Introduction: Colonial and anti-colonial forms of knowledge

Decolonisation is not finished. In 1937, Marcus Garvey advised a primarily Black audience in Nova Scotia to ‘emancipate yourselves from mental slavery’. At that time, the transnational Pan-African movement had been engaged in a decades-long global struggle for Black emancipation from colonial rule in the Caribbean and the African continent, and from the United States’s version of Apartheid rule in the Jim Crow south. As Garvey argued, the colonial system of racial hierarchies was made possible by a system of thought that normalised White supremacy, embedding it in the common understanding of what made the world function. Thus, full emancipation required changing the way society at large thought about global relations.

Forty-three years later, Bob Marley sangFootnote ¹ these same words in ‘Redemption Song’. In some crucial ways, the colonial system that marked Garvey’s time had changed. In 1960, the ‘year of Africa’, 17 Black majority countries on the African continent followed Ghana into independent rule. Legal segregation in the United States was on the way out, and most Black-majority countries in the Caribbean were self-governing by 1968. However, in the decades since the end of formal colonisation, authors such as Walter Rodney, C. L. R. James, Kwame Nkrumah, Charles Mills, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Angela Davis have continued to call for decolonisation in political practice and thought alike. As these and other authors have pointed out, the still present racialisation of international power, the global flow of wealth from poor to rich, and the externalisation of socioeconoimc and environmental insecurity and harm from rich to poor in the contemporary world echo historic colonialism in much the same way that Marley echoed Garvey in 1980.

Taking Garvey’s and Marley’s lead, this paper focuses on the coloniality of thought or ‘mental slavery’ embedded in global systems of knowledge. Specifically, this paper is intended to contribute to the ongoing process of decolonising international relations (IR) theory, which emerged as a field out of the White supremacist epistemologies of its founders.Footnote ² In particular, I argue that certain forms of Black music comprise a body of decolonial knowledge that can and should be incorporated into the study of IR. The music I discuss below challenges common IR understandings of the nation-state as a site of order and identity, questions how IR conceptualises terms like peace and security, and imagines a transnational Black diasporic solidarity that challenges conventional notions of international identity and personhood as circumscribed by state sovereignty. As with the rest of the literature on ‘decolonising the discipline’, the goal is to build a more analytically rigorous, equitable, and holistic IR.

In order to recognise the long history and present of decolonial and critical IR, I am using Cynthia Weber’s term ‘Disciplinary IR’Footnote ³ throughout to refer to the (still-mainstream) IR scholarship that – consciously or unconsciously – reproduces the White supremacist epistemologies of its founding and resists calls to change. Most of the decolonial IR theories I am drawing on here come from Pan-Africanism, Critical Race IR, and what Vitalis dubbed the Howard School of IR.Footnote ⁴ Because of its connection to the racialisation of international politics and the creation of contemporary racial categories, including Black and White, I will use the term ‘Black IR’ throughout to distinguish this collection of thought from the Disciplinary canon.Footnote ⁵ As such, I locate Black IR in the broader pantheon of Critical and decolonial IR, which includes scholarship from and about the Global South,Footnote ⁶ as well as scholarship centred on Indigenous,Footnote ⁷ Queer,Footnote ⁸ and feministFootnote ⁹ perspectives.

Engaging with music and other forms of knowledge is not something Disciplinary IR commonly does. However, there are important ways in which music serves as a body of knowledge about world politics. First, how we think and talk about music is historically embedded (deliberately and explicitly) in broader ideas about race, political citizenship, and the nation-state. Indeed, the fact that music is raced as ‘Black’ or ‘White’ de facto connects musical knowledge to world affairs, as our contemporary understandings of Black, White, and other racial categories were constituted by global and international politics. Second, the Black music I discuss below emerged in dialogue with and has been used as a site for the dissemination of Black IR from the late 19th century onward. Finally, Taylor reminds us that the decolonisation of IR knowledge requires ‘focusing attention on ordinary people’s experience of the international’,Footnote ¹⁰ rather than simply reproducing the perspectives and interests of the formally educated elite class. Black musical forms have historically been dominated by economically and politically marginalised people and have served as a conduit for the voices of ‘ordinary people’ explaining their experience of the international to people who would otherwise not listen.

