, glamour and self-fashioning, and to debates about display and materialism.

The Tuesday-night street dance on Spanish Town Road in Tivoli Gardens, running from 2003, which became the defining event of the street-dance era: a weekly gathering that crossed garrison lines, drew crowds from across Kingston and abroad, and made the video light, the dancers and the dances into the centre of dancehall culture for a decade.

The 'batty rider', the very short women's shorts that became an iconic, contested item of early-1990s dancehall fashion, especially among dancehall queens, a recurring focus of respectability debates and of Carolyn Cooper's scholarship on the dancehall body. Treated here as a documented fashion term.

The look that grew up around the Dancehall Queen title from the early 1990s: bold, constructed, expensive-looking and made to be photographed. It is a costume for a role rather than everyday dress, and the argument it has always provoked — about respectability, about who gets to be looked at — is part of what the record documents.

The perforated string vest, called 'marina' or 'merino' in Jamaica, adopted from a 1930s Norwegian army design and exported to the British Caribbean in the 1950s; suited to the heat, it became a staple of 1970s rude-boy dress and later a recurring look for reggae and dancehall artists (worn under an open button-up or in red, gold and green).

Documented public and academic debate over skin bleaching in Jamaica, from the 'browning' aesthetic to the 'cake soap' era, brought to a head by Vybz Kartel's lightened skin around 2010; Kartel framed it as fashion and self-expression while critics read it as a symptom of white-supremacist colouring of self-worth, prompting anti-bleaching songs such as Queen Ifrica's 'Mi Nah Rub'. Presented neutrally as a documented cultural argument.