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Carolyn Cooper’s influence as an academic converges with her important work as tastemaker and trendsetter for Jamaica and the wider Caribbean. In this personal homage to Cooper, charted through their meetings in Haiti, Jamaica, and London, the author proposes that we see this convergence in historical continuity with the resistive potential of swag as manifested in Caribbean expressive performative traditions, including Jamaica’s Junkanoo. The same subversive style ties together the Junkanoo reveler captured by Isaac Belisario and Carolyn Cooper’s verbal wit and sartorial elegance. Her embodied wor(l)ds convey a powerful message that coolly brushes aside middle-class timidity and conformism to inspire postcolonial people not just in the Caribbean but across the global South, empowering people to wield the beauty of creolized language, music, and movement as decolonial weapons infused with pride and joy.
Ananya Jahanara Kabir (Mon,) studied this question.