Kingstons's Dancehall

From the “limbo” to “Jerry Springer,” Jamaican dance moves have mostly been created in Kingston’s inner city. With select citizenry and spatiality, dancehall—Jamaica’s reggae descendant—is a site of collective memory. To contextualize how this urban lifestyle functions, the author provides a brief historical background to the rise of dancehall during the period between 1986 and 2002. She introduces some of the missing stories of dancehall by examining space and bodily performance. Finally, the author assesses what kind of significance the spatiality, temporality, and embodiment of dancehall holds for Kingston’s urban memory.