Information on various events leading up to the Festival week-end will be added to this page as it becomes available.
7 pm
Thursday November 12, 2009
Brades Arts and Education Centre
Public Lecture
by
Professor Carolyn Cooper |
"Sweet and Sour Sauce: Sexual Politics in Jamaican Dancehall Culture"
The saucy sexual discourse of Jamaican dancehall DJs is an essential element of their total performance repertoire. Like their calypsonian counterparts, dancehall DJs deploy pungent metaphors to elaborate the recurring identification of sex and food in Caribbean popular culture. Lady Saw and Shabba Ranks are exemplary exponents of this genre whose salacious lyrics are routinely dissed by their detractors as evidence of their creators’ moral degeneracy. Conversely, I argue that the oral/sexual politics of these brazen artists confirms the longevity of an African-derived cosmology in which the sacred and the profane, the body and the spirit are equally valorized.
(These details are subject to change)
