DanceHall combines cultural geography, performance studies and cultural studies to examine performance culture across the Black Atlantic. Taking Jamaican dancehall music as its prime example, DanceHall reveals a complex web of cultural practices, politics, rituals, philosophies, and survival strategies that link Caribbean, African and African diasporic performance.

Combining the rhythms of reggae, digital sounds and rapid-fire DJ lyrics, dancehall music was popularized in Jamaica during the later part of the last century by artists such as Shabba Ranks, Shaggy, Beenie Man and Buju Banton. Even as its popularity grows around the world, a detailed understanding of dancehall performance space, lifestyle and meanings is missing. Author Sonjah Stanley Niaah relates how dancehall emerged from the marginalized youth culture of Kingston’s ghettos and how it remains inextricably linked to the ghetto, giving its performance culture and spaces a distinct identity. She reveals how dancehall’s migratory networks, embodied practice, institutional frameworks, and ritual practices link it to other musical styles, such as American blues, South African kwaito, and Latin American reggaetòn. She shows that dancehall is part of a legacy that reaches from the dance shrubs of West Indian plantations and the early negro churches, to the taxi-dance halls of Chicago and the ballrooms of Manhattan. Indeed, DanceHall stretches across the whole of the Black Atlantic’s geography and history to produce its detailed portrait of dancehall in its local, regional, and transnational performance spaces.

Sonjah Stanley Niaah's profile page

Sonjah Stanley Niaah is the inaugural Rhodes Trust Rex Nettleford Fellow in Cultural Studies (2005) and lectures in Cultural Studies at the University of the West Indies at Mona. With research interests around Black Atlantic performance geographies, ritual, dance, as well as popular culture and the sacred, Stanley Niaah is a leading author on Jamaican popular culture and Caribbean Cultural Studies more broadly.

"Stanley Niaah’s knowledge of the elements of dancehall over the last two decades... is firsthand and encyclopaedic. Much of the value of this book is to be found in the way it documents the details of a culture so swiftly moving that it can seem impossible to document at all." -- The Caribbean Review of Books

“ the meticulously detailed research that Stanley Niaah presents in Dancehall provides us with an invaluable resource for thinking about dancehall events expansively, from a single event and all the corporeal, spatial, and aural elements that constitute it, to dancehall’s global circulation.” – Jeannine Murray-Roman, Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, Vol. 9, Iss. 1 [2012], Art. 10

"DanceHall is a fascinating and scholarly look at [dancehall] music and its tie to Jamaican culture." - The Midwest Book Review