ABSTRACT
The shifting terrains, experiences, aesthetics, and histories that brought about Hiphop and Dancehall go “back, back and forth and forth” as the epigraphs that frame this chapter suggest. Chude-Sokei points to the precolonial forms of knowledge, borne in sound culture, that displaced African descendants continuously
ences of contact with racist systems which privilege Anglocentric literacy and lifestyles. Because enslavers tried so hard to crush many of the African ways of knowing and being, emphasis has been on survivals and continuities, minimizing diasporic complexities. Sharpe alerts us to the paradigm shift from survivals to an emphasis on hybridity, difference, and discontinuities that usher forth with globalization-the mobility of capital, labor, technology, goods, culture, and media images, that “indigenises” metropolitan culture to different people differently. (Blommaert, 2003; Sharpe, 2003) Brodber brings to the fore the inextricable kinship of the oral cultures of Jamaicans and African Americans. There are more shared aspects of African American and African Jamaican expressive cultures than it would first appear.
