Rough Riding: Tanya Stephens and the Power of Music to Transform Society (Sound Culture Series)

Rough Riding: Tanya Stephens and the Power of Music to Transform Society is a groundbreaking collection of articles that explore the contribution of the cultural worker, feminist organic intellectual, and controversial reggae and dancehall artiste Tanya Stephens. An accomplished lyricist on par with the genre’s celebrated male performers, Stephens has been producing socially conscious and transformative music that is associated with revolutionary reggae music of the 1970s and 1980s. The contributors to this anthology – a diverse group of scholars, activists and reggae professionals – explore the range of ideas and issues raised in Stephens’s extensive body of work and examine the important role cultural workers play in inspiring shifts in consciousness and, ultimately, the social order.

Contributors: Tanya Batson-Savage, Elsa Calliard-Burton, Karen Carpenter, Melville Cooke, Ajamu Nangwaya, Adwoa Ntozake Onuora, Alpha Obika, Anna Kasafi Perkins, Nicole Plummer, Chazelle Rhoden, Sara Suliman

Adwoa Ntozake Onuora lectures in the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. She is the author of Anansesem: Telling Stories and Storytelling African Maternal Pedagogies.

Anna Kasafi Perkins is Senior Programme Officer, Quality Assurance Unit, Office of the Board for Undergraduate Studies, the University of the West Indies, Vice Chancellery, Regional Headquarters, Jamaica. Her publications include Justice as Equality: Michael Manley’s Caribbean Theory of Justice and Justice and Peace in a Renewed Caribbean: Contemporary Catholic Reflections (co-edited with Donald Chambers and Jacqueline Porter).

Ajamu Nangwaya is a former lecturer in the Institute of Caribbean Studies, the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. He is co-editor (with Michael Truscello) of Why Don’t the People Rise Up? Organizing the Twenty-First Century Resistance and (with Kali Akuno) of Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi.