Introduction
In the field of Caribbean studies devoted to popular culture, slackness occupies an epistemologically uncomfortable position. A portmanteau term that Jamaican moral and political authorities wield to denigrate dancehall (Cooper 2004; Hope 2006), it simultaneously designates a lyrical register, a bodily aesthetic, a social posture, and — depending on the theoretical perspective — an act of postcolonial resistance or a mechanism for reproducing gender inequality. This constitutive tension makes it a historical and cultural object of exceptional analytical richness.
While Jamaican dancehall has benefited, since the 1990s, from an abundant academic literature — Carolyn Cooper (1995, 2004), Norman Stolzoff (2000), Sonjah Stanley-Niaah (2006), Donna P. Hope (2006, 2010) — slackness as it manifests in Martinican shatta remains, to this day, an almost unexplored object of study. Yet the shatta scene, born in Martinique in the late 2000s in the wake of dancehall, reggaeton, and zouk, has developed a distinct slackness category — identified as such by the actors themselves — whose forms, functions, and internal tensions deserve rigorous examination.
In what ways does slackness, as a discursive and bodily regime, constitute an ambiguous space for negotiating relations of gender, race, and class in postcolonial Caribbean societies — and what specificities does the Martinican configuration introduce in relation to the Jamaican dancehall model? To answer this, we will proceed in three stages: an analysis of slackness in Jamaican dancehall drawing on the work of Donna P. Hope (I), an examination of slackness in Martinican shatta through the 2024–2025 interview corpus (II), followed by a comparative dialogue between the two fields (III).
Part I — Slackness in Jamaican Dancehall
I.1 Genealogy and Contested Definitions
The term slackness draws its semantic roots from Jamaican patois, where it designates any form of moral looseness, vulgarity, or public sexual transgression. Within dancehall, it refers more specifically to a lyrical subgenre characterized by the direct explicitness of sexual desire, body parts, and erotic practices — in a deliberately raw idiom. The emergence of this register in its contemporary form is generally dated to the 1980s, at a time when the decline of the Rastafari movement and the rise of urban sound systems were reconfiguring dancehall space (Hope 2006; Cooper 1995).
Carolyn Cooper, the first major theorist of dancehall, proposed a decolonial reading of slackness in Noises in the Blood (1995) and Sound Clash (2004). For Cooper, slackness constitutes an "erotic marronage": a form of cultural resistance that, by mobilizing the body and sexuality, escapes the Eurocentric norms imposed by Jamaican elites who inherited the colonial regime. Hope acknowledges this reading while shifting its terms: where Cooper tends to favor an affirmative hermeneutic, Hope articulates an analysis that more insistently accounts for the phenomenon's structural ambivalences (Hope 2006: 3–8).
I.2 Slackness, Race, and Class
One of Hope's most decisive contributions is to have placed slackness within the context of the social and racial stratifications of postcolonial Jamaican society. Dancehall was born in and for Kingston's Black working classes. Its aesthetic — including slackness — was built in conscious opposition to the norms of respectability imposed by the browning and white Creole elites, who were themselves producers of Eurocentric and colonial gender norms (Hope 2006: 14–18).
Hope shows that the accusation of slackness leveled against dancehall functions as an instrument of class disqualification: by equating the cultural expression of Black working classes with debauchery, elites reproduce a fundamentally colonial gesture. This mechanism, which can be read through Stuart Hall's (1980) lens as a practice of ideological encoding/decoding, turns the debate over slackness into an arena where concrete stakes of power — tied to race, class, and the normative control of the body — are played out.
I.3 The Female Body, Agency, and the Dancehall Queen
The question of the female body is central to the economy of dancehall slackness. Hope analyzes it with particular attention in Inna di Dancehall (2006) and in her subsequent articles. The starting observation is structurally ambiguous: within dancehall space, female sexuality is at once omnipresent and problematic. It is celebrated there, commodified, staged — but most often from a male point of view, within a framework that reproduces heteropatriarchal domination (Hope 2006: 47–51).
Hope refuses, however, to reduce women to the status of mere passive victims. Drawing notably on the example of Lady Saw (Marion Hall), a pioneer of female slackness in the 1990s, she shows how certain artists have turned the codes of slackness into a tool of self-affirmation. In Dancehall Queen: Erotic Subversion (2023), co-edited with Carla Lamoyi, Hope presents the Dancehall Queen (DHQ) as a figure of erotic subversion: emerging in 1992, the DHQ competition created a space of competition and female empowerment in which women develop technical mastery, bodily assertion, and, at times, economic advancement (Hope and Lamoyi 2023).
