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Since their 1980s rise to dominance as a popular form of music and culture in Jamaica, dancehall music and culture remain critically under-researched and under-theorized in the academy, even while they continue to generate immense critical debate and social engagement in Jamaica and elsewhere. Carolyn Cooper’s early celebratory feminist study (2004) stands as an important point of academic inquiry into this flashy and hyper-popular cultural form that has moved beyond Jamaica’s borders through its diaspora, and into multiple transnational localities. Stanley Niaah’s Dancehall builds on the foundation set by multiple scholars (including Carolyn Cooper, Norman Stolzoff, Donna Hope, and others) and presents an ambitious attempt to theorize a performance geography of black popular culture, by tracing linkages from the slave ships, through a four-century time period into the contemporary spaces of Jamaica’s popular dancehall music culture. She identifies the book as utilizing an ecological perspective “grounded in a cultural studies approach that holds trans/ multidisciplinarity and inter/multitextuality as givens” (p. xvi) and argues that it “reclaims” three missing texts: space, event, and actors/acts that have been elided from earlier works on Jamaican dancehall. As a study in performance geography and cultural studies, Dancehall provides readers with rich empirical data on the performance geography of Kingston’s dancehall, including a mapping of some popular street dances, highlighting many that exploded in Jamaica at the turn of the millennium and beyond (pp. 93-94). It also offers a chronology of many popular dance names/styles that have run the gamut of dancehall’s favorites during the period 1986-2009 (pp. 143-45). In addition, it identifies important actors in Jamaican dancehall, for example providing a useful biography of dancehall’s master dancer, the late Gerald “Bogle” Levy (pp. 124-29), and highlighting the contribution of popular female dancers and dancehall queens like Stacey. The critical overview of inner city dynamics and urban poverty in Kingston in Chapter 2 establishes a valuable foundation for the location of identity debates in the class-ridden maze of life in Kingston’s ghettoes. Stanley Niaah’s treatment of these urban spaces is complemented by the argument that the ghetto experience in Kingston is further circumscribed by the

Dancehall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto. Sonjah Stanley Niaah. Ottawa, Canada: University of Ottawa Press, 2010. xix + 238 pp. (Cloth US$ 65.00)