Event

Tao Leigh Goffe

Spaghetti Westerns and Soundsystems: Black and Chinese Reggae Media Infrastructures in Rural Jamaica

The 1972 cult classic film The Harder They Come (dir. Perry Henzell) was the first to bring the electricity of Jamaican rude boy culture to a global audience. In the film, we see a glimpse of various Jamaican publics consuming Spaghetti Westerns and participating in dancehall and disco parties. Delving deeper into the sonic and visual technologies of Jamaican life during this period, this talk centers Afro-Asian extracolonial intimacies. Analyzing the racial formations and the ecology of cinema and sound in rural Jamaica during the late colonial period,  the presentation focuses on media infrastructures developed by Black and Chinese sound engineers, party promoters, and small retail entrepreneurs from the 1940s-1970s. I track the anti-colonial conditions of possibility for reggae as the soundtrack for the island nation, newly independent from Britain in 1962. Exploring what was fostered through countryside film projection technologies, mobile generators, and dancehall speakers, a network of sound and image for urban and rural Jamaicans shaped a global "cool" through the aesthetics of popular music and film culture..

Tao Leigh Goffe is an assistant professor of literary theory and cultural history. She has a joint appointment between the Department of Africana Studies and Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. She is also a writer and a DJ specializing in the narratives that emerge from histories of imperialism, migration, and globalization. She received her Bachelor's degree in English from Princeton University in 2009 and PhD in American Studies from Yale University in 2015. She has held research positions at Princeton University, Johns Hopkins University, New York University, and Leiden University in the Netherlands. At the intersections of the environmental humanities and science and technology studies, her interdisciplinary research and practice examines the unfolding relationship between technology, the senses, race, and nature. DJ’ing is an important part of her pedagogy and research. Film production, sound editing, digital cartography, and oral history are also integral to her praxis. Her writing has been published in South Atlantic Quarterly, Small Axe, Amerasia Journal, and Women and Performance. She is writing a book on islands and the climate crisis called After Eden (Doubleday, Hamish Hamilton). Another book Dr. Goffe is writing, Black Capital, Chinese Debt explores post-emancipation technologies and markets in the British, Dutch, and Spanish Caribbean.