This essay examines Carolyn Cooper’s intellectual project as a practice of noisy disturbance that anchors her conceptualization of Jamaican literary and cultural discourses within the concrete materiality and exteriority of the island’s historical, cultural, socioeconomic, and linguistic realities. Using Edward Said’s notion of worldliness, the essay argues that Cooper articulates this via three related tropes—noises, border clashes, and the vulgar body—that address the politics of Jamaican linguistic and cultural hierarchies. Cooper’s two groundbreaking publications, Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (1993) and Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large (2004) are read schematically as strategic interventions that privilege a multifarious disturbing and transgressive orality. Cooper’s work is deliberately and self-consciously invested in disturbing and disrupting cultural and linguistic shibboleths that accord epistemological nullity and ontological invalidity to Jamaican vernacular discourses such as Jamaican Creole/Patwa and the musical genres of reggae and dancehall.
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Research Article|
July 01 2024
Dangerous Disturbances: Carolyn Cooper’s Noisy Worldliness
Nadi Edwards
Nadi Edwards is an independent scholar from Jamaica. He formerly taught in the Department of Literatures in English at the University of the West Indies, Mona. His research interests are in Caribbean literary and cultural studies, postcolonial theory, and African diaspora studies. He has published extensively on various Caribbean writers and critics, as well as on broader issues of Caribbean popular culture.
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Small Axe (2024) 28 (2 (74)): 51–62.
Citation
Nadi Edwards; Dangerous Disturbances: Carolyn Cooper’s Noisy Worldliness. Small Axe 1 July 2024; 28 (2 (74)): 51–62. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-11382452
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