Projects

In cooperation with Anika Gerfer:
Funny or offensive? Performance and perceptions of stereotypes in “Jamaican Countdown”

• BBC Three (2020, August 21). Jamaican Countdown | Famalam: Brand New Series 3 Coming To iPlayer [Video]. YouTube. Retrieved April 20, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qdys7jKUOaE

In 2020, the BBC released their new sketch series Famalam starring Black British actors. The clip “Jamaican Countdown” openly displays stereotypes about Jamaicans, i.e., they are portrayed as being musical, highly sexualized, well-endowed, undisciplined, uneducated, and stoned, has sparked off a heated public debate.

Previous research on the appropriation and performance of Jamaican Creole (JC) e.g. in reggae and dancehall music (Gerfer 2018, Westphal 2018) showed that non-Jamaican singers only use a limited range of some stereotypical phonetic and morphosyntactic features of JC as well as lexical items of the creole register Dread Talk (Pollard 2000). Lopez and Hinrichs (2017) analyzed the appropriation of JC by a European American character in a VW Super Bowl commercial. They found that the linguistic representation is restricted to stereotypical features which would be identified by an American viewership. Additionally, the actor’s language use and his non-verbal performance index images of “the dreadlock-wearing Jamaican Rastaman” (Lopez & Hinrichs 2017: 140) as well as associated social practices such as smoking marijuana.

Performance
Our study addresses the following research questions: 1. How do the actors perform JC in “Jamaican Countdown”?, and 2. Which cultural stereotypes are portrayed and how? To answer these research questions, we conducted a qualitative linguistic analysis, focusing on the actors’ use of JC phonetic, morphosyntactic, and lexical features, and a multimodal analysis of the content, the actors’ outward appearance, their gestures and facial expressions, as well as background music. The results show that the use of JC in “Jamaican Countdown” is remarkably accurate and not only based on few stereotypical features. This ‘authentic’ use of JC may only be intelligible to audience members who are familiar with the language. However, viewers do not necessarily need to understand JC to understand the sketch but be able to recognize the displayed cultural stereotypes.

Perception
Lopez and Hinrichs (2017) showed that different audiences interpreted the VW Super Bowl commercial through various ‘terministic screens’ (Burke 1966), i.e., different ‘cultural lenses’: While US-Americans of color perceived it negatively through a racially highly sensitive terministic screen, Jamaican audiences reacted rather favorably through an inclusive ideology lens.

The aim of our study is to investigate how the audience perceives the actors’ performances in “Jamaican Countdown” by conducting a qualitative content analysis (Kuckartz 2012) of YouTube comments addressing the portrayal of JC and cultural stereotypes. In contrast to the language performance in the Super Bowl commercial, the use of JC in “Jamaican Countdown” is remarkably accurate and not only based on few stereotypical features. It can therefore be expected that while negative voices will occur, the majority of Jamaican viewers might appreciate the skillful portrayal of their language and overall consider the performance of cultural stereotypes as humorous.

References

• Burke, Kenneth. 1966. Language as symbolic action: Essays on life, literature, and method. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Gerfer, Anika. 2018. Global reggae and the appropriation of Jamaican Creole. World Englishes 37(4), 668–683.
• Kuckartz, Udo. 2012. Qualitative Inhaltsanalyse. Methoden, Praxis, Computerunterstützung. Basel: Beltz Juventa.
• Lopez, Qiuana & Lars Hinrichs. 2017. ‘C’mon, get happy’: The commodification of linguistic stereotypes in a Volkswagen Super Bowl Commercial. Journal of English Linguistics 45(2). 130-156.
• Pollard, Velma. 2000. Dread Talk: The language of Rastafari. Canoe Press.
• Westphal, Michael. 2018. Pop culture and the globalization of non-standard varieties of English: Jamaican Creole in German reggae subculture. In V. Werner (Ed.), The language of pop culture (pp. 97–115). Routledge.