“At the Ideological Cross Roads: Interrogating (Jamaican) Masculinities in Contemporary Urban Culture through Historical Discourse.” By arguing about the centrality of history in the development paradigms of Jamaican gender

Working Title: “At the Ideological Cross Roads: Interrogating (Jamaican) Masculinities in Contemporary Urban Culture through Historical Discourse.” By arguing about the centrality of history in the development paradigms of Jamaican gender (identities), contemporarily, this paper looks at the intersection of history and urbanization as a representation of Jamaican popular culture, primarily Dancehall. It examines how historical processes such as slavery, colonialism and racial/class prejudices have impacted the development of Jamaican masculinities as discourses of power in the society. It further argues that the resemanticisation of the sign (of the body), therefore, observed through the prisms of popular culture, namely Dancehall music/culture, offers the possibilities for changing power dynamics in the society, specifically as it relates to race and class. Theoretical Constructs: Using a postmodern lens, the paper develops the idea that notions about the body, both as sign and discourse of this sign, are representative of how Jamaican society organizes its notions of power. The phenomenon of violence in certain parts of Kingston’s inner-cities represents, accordingly, an effort to deconstruct hegemonic and, at times, ethnocentric ideas related to power and state; though ironically, it also reconstitutes these power ideologies in the society. In which regard, Dancehall as the representation of this discourse is as much entertainment as it is hardcore political commentary on the changing nature of Jamaican society as it undergoes radical social and political upheavals, in part, due to urbanization.