10.4225/03/58a642d0b6ec4
Stevenson, Mathias Sutherland
Mathias Sutherland
Stevenson
The politics of ‘connective marginalities’ in Italian reggae culture
Monash University
2017
Autonomy
Italy
Counter-information
Dub
Raggamuffin
Restricted access
Hegemony
Sound system
Dialect
Popular music
Anti-racism
Youth culture
Connective marginalities
Rhizomatic
monash:131139
Radical alternative media
2014
Anti-fascism
Identity
Resistance vernacular
1959.1/1060125
Tranculturation
Riflusso
Centri sociali
Language
Gramsci
Youth politics
Punk
Counter-hegemony
Hip hop
Non-institutional politics
National-popular
Jamaica
ethesis-20141110-14534
Radio libere
Glocalization
Subaltern
Britain
Counter-culture
Rap
thesis(doctorate)
Politics
Reggae
2017-10-11 04:19:31
Thesis
https://bridges.monash.edu/articles/thesis/The_politics_of_connective_marginalities_in_Italian_reggae_culture/4663930
In this thesis I discuss how the subaltern roots and counter-hegemonic messages of reggae have resonated rhizomatically across linguistic, cultural, and geographical frontiers to connect with marginalized groups and inspire counter-hegemonic forms of communication and social engagement ‘from below’. Using this ‘connective marginalities’ framework, I argue that the transculturation and glocalization of reggae in Italy during the 1980s and early-1990s led to new and creative forms of inclusive, grassroots, and non-institutional political practice and cultural opposition, which resisted and challenged the social and political disengagement of the so-called ‘riflusso’, and reinterpreted and reinvented Italy’s counter-cultural youth practices of the 1970s.
Through an analysis of personal interviews with key figures and other primary textual and contextual data, I establish a historic and thematic narrative focusing on the socially and politically tumultuous period between 1980 and 1994. I maintain that, during this period, which represented the most innovative and influential phase of reggae’s evolution in Italy, reggae was used as a means of challenging the nation’s hegemonic politics, culture, identities, and racisms. To this end, I pay particular attention to the profound resonance of reggae in Italy’s South, where it was synthesized with local dialects, perspectives, and cultural elements to create a ‘resistance vernacular’ that resisted Southern marginality. Despite the particular significance of these Southern connective marginalities, I also discuss the translocal and ‘national popular’ posse era of the late-1980s and early-1990s, when reggae and rap were popularized throughout Italy, within both non-hegemonic and hegemonic contexts, as a form of counter-information, social commentary, and intercultural/interregional solidarity.