Rude Citizenship: Jamaican Popular Music, Copyright, and the Reverberations of Colonial Power
York University (Canada) / Goldsmiths, University of London (UK)
In Rude Citizenship: Jamaican Popular Music, Copyright, and the Reverberations of Colonial Power, Larisa Kingston Mann unravels the moral economies and legal copyright frameworks that inform and animate the ongoing evolution of Jamaican popular music. Mann’s intervention into the study of Jamaican music and culture in this context is novel in multiple ways. Existing approaches to theorizing Jamaican popular music have contended with ways in which practitioners of the culture incorporate elements of embodied social knowledge (Henriques 2011), challenge the dominance of a stratified system of social classes (Cooper 2004) and create a sense of kinship with ancestral histories of migration and ritual practices (Niaah 2010; Stanley Niaah 2008). Mann’s approach presents an account of how Jamaican musical cultures challenge dominant epistemologies about intellectual property and ownership based on colonial notions of enclosure—positioning the conditions in which Jamaican popular music emerges in relation to global struggles against the loss of commons—ecological, economic and cultural.
Mann locates the legal framework of copyright as part of a wider set of colonial worldmaking apparatuses that create enclosures around popular music and culture, entangling them in regimes of ownership and intellectual property that most closely adhere to ideas of musical composition and creativity within a Eurocentric framework of cultural production, centering specific individuals and collectives in isolation from their cultural milieu as auteurs. Within the broader context of British imperialism in which Jamaican popular genres like reggae, ska, dancehall and dub have emerged, there are additionally class, geographical and economic considerations of practitioners that contribute not only to the evolution of distinct musical styles but also to their legibility within the political economy of global music and associated legal regimes. Mann’s most important and unique contribution to this growing literature on the embodied knowledges and epistemologies emanating from Jamaican music’s ethos is linking the ways it challenges class and coloniality within Jamaica to how the notion of “rude citizenship” (130, 177)—the sociocultural, affective, and embodied practices of poor Jamaicans contrasted with the state-supported ideals of the elite classes—created “a kind of sheltering space where poor Jamaicans can produce this relatively autonomous cultural life” (7). It is through this perspective of rude citizenship—which encapsulates how the Jamaican poor resisted forms of coloniality by challenging certain white supremacist norms of conduct still affirmed by elites in Jamaican post-independence society—that Mann shows how anti-Blackness and coloniality pervaded post-independence Jamaica. Even though “the state and its elite intellectuals (…) were at odds over the appropriate forms and distributions of power, they tended to remain more in agreement about cultural norms of conduct, reading the poor as ‘rude’ rather than as challenging coloniality” (9). Accordingly, within marginalized spaces in Jamaican society, popular musical cultures reflected the moral economies and embodied representations of various approaches to pushing back against state-enforced, anti-Black understandings of personhood, creativity and conduct. These cultural practices present considerable epistemological challenges to dominant global orders surrounding the status of intellectual property and ownership when it comes to music, countering established notions of copyright law.
When considered through the prism of notions of “rudeness” and rude citizenship as per Mann’s articulation, we can begin to observe the impacts of persistent coloniality and anti-Blackness in post-independence Jamaica as broad, cascading forms that create the scaffolding in which Jamaican popular music, legal mechanisms like international copyright law and notions of ownership interface and operate, each challenging the limits of the other. In this nexus, Jamaican musical practices, regardless of their genre, represent part of a pluriverse in which traditional cultures of orality, notions of sonic commons that not only enable but also celebrate forms of hybridity facilitated by mixing and sampling practices and other embodied and aural knowledges—frequently demonstrate their continuous evolution and autonomy even as newer mechanisms of legal and physical enclosure emerge by engaging with and producing forms of musical composition that defy colonial constructs of copyright law.
In this way, the musical forms, textures, pedagogies, and epistemologies that undergird the ethos of Jamaican popular music continue to refract the moral economies surrounding the idea of “rude citizenship” within the domains of music and cultural production, legal regimes and beyond. Jamaican popular music and dance culture, its technological innovations and migrating evolutionary trajectories will likely continue to lay significant challenges to the global hegemonic legal orders around creative composition, collaboration and ownership. Mann’s work in Rude Citizenship extends this inquiry well beyond the realm of music into broader conversations about coloniality, Indigenous approaches to legal worldmaking and the nature of cultural production itself. By questioning the fundamental underlying assumptions in Western conceptions of musical and sonic composition with examples from Jamaican popular music, Mann’s provocation in Rude Citizenship asks readers to question their understanding of auteurship, originality and notions of musical talent.
Cooper, Carolyn. 2004. Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large. 2004th edition. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Henriques, Julian. 2011. Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques, and Ways of Knowing. 1st edition. New York: Continuum.
Niaah, Sonjah Stanley. 2010. DanceHall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto. Illustrated edition. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press.
Stanley Niaah, Sonjah. 2008. “Performance Geographies from Slave Ship to Ghetto.” Space and Culture 11(4): 343–60.