I.4 Dancehall Masculinities and Man Vibes
Man Vibes (2010) is the second pillar of Hope's body of work. The book examines Jamaican masculinities through the lens of dancehall and identifies five major configurations: promiscuous heterosexual sexuality, gun/violence identity, anti-homosexuality, conspicuous consumption, and a feminized variant in its aesthetics. Slackness intervenes transversally across these configurations, particularly through the register of sexual virility.
Hope emphasizes that these constructions of masculinity respond to a structural condition of exclusion: in a postcolonial Jamaica where working-class Black men are systematically denied access to conventional markers of masculine respectability, dancehall offers an alternative space of recognition and symbolic value. Slackness, in this context, becomes a language of compensation and identity negotiation (Hope 2010: 34–42). The deeply heteronormative dimension of slackness — of which homophobia is the structural flip side — must be read as a functional component of this gender system, not as an isolated phenomenon (Hope 2008: 32–57).
Part II — Slackness in Martinican Shatta
II.1 Slackness as a Category in the Shatta Typology (2012–2025)
The typology of Martinican shatta constructed for the 2012–2025 period distinguishes six main categories: festive/delirious, conscious, militant, feminist, slackness, and fusion. These categories are not mutually exclusive; a single artist, a single track, can fall under several registers at once. Slackness nonetheless constitutes a category identified as such by the actors themselves, which gives it fundamental emic status for the analysis.
The term slackness is directly borrowed from Jamaican dancehall vocabulary, which attests to a conscious cultural filiation between the two musical spaces. However, Martinican actors carry out a situated semantic reworking of the term: they load it with meanings specific to their social, linguistic, and post-departmental context, thereby producing a category that is homologous to, but not identical with, its dancehall counterpart. The analytical task is precisely to grasp what shifts and what remains in this cultural transfer.
II.2 Body, Gender, and Slackness Speech in Shatta
The following primary sources, drawn from the 2024–2025 interview corpus and from lyrics of the shatta slackness scene, form the empirical material for this section.
"I'm surprised that children listen to shatta. I've been making it for 10 years now. To me, shatta is for adults." (Kryssy)
Shatta? "It's our way of releasing a lot of what we've been through" (Maureen)
"When we make conscious tracks, the audience doesn't listen." (General Shizzle)
II.3 Social and Media Reception of Shatta Slackness in Martinique
The reception of shatta slackness in Martinique unfolds within a media and social field structured by three levels of scrutiny: local (Martinican press and radio), national (mainland French media), and European.
August 2023, in the French Antilles: a news segment on a shatta concert is pulled from broadcast. The reason given: the images were likely to offend viewers. (Outre-mer la 1ère, December 2025)
Lexical and quantitative analysis of the media corpus makes it possible to reconstruct the categorizations operated at each level, taking care to distinguish properly musical framings from moral framings and racial framings.
"But what exactly is shatta? A musical current from the French Antilles, inspired by Jamaican dancehall, with sharply marked percussion, sub-bass, super-deep voices, and language that's more than raw!" (Radio France, February 2026)
At the local level, discourse on shatta slackness reproduces, in a specifically Martinican configuration, the "culture vs. slackness" dialectic described by Cooper (2004) and analyzed by Hope (2006) for Jamaican dancehall: the denunciation of slackness by authoritative voices (religious, political, educational) functions as an instrument of normative control over the bodies and expressions of the Black working classes. At the national and European levels, this framing is overlaid with an additional layer of racial and colonial stigmatization, which the theoretical lens of Fanon (1952) and Hall (1980) helps to analyze.
Dancehall Queen Martinique 2010: "Sexy but not vulgar" — France-Antilles-Martinique, 2010.
The censored news segment, in August 2023, showed images of suggestive dancing, deemed vulgar by some. Because more than the music itself, it is the lyrics and this dance — in which women move mainly the lower body — that spark controversy. "I understand that it can offend. But that's exactly where the freedom lies." (Outre-mer la 1ère, December 2025)
Part III — Comparative Dialogue
III.1 Postcolonial Continuities: Domination, Resistance, the Body
The comparison between Jamaican dancehall slackness and Martinican shatta slackness first reveals a set of deep structural continuities, rooted in a shared postcolonial heritage. In both contexts, slackness emerges in social spaces occupied by Black Caribbean working classes who are systematically denied access to legitimate markers of social respectability. Bodily and sexual speech there constitutes a mode of identity affirmation in the face of postcolonial hierarchies — whether racial, classist, or gendered.
