Dangerous Disturbances

This essay examines Carolyn Cooper’s intellectual project as a practice of noisy disturbance that anchors her conceptualization of Jamaican literary and cultural discourses within the concrete materiality and exteriority of the island’s historical, cultural, socioeconomic, and linguistic realities. Using Edward Said’s notion of worldliness, the essay argues that Cooper articulates this via three related tropes—noises, border clashes, and the vulgar body—that address the politics of Jamaican linguistic and cultural hierarchies. Cooper’s two groundbreaking publications, Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (1993) and Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large (2004) are read schematically as strategic interventions that privilege a multifarious disturbing and transgressive orality. Cooper’s work is deliberately and self-consciously invested in disturbing and disrupting cultural and linguistic shibboleths that accord epistemological nullity and ontological invalidity to Jamaican vernacular discourses such as Jamaican Creole/Patwa and the musical genres of reggae and dancehall.