Beating the Babylon System: Paratextual Apparatuses and Theorizing 1960s Jamaican Record Pressing

• In Event: ICA Interactive Paper/Poster Session II
  In Interactive Paper Session: Media Industry Studies Interactive Poster Session

Abstract

This presentation explores the development of vinyl record manufacturing infrastructure in Kingston, Jamaica, in the 1960s to illustrate how the city’s nascent cultural industries class attempted to situate itself within a larger market of global flows. I do this in two ways: (1) a history of record pressing in Jamaica, which gives us a deeper understanding of the tenor of the island’s early music industry and (2) a broad theorization of the political economy of the record plant and its use within a wider historical and conceptual frame. I theorize the record plant and the production process as a paratextual media epiphenomenon, an apparatus whereby media power is negotiated along the same lines as the nation’s political decolonization. Secondly, I argue the plants can be read as an attempt by Jamaicans to develop autochthonous industrial solutions in response to what I term “participatory discrepancies” that perpetuated historic and epistemic disadvantages.

Author

• John Vilanova, U of Pennsylvania