The cultural politics of Jamaican dancehall music in South Florida

For Jamaicans throughout the Diaspora, dancehall music has emerged as their most potent cultural symbol demarcating their place of origin and continued sense of national belonging. Due to its unapologetic nature and tendency to tackle divisive issues such as those involving race, class, and sex, dancehall has been unfairly branded as wholly misogynistic and violent. This dissertation attempts to counter some of these assertions by exploring the cultural politics of dancehall music in South Florida's Jamaican community. Information for this study was obtained using participant observation, formal, and informal interviews. Participant observation was conducted over a 2 year period at several dancehall clubs and events throughout South Florida. A total of 24 formal and 30 informal interviews were conducted with listeners of the music and business owners who are directly and indirectly involved with the promotion, production, and distribution of dancehall in South Florida. ^ Results show that dancehall enacts cultural politics in three primary ways in South Florida. First, the music serves as one of several types of materials used in the construction of a "Jamaican identity." This is achieved through the lyrical content of the music where social, economic and political issues affecting the island are often discussed and debated. Second, dancehall operates as a form of cultural politics through its nurturing of nationalistic sensibilities. Evidence of this is apparent in the controversy involving dancehall's homophobic stance. Third, dancehall affords Jamaicans in South Florida the ability to transplant and perpetuate the uptown versus downtown divide. ^ Far from being wholly misogynistic and violent, therefore, dancehall is an important tool that can be used to address a wide variety of issues within the local Jamaican context and throughout the Jamaican diaspora. ^

Dulce Maria Loynaz' Jardin: Subversive tropological discourse

The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze how the tropes or figurative discourse in Loynaz’s novel, Jardín, becomes a means by which she involves the reader within a text that subverts socio-cultural conventions. Through textual analysis, it explains how the poet communicates her views of the world as a conflictive space where existence is the will to live, life being a human construction like a garden, and a woman’s decision –often frustrated by men– to seek self-realization.^ By tracing some critical studies focused on polarities allegedly present in Jardín, such as: poetry/prose, lyric poetry/novel, word/silence, life/death, character novel/space novel, civilization/barbarism, posmodernismo/vanguardismo, and femininity/feminism, this essay explores Loynaz’s esthetic and ideological codes to demonstrate how opposition can be seen in her novel as part of her arrangement of an artistic philosophy.^ This research refers to three main sources: the semiotician Umberto Eco’s notion of the text’s indeterminacy as an opera aperta, reception theory, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism. By applying these theories to the analysis of this novel, I seek to show Loynaz’s literary modus (tropological language) and ideological dictum , which correlate oppositions and transform them as a point of departure to reconsider civilized life. The poet is presented as an esthetic force that compels the reader to question some false values, by creating an implicit but intelligent dialogue between him/her and a lyrical text. To describe such literary procedure, I coin in this study the term dialirismo (dialyricism). ^ My essay is centered on the tropes through which Loynaz creates her dialyrical text. By focusing on metaphor, symbol, synecdoche, and metonymy, I examine Jardín as a convergence of the following conceptual aspects: intertextuality, primitivism, and feminist discourse. I argue that Loynaz’s novel is a creative response to the literary tradition, as well as a proposal to understand writing –and reading– as an open, interactive process in search not only of artistic values but also of critical knowledge.^ This exploration shows how the novelist faces a so-called civilized world through the eyes of her fictional character, Bárbara, who confronts patriarchal discourse. It celebrates Loynaz’s poetic representation of this inquisitive woman, in her fenced garden, as a human being who can see, above and beyond an iron curtain, the possibility to overcome an aggressive male-centered civilization.^

Nec(Romantic)

NEC(ROMANTIC) is a poetry collection thematically linked through images of insects, celestial bodies, bones, and other elements of the supernatural. These images are indicative of spells, but the parenthesis around romantic in the collection’s title also implies idealism. The poems explore the author’s experiences with death, grief, love, oppression, and addiction. NEC(ROMANTIC) employs the use of traditional forms such as the villanelle, sestina, and haiku to organize these experiences. Prose poetry and a peca kucha ground the center of NEC(ROMANTIC) which alternates between lyrical and narrative gestures. NEC(ROMANTIC) is influenced by Sylvia Plath. The author uses Plath’s methods of compression, sound, and rhythm to create a swift, child-like tone when examining emotionally laden topics. Ilya Kaminsky influences lyrical elements of the poems, including surrealism. Spencer Reese’s combination of the natural and personal world is also paramount to this book. Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde influence NEC(ROMANTIC)’s political poetry.

