Born a Sufferah

"This book evaluates modern Caribbean politics through the soundscapes of Reggae and Dancehall. Born to Reggae in the 1970s, Dancehall is often framed by its lyrics of hyper masculinity. This has distorted its engagement with Reggae's innate politics, largely Rastafari's critique of the West as being of a Biblical Babylon. Both strains grappled with questions of a decolonizing and migrating Caribbean: hard times, concrete ecologies, and promised lands. But if Reggae's radical soundings of Black liberation repatriated East beyond Babylon's rivers, then to what extent did Dancehall imagine freedom amidst the contradictions of the gully sided West?"--