This is not the first musical interrogation of political science. Kevin Dunn in this journal,Footnote ¹¹ Steve Smith,Footnote ¹² and Damascus KafumbeFootnote ¹³ have spoken about the way in which music produces knowledge about the world. Ubaldo and Hintjens discuss how music can and has been used to build community and promote peacekeeping in post-conflict situations.Footnote ¹⁴ Music both speaks to and is a product of politics.

I explore these themes by focusing on what Maysles describes as Rebel Music of the Afro-Caribbean, although I do also mention other Black forms, such as jazz, Afrobeat, and hip hop. In the context of this paper, rebel music includes reggae, dancehall, dub, and dub poetry as musical forms that ‘return to imaginary African roots … implicate the musically ritualized history of African origins, exile, enslavement, and spiritual survival [and] invites a confrontation with the forces of Babylon’.Footnote ¹⁵ To trace the connection between rebel music, Black IR, and decolonial knowledge, I engaged in extensive archival research of scholars from the Pan-African movement, including analysis of special collections of Walter Rodney and Roger Mais at the Robert Woodruff Library at Atlanta University Center, and the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica. I conducted first-hand interviews with some of the original reggae artists from Trenchtown: Rozah Rose, Junior Moody, ‘Blakka’ Ellis, and Alton Ellis Jr., as well as with Jah9, a contemporary artist and disciple of Burning Spear, one of the most prominent Rasta musical intellectuals. I supplemented these with recorded and transcribed interviews of other musicians in the rebel music tradition, including Bob Marley, Burning Spear, and Mortimo Planno. Above all, I listened to the music.

Disciplinary IR and white hegemony

To understand what it is about Disciplinary IR that rebel music challenges, it is worth having a brief review of how it is that colonialism is embedded in the field. Disciplinary IR, which includes both realism and liberalism, focuses on the nation-state as the core unit of analysis. The nation-state, as understood, is a rational actor in an otherwise anarchic, potentially dangerous, and insecure state of nature. Consequently, the field has explicitly state-centric interpretations of concepts like security, peace, conflict, sovereignty, and anarchy.

As scholars like Vitalis and Lynch have pointed out,Footnote ¹⁶ the early 20th-century founders of IR, namely liberalists like Woodrow Wilson and realists like Paul Reinsch and Carl Schmitt, developed this framework of understanding international relations because it fit with and reinforced a White supremacist understanding of politics and world processes. In the first place, the way in which these scholars described the state of nature drew from ahistoric but well-established racial ideas about non-White society that were embedded in the work of earlier philosophers, like Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Hegel, and Rousseau. Despite differences in how they thought about the role of the nation-state, all of these thinkers agreed that Black and First Nations people lived in a ‘savage lawlessness’ that they were either incapable or unwilling to escape from, at least without the tutelage of enlightened Europeans.Footnote ¹⁷ Although several African systems and First Nations were, in fact, organised political units, with functional and varying kinds of government, art, and society, the fact that their systems were not equivalent to those of Europe meant ipso facto that they remained stuck in the state of nature. As Schmitt explained, not only did the state of nature distinguish African and First Nations from European state, it also meant they were inferior:

As such, the expansion of the state form through colonialism would foster ‘the creation of civilized life where none existed before’.Footnote ¹⁹ This had important implications for understanding international relations. Since ‘security exists only in the state’, the state is the only appropriate actor that can create international peace. For example, Woodrow Wilson stated in his ‘14 Points’ that the ‘peace-loving nations of the world’ would be the ones to form such ‘arrangements and covenants’ as would be necessary in the inter-war period to ‘[remove] the chief provocations to war’. The German realist Carl Schmitt agreed, arguing, ‘international law [is] possible only between states, and can be promulgated by states ordered only “as such”’.Footnote ²⁰ Finally, because the state provides order and security, and because the state is the locus of analysis, we can understand violence and insecurity on a global scale by focusing on the presence or absence of conflict in the relations between sovereign states. We can consider, for instance, the way in which Disciplinary IR measures peace. For example, in describing world politics at the turn of the 20th century, Paul Reinsch noted that the creation of the Concert of Europe and the end of outright war on the continent meant ‘the rankling hostilities that were constantly endangering the world’s peace [have] given way for the time to broader interests’.Footnote ²¹

The problem of course, is that the security, peace, and law described by Reinsch, Schmitt, and Wilson were only for White imperial powers. The late 19^th and early 20th century was a time of increased and increasingly violent colonial exploitation, particularly in the African continent. Some of the first Holocausts of the 1900s, that of the Congolese people in the Belgian Congo, and of the Nama and Herero people in German West Africa, defined this time. This was an era of globalised and systematic violence through international politics. Yet this violence was invisible in the discipline of IR, precisely because it was conducted against people of colour.

