Content area
Full text
Norman C. Stolzoff, Wake the Town and Tell the People: Dancehall Culture in Jamaica, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000, xxviii + 298 pp.
Norman Stolzoff's examination of dance hall culture in Jamaica represents a powerful and skilful attempt to engage our understanding of the historical and social factors that have helped to shape contemporary Jamaican culture. Scholars of the contemporary Caribbean social scene will find in his book an important contribution to Caribbean historiography with a focus on popular culture. This area of Caribbean historiography has not heretofore occupied a significant share of the investigations of social life in the region and while there has been an increased interest in cultural studies among the Caribbean historical fraternity, works such as Stolzoff's are the more important because of the low frequency of their appearance.
The book is organized in eight chapters, each of which reflects the author's concern to ground his research in the social and historical contexts. Indeed, as he informs us, ' 'the meaning of cultural work has to be understood in its social context. What is wrong with many analyses of dancehall culture is that they either start at the level of analysis of cultural texts (song lyrics) or they go straight to an esthetic or ethical critique of the work without examining the way that the text is produced or consumed and what effects these processes have on the text." Stolzoff's investigation of dancehall culture in Jamaica sinks or swims depending on the extent to which he follows his own prescription. That he keeps this prescription in view becomes apparent to the discerning reader.
Chapter one, entitled "Dancehall Culture in Jamaica: An Introduction", begins immediately to engage the socio-cultural context in which this aspect of popular culture emerges. Here, Stolzoff begins his analysis of the way in which dancehall represents an arena in which workingclass Jamaican youth mitigate the problems of poverty, racism and violence that appear so rooted in inner-city environments. Perhaps the major problem for the author is how to free himself from his privileged background. In his reference to working-class Jamaicans as "lower class", he reveals that his struggle to explore the inner workings of the Jamaican inner-city scene was not without its own inner contradictions....