Charting a Convivial Continuum in British Post-war Popular Music 1948-2018

Abstract

This chapter seeks to chart a convivial continuum within Caribbean influenced British post-war popular music. Conviviality is understood here to find expression in social formations where essentialised racial identifications and their associated hierarchies breakdown. Popular music is an important site at which to trace convivial formation and its relationship with migration within the UK because it offers a productive site at which vibrant intermixture and combination have taken place. In this chapter, these processes of intermixture and combination are understood in terms of creolisation. Calypso, reggae, post-punk, jungle, two-step garage, dubstep and grime are explored as sites of signifying-practice and corporeal affect with potential to articulate identity positions and experiences that are anti-essential and capable of disrupting racial hierarchies.