To be fair to Reinsch, Schmitt, and Wilson, it should be noted that this racial myopia in understanding ‘peace’ is not restricted to pre–World War II Disciplinary IR. Later scholarship, including by Morgenthau,Footnote ²² Waltz, Doyle,Footnote ²³ and Mearsheimer,Footnote ²⁴ describes either the Concert of Europe, or similar arrangements of White imperial domination, including the pre-1960s Cold War, as ‘peaceful’. Contemporary databases on international violence, such as the Correlates of War Project (CoW), also do not classify early European violence against organised, but non-White political systems as ‘international war’ because, like Hegel, Locke, and Rousseau, pre-colonial non-White political systems are still not commonly understood as international persons, or legitimate forms of political organisation. As Dancy argues, from her study of the international conflict typology used by the CoW:

Thus, Disciplinary IR is founded on a very narrow interpretation of what international personhood, peace, and political agency look like. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Whiteness in the framework of the field is reflected in the disproportionate Whiteness of the people that produce knowledge about the world. Despite the fact that White male scholars from the settler-colonial and colonial great powers comprise a minority of the world’s population, data on assigned readings on syllabi,Footnote ²⁶ publication and editorial offers at ‘elite’ or ‘top-ranked’ journals and academic presses,Footnote ²⁷ and citation practicesFootnote ²⁸ illustrate a Disciplinary IR that is dominated by them. It is this hegemonic Whiteness at which the decolonial effort is aimed.

Black IR, Black music, and the decolonial effort

There has always been decolonial IR, and decolonial IR has always had a relationship with music. As described above, this paper engages primarily with Black IR, centred in part on the Howard School between the 1920s and 1950s, and its later offshoots in the broader Pan-African and Critical Race IR scholarship.Footnote ²⁹ To be clear, the intellectual field of Black IR is diverse. The literature includes speeches, pamphlets, and texts between the late 19th century and the present day, including work from Marcus Garvey, Amilcar Cabral, Amy Jacques Garvey, Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Anna Cooper, Alain Locke, Walter Rodney, and Kwame Nkrumah, as well as later scholarship on the racing and gendering of the global political economy by Angela Davis and bell hooks. While acknowledging the diversity among these various authors, what they have in common is a belief that (1) the world as constituted is built on a global political project of White supremacy, and (2) in the service of this project, dominant modes of education have rationalised and normalised White hegemony. One of the clearest explanations of this is another 1937 speech by Garvey, this time in Windsor, Ontario, on the importance of developing an ‘African Philosophy’:

The connection between these ideas and the ideas embedded in Black music, especially rebel music, comes from over a century of cross-pollination and communication between philosophers in the Black IR orbit and emerging musical communities. Music has always played a role in Black political communication. Storytelling and the oral tradition are part of a centuries-long tradition of knowledge production that enslaved Africans brought to the colonised world.Footnote ³¹ During colonialism, music became one of the few forms of communication and knowledge building available to Black people. In tracing the construction of the Black Atlantic, Gilroy notes that within the Black Diaspora, the ‘power and significance of music’ grew out of the fact that ‘slaves access to literacy was often denied on pain of death and only a few cultural opportunities were offered [for autonomous self expression]’.Footnote ³²

Thus, when the Pan-African movement began in the early 20th century, scholars and activists in Black IR built on this pre-existing history of Black music as a politically engaged form of knowledge, by fostering connections with musicians in the Black Diaspora. Significantly, at the first Pan-African Conference in 1900, the invitees included among the scholars and activists musical acts like the British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and the Fisk Jubilee Singers.

