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.