Apple

Apple is a collection of poems that explores the connection between human relationships and the evolution of an identity. Multiple speakers investigate gender and sexuality, plentitude and poverty, atheism and Christianity in order to better understand some of the forces that affect a woman's consciousness. An awareness of perceived dualities, such as self and other, reason and faith, nature and technology, socialization and loneliness are central to this exploration. The poems employ various forms, such as ultra-talk narratives, lyrical meditations, prose poetry, epistolary poems and hypertext. The variety of structure and form in the collection mirrors the variety of approaches the speakers employ to move closer and further away from the subjects at hand. The rhetorical posture employed in each poem is directly linked to the speaker's relationship with the audience, which is an excellent example of a human relationship affecting the evolution of an identity.

Gravel music

Gravel Music is a collection of poems, encompassing a wide range of styles from free verse to sonnets, including several unique forms, using rhyme where it was deemed pertinent, but also operating in a deconstructive mode where prosody is concerned. The book is divided into three sections. Poems in the first section strive toward political and critical utterance, addressing Marxism, Darwinism, neo-pragmatism, and humanism in a sequence of interrogations of the barriers between aesthetics, politics, critical theory, and philosophy, hoping to find traces of truth, fact, and authenticity that transcend category. The second section is comprised of a single lyrical narrative which follows a married couple as they interact on their small farm in late Autumn, addressing themes of literacy, love, and domesticity. The third section continues the focus on domestic life, but also addresses themes of nostalgia for childhood and lost love. The poems of this section move away from the formal, socio-political outbursts of the first section, instead operating primarily through persona and voice, bringing the book to a quiet, personal close.

Of Taffeta and Soil

OF TAFFETA AND SOIL is a collection of poetry unified through images of Argentinean and Floridian soil, flora, and fauna, and by themes of geographic and emotional dislocation, memory, and the quest for home. These images are brought forth in lyrical poems that question the growth and settling of a romantic partnership, domestic turmoil and resolution, and the constant tension between self and community. Mostly written in free verse, the collection also utilizes forms such as prose poem, haiku, and sonnet, for more formal unity. Section one chronicles and explores a romantic relationship through attraction, passion, disappointment, and self-awareness. Section two is a long poem that centers on the speaker’s continuous struggle to come to terms with her present adult life while still remembering and idealizing a homeland. Finally, the collection ends with two sections that work toward self-acceptance, forgiveness, and evolution via community, family, travel and nature.

Give Us This Day

GIVE US THIS DAY is a collection of poetry grounded in the lyrical tradition that speaks to the conflicting need for structure and the inherent desire to be free. It focuses on those moments of rupture, when the structure, whether physical, emotional, psychological or political, is broken. The title poem sets the tone for the collection, capturing the idea that today is all one can truly know. Throughout the five sections of the collection, one comes to understand a complex family story, where right and wrong is blurred in the reality of existence. The sections, representing various parts of the day, are a parallel to the individual stories, speaking to the idea that a single day contains both times of light and darkness, similar to a life. The collection takes place in several cityscapes from Moscow to Delhi, Washington, D.C. to Miami. There are correlations drawn between familial settings and political unrest and tension. Often the political atmosphere is alluded to and drawn into context through the use of intimate personal vignettes. In contrast to the urban noise, there is pervasive natural imagery of gardens and tropical locales which mimic the physical life cycle, climaxing in the blossom.