For the attendees, the presence of these musical acts was warranted, due to their visible position in and importance to the global Black struggle. At that time, Coleridge-Taylor had come to prominent for using African motifs in classical music compositions, which often centred on themes of Black emancipation and Black Pride (like Toussaint L’Overture, Twenty-Four Negro Melodies, and Song of Hiawatha). Because of the unapologetic Blackness in Coleridge-Taylor’s music, and the fact that he performed at sold-out music halls in the UK and USA during the turn of the century, ‘in the decade up to 1910 Coleridge-Taylor’s music [became] a rallying point for Black consciousness groups and American black activists’.Footnote ³³ Shortly after the conference, in 1903, Andrew Hilyer of the NAACP wrote to Coleridge-Taylor, saying:

Similarly, throughout the early 20th century, Du Bois wrote passionately about the importance of music in Black consciousness and knowledge production in The Souls of Black Folk, where he stated: ‘I know little of music and can say nothing in technical phrase, but I know something of men, and knowing them, I know that these songs are the articulate message of the slave to the world.’Footnote ³⁵ After starting The Crisis magazine, Du Bois gave a speech at the NAACP in 1926, saying:

In writing about the connection between Black music and Black political thought, it is worth acknowledging the tensions between cosmopolitanism and particularism in various genres of music. On one hand, the styles of Black music that have been embedded in political movements and political thought since the late 19th century are sometimes understood as particular to certain national contexts. These include jazz, hip hop, and spirituals, which are identified as products of the USA, while dancehall, dub, and reggae are from Jamaica, calypso from Trinidad, and Afrobeat from Nigeria and Ghana. This might suggest that music from one country would have little to say about Blackness and Black identity in another. On the other hand, these musical traditions developed through a long history of borrowing, syncretism, and cross-pollination, such that the local particularism of each musical tradition has clear influences from and on the others.Footnote ³⁷ However, I draw from Gilroy’s work to argue that the apparent Caribbean-ness of rebel music in no way prevents it from functioning as an articulation of a global Black identity, especially in an era where technology has facilitated the globalisation of music.Footnote ³⁸ Conducting a full genealogy of Black music and Black IR is beyond the scope of this paper, but it is worth noting the breadth of musical styles and artists in this tradition.

Rebel music and Afro-Caribbean consciousness

Turning back to Afro-Caribbean rebel music, its intellectual origins are rooted in the same milieu of global Black identity that led to the emergence of Pan-Africanism. Harlem of the 1920s was a crucial locale for the emergence of rebel music and of Black political thought, and a place in which the global Black diaspora began creating what Alain Locke described as ‘the New Negro’.Footnote ³⁹

One of the relevant figures during this period was Leonard Howell, an avid follower of Garvey, who synthesised Garvey’s statements and speeches from other Black street preachers in Harlem in a text called ‘The Promised Key’. After being deported to Jamaica in 1932, Howell started Rastafarianism, a social and religious movement named after the emperor of Ethiopia, which drew on the anti-colonial philosophy of Pan-Africanism, and of Garveyism in particular. In the late 1930s, the socio-politically active Rastafarians became one of the major groups engaged in the anti-colonial and labour movements in the Caribbean.Footnote ⁴⁰ In 1938, a year of widespread regional labour riots in the Anglo-Caribbean, a trial judge remarked on ‘the undoubted nuisance the Ras Tafari people were becoming’ to the colonial system.Footnote ⁴¹ In the 1950s the Rastafarians, described in newspapers as a ‘bearded cult’,Footnote ⁴² were opening meetings by proclaiming Garvey’s Pan-African slogan, ‘Africa for Africans, at home and abroad’.Footnote ⁴³ By 1960, the Times of London described Rastafarians as people ‘left behind by the rest of the community in the educational, cultural, economic, and political advances since the last war … gathering in depressed areas … building up resentments against the progressive elements of society and still dreaming of a return to Africa’.Footnote ⁴⁴

For the emerging Rasta movement, music played a key role in community building and the construction of this anti-colonial Pan-African identity, both before and after Caribbean independence. In the 1940s, the Nyabinghi branch of Rastafarianism adopted burra, a drumming style formerly used to welcome released prisoners back to their communities. They changed the name of the drums from burra to akette, and, as they attracted more people, ‘the emphasis on drumming increased’ as a means of outreach and community building.Footnote ⁴⁵ When reggae music and other forms of rebel music later developed, it kept the tradition of Pan-African thought in Rastafarianism, melding African drumming styles, Afro-Caribbean mento music, and rhythm and blues, to carry on the musical tradition as a ‘form of communication [to] meet the needs of a section of society searching for self expression and self organization’.Footnote ⁴⁶ In 1968, the Pan-Africanist Walter Rodney travelled to Jamaica, and by that time, the politically conscious Rastafarians already constituted a ‘social movement in Jamaican urban communities of the poor’.Footnote ⁴⁷ As Rodney stated in a recollection of his time in ‘groundings’, (informal workshops and dialogues with the urban poor_:

