Tuesday 29 July 2014

Project Overview


The project will focus on European Dancehall Queens (EDQC) and connections between Jamaican and European identities in this cultural sphere. It will question how practitioners of various backgrounds performing in the European context engage with and appropriate Dancehall Queen (DQ) culture and examine how they position themselves within the sexual, geopolitical and social fields present within the style.

Objectives

·         To examine how the black Jamaican socio-cultural underpinnings of dancehall are present in its European form and analyse how this relates to wider socio-political relations between Europe and the Caribbean.

·         To identify the nature of digital-embodied-communication in the development of a European dancehall aesthetic and how this becomes integrated into the European dancehall cultural landscape.

·         To analyse how contestants in the European context construct feminine identities both physically and discursively through dancehall practice in face-to-face and digital contexts.

·         To consider the ways in which dancehall’s sexual component is addressed by practitioners in European contexts and whether it has developed into an appropriated form.

·         To locate the role of diaspora ideologies and racial signifiers in this cultural system using current postcolonial and trans-atlantic cultural theory (Gilroy, 1995; Roach, 1996) as a starting point to analyse the flows of culture manifested at the EDQC.