Larisa Kingston Mann, "Rude Citizenship: Jamaican Popular Music, Copyright, and the Reverberations of Colonial Power (UNC Press, 2022)

In this episode, our host Mariela Morales Suárez discusses the book Rude Citizenship: Jamaican Popular Music, Copyright, and the Reverberations of Colonial Power (UNC Press, 2022) by Dr. Larisa Kingston Mann. You’ll hear about: Dr. Mann’s intellectual trajectory and how she became interested in the topic of copyright in Jamaican popular music; The concept of “rude citizenship” through the Jamaican music world; What it means to be “original” from the perspective of copyrights, language, and diverse modes of cultural production in Jamaica; Dr. Mann’s writing process as a form of translation from fieldwork notes, archival materials, and music contents into ethnography; How to make the classroom a meaningful pedagogical space by learning from marginal voices and practices; What constitutes the exilic spaces, namely, the reimagining of marginalized spaces as sites of agency and sovereignty through music and cultural production; The transnational networks of the local music production in Jamaica and global flows of sonic resistance, especially during COVID-19. About the book In this deep dive into the Jamaican music world filled with the voices of creators, producers, and consumers, Larisa Kingston Mann—DJ, media law expert, and ethnographer—identifies how a culture of collaboration lies at the heart of Jamaican creative practices and legal personhood. Because many working-class and poor people are cut off from the full benefits of citizenship on the basis of race, class, and geography, Jamaican music spaces are an important site of social commentary and political action in the face of the state’s limited reach and neglect of social services and infrastructure. Music makers organize performance and commerce in ways that defy, though not without danger, state ordinances and intellectual property law and provide poor Jamaicans avenues for self-expression and self-definition that are closed off to them in the wider society. In a world shaped by coloniality, how creators relate to copyright reveals how people will