Tanya Batson-Savage, Freelance Writer
WHEN TRACING Afro-Caribbean or Afro-American culture, the usual route is to start in African and then explore the retentions and reformations that can be found in contemporary black culture. Yet, on Monday evening, Dr. Stanley Niaah traced a reverse triangular trade route using culture.
The lecture took place as the 13th annual Philip Sherlock Lecture, staged by the Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts as a part of their anniversary celebrations. The lecture was dubbed 'Black Performance Georgraphies from Slave Ship to Ghetto'.
Dr. Stanley Niaah is the recipient of the 2005 Rex Nettleford prize in Cultural Studies and is also the first doctoral graduate of the UWI's cultural studies programme. The paper exposes Stanley Niaah's educational trajectory which has come via geography and the social sciences to cultural studies.
The lecture explores performance as a kind of identity formation for particular locations and how these kinds of per-formances are created both as a way to make space but are also a result of the space allotted.
SLAVE SPACES
As such, she began by exploring the limbo whose creation she linked to the cramped spaces of the first of the slave castles and later the slavers which brought Africans across the Atlantic.
Stanley Niaah's paper looked at three spaces and three kinds of performance. She looked at dancehall in Jamaica, the blues in the United States and Kwaito in South Africa.
As such, in a performance-driven map, she traced, connections between Jamaica's dancehalls, the South's jook joints and the sheebeens of South Africa as performance spaces for the three genres. It was an exploration which connected space and performance looking at the attributes which connect and reveal connections in dancehall, the blues and kwaito.
ENGAGING ANALYSIS
Stanley Niaah explored the blues' influence on the creation of Jamaican popular music and then the dancehall's influence on the creation of kwaito, turning the traditional movement of cultural movement from Africa to the diaspora on its head.
With a presentation enhanced by photos and a music video, Stanley Niaah's engaging analysis was made even more compelling with the visual proof of connections. This was particularly striking in a video clip of a kwaito performer which melodically referenced 1980s dancehall. The dancing was quite similar to the current state of dancehall, even though the dance shown, the 'chop the grass', was created from the South African experience. Interestingly, the video had also included what appeared to be the 'thunder clap'.
During the question and answer segment, Stanley Niaah was asked about the various areas which her study covers, and/or why particular areas were not covered. She noted that an exploration of space in culture was her contribution to broadening the lens through which culture is viewed. It is her way of making more space.
