JAMAICANS DEAL WITH HIP-HOP

From "modem blackness " to "foreign mind, " cosmopolitanism to pan-Africanism, radical remixology to outright mimicry, hip-hop in Jamaica embodies the myriad ways Jamaicans embrace, reject, and incorporate foreign yet familiar forms. Seemingly deep contradictions can emerge in such engagements, as when, for instance, hip-hop-generation Rastafarians claim conspicuous consumption as a tool for advancement. Examining the lines that Jamaican artists and audiences draw between "authentic " local expression and a "bow " to the foreign demonstrates how music mediates identity and subjectivity in contemporary Jamaica. Through historical perspective, musical analysis, and ethnography, this essay seeks to illus-trate the contingent, shifting limits of such commonplace appropriations. Hip-hop, as with any number of African-American cultural forms before it, offers a range of compelling and contradictory significations to Jamaican artists and audiences. From "modem blackness " to "foreign mind, " transnational cosmopolitanism to militant pan-Africanism, radical remixology to outright mimicry, hip-hop in Jamaica embodies the myriad ways that Jamaicans embrace, reject, and incorporate foreign yet familiar forms. Empowered by, even as it is critical of US political, economic, and cultural dominance, hip-hop resonates across the Jamaican soundscape as a suggestive symbol of the contradictions facing a nation whose citizenry increasingly resides abroad, whose promise of post-colonial self-determination remains elusive, and whose internal conflicts — in particular, the persistence of vast inequalities that correlate all too well with an entrenched "pigmentocracy"— * For their very helpful feedback on earlier versions of this paper, I would like to thank Ronald Radano, Richard Miller, Rebecca Nesson, and Annie Paul. I would also like to thank my many Jamaican collaborators for their crucial contributions to my understanding of hip-hop in Jamaica (and, for that matter, reggae in the United States) — in particular, Rashome and the Twelve Tribes brethren, Dami D