“Kingston Be Wise:” Jamaica’s Reggae Revival, Musical Livity, and Troubling Temporality in the Music Industry

• In Event: ICA Interactive Paper/Poster Session III
  In Interactive Poster Session: Global Communication and Social Change Interactive Poster Session

Abstract

Kingston, Jamaica’s capital city, is home to a cohort of creative and music industry workers organizing for urban creative industrial development, collective security, and social uplift. This essay uses interviews and media discourse analysis to historicize and contextualize one group, Manifesto Jamaica, and situates their work alongside close readings of new music by and additional interviews with Jamaican artists organizing as the “Reggae Revival.” The groups’ media is characterized by two themes: (1) a cross-textual referencing practice connected to the Rastafari folk religion’s concept of “livity,” or the collectivity of all things and (2) an intentional troubling of teleological, temporal order, which connects the protests, politics, and people of the 1970s reggae golden age to today through musical gestures and choices. Manifesto Jamaica and the Reggae Revival represent creative industries development and cultural production in a specific neo-colonial socio-political and Afro-diasporic world-historical context that is significant and worthy of study.

Author

• John Vilanova, U of Pennsylvania