Donna P. Hope. Man Vibes: Masculinities in the Jamaican Dancehall.

Crichlow, Wesley

DONNA P. HOPE. Man Vibes: Masculinities in the Jamaican Dancehall. Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2010, 188 p., index.

Caribbean cultural contemporary academic and critic, Donna P. Hope, in her new book Man Vibes: Masculinities in the Jamaican Dancehall, addresses the strictures of black male representation, the tropes of black postcolonial Caribbean masculinity, heteropatriarchy, homophobia, and sexuality in a predominantly black Jamaican Dancehall music and culture. She marries popular culture debates with theories of gender and sexuality, while examining the progress of Jamaican masculinities in Dancehall cultures. She explores rive prominent masculine debates that are well known in Dancehall music and culture. The debates are promiscuous heterosexuality, gun/violence, antimale homosexuality, conspicuous consumption, and the noveau presentation of a fashioned and styled dancehall variant of maleness, or a biologized hypermasculinity. Methodically as a native of Jamaica, she uses both a personal, ethnographic, and anthropological perspective, auditing the history of Dancehall within Jamaican popular culture.

Given the sparsity of academic literature on the Jamaican Dancehall culture and music by Jamaican academics and Jamaican cultural critics, Hope's contribution is both critical and timely, in debunking some of the racist stereotypes that exist on Dancehall produced mostly by foreigners. As a Jamaican cultural critic, Hope's work reorients early feminist debates around dancehall dancehallized masculinities to position actors firmly within the scope of patriarchy. Consequentially, it confirms the expansion of modes of activity for women in dancehall, arguing that dancehall culture is in fact a mirror of Jamaica's traditional patriarchy, historic racial, and cultural values.

There is a certain reciprocity she holds onto in her insightful, intellectual, and thought provoking contribution. That is, one's social identities represent the way we participate in a historical narrative. She argues that our histories are irretrievable, while inviting imaginative homosocial bonding and reconstructions like dancehall. In essence, Hope informs us that to better understand, interrogate, and make intelligible understandings of black Jamaican working class dancehallized masculinities, we must historize the act or its bodily performance, and that the past or the present is a recast across a Jamaican or Caribbean renaissance.

Dancehall is a troubling and complex aspect of racial and gender politics, which continue with respect to the strictures of representations of Caribbean black masculinity, black hypermasculinity, and biologized masculinity. The romanticization of the genre and style is a celebration of working and middle class black masculinities in a postcolonial society, often misunderstood by foreigners. Arguably, Hope informs us and is quite clear, that male dancehall contemporary images of Caribbean black masculinity continues to trouble and challenge hegemonic white masculinities, even as they rewrite and reproduce forms of misogynistic, patriarchal authority, while banking some of its most disturbing aspects and currency in black dancehallized vernacular styles and expressive performance of a policed masculinity.

Hope's book is a present-day dialogue into postcolonial societies, just as slave narratives examined what it meant to be slaves. Narratives by writers, such as Fredrick Douglas and Harriet Jacobs, examined what it meant to be a black man or woman in the pre-Civil War in the United States, when blacks could not lay claim over their own bodies. Male Dancehall actors explore and express their manhood in a manner they understand it within the black working classes of Jamaica. Hope's work is an excellent analysis of class and socialization in Jamaica. She constructs black dancehallized masculinities with some of the men embodying harsh and brutal behaviors, while acting sexually perverse, sexually wanton, and irresponsible, contributing to the baby mother syndrome. She further makes it clear that black Jamaican or Caribbean women should hot be sacrificed for black men's pride, irresponsiblity, or lack of maturity.

Hope's work makes a significant contribution and is an excellent teachable moment to the present media representations of the angry and aggressive black masculinities often portrayed. By contextualizing and historizing Jamaican working class masculinities for us, it looks, acts, and embraces an aggressive outlook, a view often missing in the debate on working class masculinities within postcolonial societies. Given that we have a very strong anti-Jamaican sentiment within the Canadian criminal justice system, this book on male Jamaican Dancehall culture gives people who talk about the Jamaican crime problem in Canada an opportunity to find alternatives to black male criminalization, and solutions deemed logical. In other words, this book lends itself to some of the terms of the discussion on an anti-Jamaican crime sentiment in the public arena, by setting the directions for public policy informed by black popular cultural masculinities and expressions. Little information is set forth about the conditions that foster such behaviors, exacerbated by the abject poverty, homelessness, and community instability, which Hope sketches for us in narrative, leaving much room for a picturesque understanding of the social conditions of dancehallized masculinities dancehall culture and its relation to crime and hypermasculinity.

In making her arguments, critiques, and analysis of Dancehall, Hope contributes to cultural and postcolonial studies writing on race and nation that seeks to question the discourses of masculinities, harmony, homophobia, and femininity. She makes a significant and critical contribution to the black body politic, joining North American thinkers, such as Hall, Mercer, Hooks, Dent, Wallace, Bobo, Gates, West, Collins, Lorde, Smith, Walker, Rose, Davis, and others in North America. Taken collectively, the insights of these scholars, others, and that of Hope, have moved the study of race and popular culture far beyond taken-for-granted institutional boundaries, with a focus on the experiences of black masculinities, where expressions of dance is conceptualized as a significant force in the reproduction of a racialized culture.

This book Man Vibes: Masculinities in the Jamaican Dancehall, by Ian Randle Publishers--Kingston, Jamaica--http://www.ianrandlepublishers.com invites a significant dialogue and makes a important contribution to Canadian Sociology, Anthropology, Social Work, Popular Culture, Youth Studies, Feminist Studies, LGBT Studies, Media Studies, and Criminal Justice Studies in Canada. Donna Hope's work is a unique and long overdue contribution to the study of Caribbean Masculinities, Performance, Dancehall, Music, Culture, Postcolonial Studies, and Race.

WESLEY CRICHLOW, University of Ontario Institute of Technology