King Yellowman

Jamaican deejay

Yellowman divided a country with his bawdy songs and his very body: he has been

wildly popular among dancehall fans, yet widely despised by polite society. Even

though his contribution to Jamaican musical culture is immense, scholars have

ignored him and reggae histories have largely misunderstood him.



King Yellowman: Meaningful

Bodies in Jamaican Dancehall Culture is the first serious study of one Jamaica's most significant artists

and dancehall's first major international star. It is a critical biography designed

to satisfy fans while furthering academic discourse on dancehall by offering a

new perspective on the way Yellowman negotiates the slackness/culture binary in

Jamaican music.



Based on years of ethnographic

fieldwork, Brent Hagerman begins with the compelling story of Winston Foster's

early life as an abandoned ghetto outcast and his hard-fought journey to become

the King of Dancehall, then goes on to a critical exploration of the

marginalization of people with albinism in Jamaica and the use of slackness in

Caribbean music. Through slackness and his mobilization of Rastafarian symbols,

Yellowman subverts embedded Jamaican cultural notions of sexuality, gender, and

race to overcome his cultural displacement, promote his yellow body as sexually

appealing and forge a place for himself among the Jamaican body politic.