This essay gauges the significance and legacy of Carolyn Cooper’s Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (1993). It discusses the book’s impact across and against the “Black Atlantic” paradigm, the rise and limits of global feminisms, and shifts in Black popular and academic cultures in the 1990s. Just past its thirtieth anniversary, the book’s critical methodologies enabled much of contemporary thinking about race, gender, and popular cultures in the African diaspora. However, it also establishes some aesthetic and political refusals that are still necessary in an intellectual climate where the Caribbean continues to struggle against the hegemonizing demands of elite Pan-African solidarities.

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