ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter highlights how Jamaican dancehall reveals a spiritual underscoring and embodiment from the spiritual worldview of African/neo-African forebears. It also foregrounds the reimagining of Jamaican religious and spiritual practices forming an alternative way of life through which corporeal dancing bodies become vessels transferring spiritually (en)coded movement vocabulary, manifesting an emergent ‘dancehall spirituality’. Slackness and violence discourses surrounding dancehall scholarship are rejected as the primary interpretation of dancehall culture, as dancehall corporeal dancing bodies and expressions are shown to represent a praxis based epistemological/hermeneutic and survival strategy through which many participants structure the way they live their lives.
Dancehall dance as a resistance, spiritual and masking technique is shown to underscore humanity's major life-to-death celebrations, representing a continuity transferred and reimagined from Jamaican African/neo-African spiritual/religious practices. Yet, also demonstrably subsumed within dancehall are formal Christian and charismatic spiritual influences connected to the engagement of dance with the working of the Holy Ghost Spirit in worship practices, transferred to the dancehall space. Thereby, dancehall is shown to be an embodied healing and resistance process against historical corporeal and psychological trauma, and importantly, a cultural expression providing a viable alternative socio-politico-economic means of existence through which some participants transcend and become ‘spirit bodies’.
