5 Questions with Professor Donna Hope
Published:Friday | June 21, 2024 | 12:06 AMKenrick Morgan/ Gleaner Writer
For years, Professor Donna Hope has been the foremost authority on all things rooted in dancehall, and by extension, Jamaican culture. Born and raised in Linstead, St Catherine, Hope managed to traverse the streets of her well-known community to eventually become a tenured professor of culture, gender and society at the University of the West Indies, Mona.
She is known for her expertise in the areas of popular culture, identity, and gender and is a keen cultural activist with an interest in the black, working-class culture. Prof, as she is affectionately called, has published extensively in both academic and popular circles but is most respected in ‘the streets’ for the positive light she sheds on dancehall culture.
In fact, Professor Hope is the founder of The Dancehall Archive and Research Initiative ( www.dancehallarchive.org), which preserves, innovates, and disseminates information about dancehall culture. And her most recent literacy endeavour focuses on the Jamaican dancehall queen as a cultural form not often recognised due to its suggestive themes through a book titled Dancehall Queen: Erotic Subversion/Subversión Erótica.
Today, 5 Questions With … caught up with Prof to find out more about the woman behind the great works.
You are constantly looked to as one of the authorities on all things cultural. What inspired you to study Jamaican culture in the first place?
My upbringing. I was born and raised in Linstead, St Catherine. My life was steeped in Jamaican music, Jamaican food, and everything Jamaican. My late mother was an avid reader, and she filled my head with all kinds of information about music, language, history, and knowledge about our culture. And dancehall was the soundtrack of my teenage years, so I developed a keen interest in trying to understand what exactly was happening in this vibrant cultural arena since so many people seemed so challenged by it.
What aspects of Jamaican culture interest you the most?
I am always intrigued by just how we live as Jamaicans. What makes us Jamaican. It’s more than just being born here, you know? It’s in our mannerisms, in our language, in the way we dress, the ways we move, the ways we love, the ways we fight, the ways we have fun, the foods we cook, and the music cultures we create. So everything led me to the music culture because it holds everything inside of it. Being a Jamaican is such a unique identity, and it makes our culture unique.
Your most recent book, ‘Dancehall Queen: Erotic Subversion’, speaks of a totally different era of dancehall and Jamaican culture. What has the reception been like so far?
My co-editor, Carla Lamoyi, and I, put our bilingual (English and Spanish) Dancehall Queen (DHQ) book together because of the yawning gap that still exists for information about so many parts of our culture. Dancehall culture is talked about a lot in Jamaica, but so few people write. So the huge influx of non-Jamaicans are demanding documented, research material about the culture. Our DHQ book has filled a huge vacuum because there is a massive wave of DHQ competitions all over Europe, Latin, South, and Central America. The reception has been overwhelming, especially among my dancehall dance-dancehall queen family. To date, copies of our DHQ book are in the hands of men and women in over 30 countries worldwide – including Jamaica of course– Germany, Greece, Sweden, Poland, Egypt, Philippines, Japan, Portugal, Germany, Chile, Mexico, Costa Rica, Russia, Belgium, France, USA, England, Argentina, Colombia, Panama, Venezuela, Barbados, Trinidad, and so on.
What advice do you have for young scholars looking to study Jamaican culture more deeply?
Go for it! Jamaican culture is a rich arena bursting with a variety of themes and plans for study. I have found the ethnographic approach to be the best because in-depth cultural analysis requires a robust, participatory approach. So many aspects of Jamaican culture have not been studied in any great detail, and we have undergone a period of immense transformation over the last 10 or so years. We need scholars to produce works on Jamaican culture so we can understand who we are and how to navigate so many of the pathways that are opening up in front of us. I’ve been encouraging and grooming many young scholars from Europe, the UK, the USA, Africa, and all over the world who are doing important research and writing on Jamaican culture.
What can Jamaica, and by extension, the world, look forward to from Professor Donna Hope this year?
Well, I will have to release my poetry collection that I have been holding on to for some time: These Thorns Have Roses. But of course, I don’t want to have a book clash between this one and the DHQ book. So maybe in December of this year. And I am also doing some tours with the DHQ book, so I’ll be in Mexico and Colombia and a few other Spanish-speaking countries.