In both spaces, slackness is simultaneously a regime of male domination and a terrain of partial female appropriation. The fundamental ambivalence Hope describes for dancehall — the same space that constrains and the one that liberates — is found, with its own inflections, in the Martinican shatta scene. Material from the 2024–2025 interview corpus will make it possible to assess the extent to which Martinican female artists have developed, like Lady Saw in Jamaica, a stance of turning the codes of slackness around.
III.2 Martinican Specificities: Language, the State, Racial Stratification
Martinique, a postcolonial society that has been a French department since 1946, presents configurations that significantly differentiate its cultural space from the Jamaican model. Three dimensions deserve emphasis.
First, the relationship to Creole language constitutes an important difference between Jamaican slackness and its Martinican reappropriations. In Jamaica, dancehall was built on Jamaican patois, which serves not merely as a linguistic vehicle but is fully constitutive of the genre's aesthetic. Wordplay, sexual double meanings, shifts in meaning, and the deliberate opacity of lyrics all rest on the specificities of Jamaican Creole and its capacity to produce a coded language, understood first and foremost by local working-class audiences (Cooper 1995). This dimension echoes Édouard Glissant's reflection on the polysemy and opacity of Creole languages, conceived as spaces of cultural resistance against dominant linguistic norms (Glissant 1990).
In Martinique, shatta takes up part of this logic, but within a different sociolinguistic context. Artists move continuously between Martinican Creole and French, sometimes within a single track. This linguistic alternation reflects a diglossic situation inherited from colonial history: French remains associated with academic, institutional, and professional legitimacy, while Creole remains strongly tied to popular sociability, intimacy, and local cultural expression (Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant 1989). The use of Creole in shatta therefore carries a double dimension. It can function as an identity affirmation and a marker of generational and territorial belonging, but it also remains exposed to forms of social and media disqualification, particularly when the lyrics are judged too sexual, vulgar, or "disreputable."
Shatta slackness thus sits in permanent tension: it mobilizes Creole as a language of closeness, humor, sexuality, and cultural performance, while operating within a space where that language remains historically undervalued by institutions and by certain social representations inherited from the postcolonial context.
Second, the relationship to the French state. Unlike Jamaica, an independent state since 1962, Martinique is subject to the French legal, institutional, and normative framework. This post-departmental configuration introduces specific mechanisms for controlling popular expression: shatta slackness can become subject to legal characterizations (offense against public decency, sexual provocation) that mobilize mainland French legal categories poorly suited to Caribbean realities.
Third, Martinican racial stratification — marked by the persistence of a chromatic hierarchy inherited from slavery, encompassing the békés (the White Creole planter class), the mulâtre/câpre categories, and the Black working classes — produces a specific field of tensions within which shatta slackness must be read. A multiscalar approach (Didier 2011) makes it possible to grasp these local configurations without dissolving them into an overly general comparative grid.
III.3 Limits of the Comparison and Methodological Precautions
Any comparative undertaking carries the risk of flattening singularities. The Jamaica/Martinique comparison is not intended to produce a general model of Caribbean slackness, but to illuminate, through contrast and resonance, what each field says about itself. Hope's work provides a theoretical frame of reference, not a normative yardstick against which to measure shatta slackness.
It should also be noted that the corpus currently available has its limits: the 39 interviews conducted between 2024 and 2025 constitute a solid empirical base, but section II.2 of this article remains a placeholder pending the integration and validation of primary sources. The hypotheses put forward in Part III are therefore reasoned working hypotheses, not definitive conclusions, in keeping with the principle of scientific caution that governs this doctoral project.
Conclusion
Donna P. Hope's work provides, for the study of slackness in Jamaican dancehall, a remarkably rigorous analytical framework. It allows us to move beyond reductive readings — whether morally condemnatory or naively celebratory — to grasp the complexity of a cultural phenomenon rooted in the deep structures of postcolonial Caribbean societies. Slackness is neither mere vulgarity nor mere resistance: it is a space for negotiating relations of gender, race, and class, crisscrossed by contradictions that make it rich material for demanding historical and cultural analysis.
Placing it alongside Martinican shatta slackness opens up a fruitful comparative perspective, one that tests the reach and limits of the Hopean model outside the Jamaican context. The hypotheses put forward in this piece — postcolonial continuities, Martinican specificities, the ambivalence of the female body, masculinities under tension — will need to be tested against the interview corpus and media analysis. That is precisely the task this ongoing doctoral project has set for itself: to let Martinican shatta speak in its full singularity, both heir to Caribbean dancehall and mirror of a Martinican society in the process of recomposing itself.
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