Description: While the 1970s is understood as being Reggae's political pinnacle, this book explores the globally insurgent soundscapes of Dancehall music at the turn of the 21st-century.
Brief description: Quito J. Swan is Director of Africana Studies and Professor of History at The George Washington University, USA. He is a scholar of Black Internationalism and author of four books: Born A Sufferah: Dancehall Music's Insurgent Soundscapes (Bloomsbury, 2025), Pasifika Black: Oceania, Anticolonialism, and the African World (New York University Press, 2022), Pauulu's Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice (University Press of Florida, 2020), and Bermuda: The Struggle for Decolonization (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
Review Quotes:
"Attuned to the reverberations of Jamaican popular music in diverse cultural contexts, Quito Swan skillfully theorizes the politics and aesthetics of dancehall performance. Like a top-ranking sound system selector, he deftly practices the art and science of academic juggling. Born a Sufferah is a dubplate special, signifying Swan's prowess in the sound clash of dancehall scholarship." --Carolyn Cooper, Professor Emerita, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica
"Quito Swan (re)mixes culture and politics to produce a lyrical account of Black revolt at the millennium's end. Dancehall is no mere soundtrack but a sound, a sounding, where dub poetry meets history, and we discover the three R's: Riddim, Remembering, Resistance. Moving intervallically and diasporically through key episodes of Black insurgency, Born a Sufferah re-members separate, discrete arenas of struggle - the street, the home, the school, the dance floor - as one Babylon where popular defiance is expressed as one Love. Read until you overstand." --Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination "A much overdue examination of dancehall as a perceptive and articulate international cultural ambassador, rather than merely the influential musical phenomena we love it for. Although that isn't forgotten in this fascinating and insightful study." --Lloyd Bradley, author of Bass Culture, a history of reggae