Rebel music performers have also commented on the importance of music as a form of political communication among the urban poor. In 1978, Bob Marley said about the purpose of reggae music:

This narrative of Black music serving as knowledge dissemination was also famously echoed later by Chuck D of the American rap group Public Enemy, who stated in 1989 that ‘rap music [is] the CNN that Black people never had’. Similarly, the dancehall artist Bounty Killer adopted the moniker ‘the Poor People’s Governor’ because of his centering of the political conditions of poor Black people in his music:

Having sketched the connection between rebel music and Pan-African thought, the next section explores how the music critiques Disciplinary IR by (1) challenging Disciplinary IR’s focus on the nation-state as the locus of theorising about global politics; (2) critiquing Disciplinary IR’s understanding of international peace; and (3) reproducing decolonial Pan-African philosophy in ways accessible to the marginalised poor. Importantly, while this paper will explore a textual analysis of rebel music, the quality and style of the music itself functions as decolonial knowledge. Decisions about instrumentation, rhythmic arrangements, and melodic choices are all embedded in pre-existing and globalised understandings of race, national citizenship, and identity. As Ubaldo and Hintjens point out, the power of music is that it is a form of communication that can ‘generate place-based experiences in identities are experienced as embodied’ in non-verbal, as well as verbal/textual ways.Footnote ⁵¹ In order to understand this, we should think about how it is that musical instrumentation becomes raced, and thus how rebel music critiques the racial (and hence, global) knowledge of White music.

The clearest articulation of the connection between musical instrumentation and race is visible in the work of the music theorist Heinrich Schenker.Footnote ⁵² In short, Schenker developed his eponymously titled mode of analysis of musical arrangement by studying the tonal and melodic choices of German composers (including purely instrumental pieces by Mozart and Bach). His analysis consisted of studying how groupings of notes in the melody of a selected piece indicated a deeper layered tonal structure, or Ursatz, that constituted the foundation of the piece. In a logically hermetic argument, Schenker stated that the musical tradition of Mozart, Bach, and other German composers represented the pinnacle of musical achievement, proving German superiority in the 1920s, and the reason that Mozart and Bach were musical geniuses is the fact that they were German. As he stated, ‘no Anglo-Saxon, French, or Italian mother could ever carry in her womb … a Bach, a Mozart, a Goethe, a Kant’, which meant that ‘of all the nations living on the earth today, the German nation alone possesses true genius’.Footnote ⁵³

The corollary of this is that musical traditions that differed from those that came out of 18th-century and interwar Germany were, as a result of being different, by definition inferior. Schenker had particular distaste for music that was raced as Black, especially the jazz and Afro-American spirituals so beloved by Du Bois, Locke, and others. Jazz markers such as syncopated rhythms or the use of the 12- or 32-bar structure taken from the blues (another Black musical tradition), or syncopation and counter-rhythms in Black spirituals were not only specific cultural markers of Black people, they were at best ‘completely falsified, dishonest expropriations of European music’,Footnote ⁵⁴ and thus evidence of Black cultural degeneracy. Schenker explicitly stated that his musical understanding was consonant with his belief in White supremacy. He warned in the 1920s of the dangers of ‘inferior races’, noting with incredulity that ‘even negroes proclaim that they want to govern themselves’.Footnote ⁵⁵

Schenker is not the only one to state that Black musical forms were evidence of Black inferiority, by virtue of being Black. The aforementioned Coleridge-Taylor’s music was condemned by White critics who viewed the incorporation of African-influenced melodies in his work as ‘simple, unanalytic’ albeit with ‘plenty of colour … appealing to his half-brothers of primitive race’.Footnote ⁵⁶ While elaborating on the ‘low stage of civilization among the African negroes’, Reinsch, as one of the founders of Disciplinary IR, observed that ‘the art sense of the negro is rudimentary … His chief pleasure is the dance and the entrancing sound of the tom-tom’.Footnote ⁵⁷

During the 1930s, White nationalists in the USA, UK, and Germany similarly described the musical stylings of jazz as evidence of the degeneracy of the Black race,Footnote ⁵⁸ who, along with Jews, corrupted the ‘beautiful melodies’ of good, White classical music with ‘degraded negroid cacophony’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Now that jazz has become Whiter, and by extension more respectable, similar sentiments about cultural-political degeneracy have been applied to newer forms of Black music, including reggae, dancehall, and hip hop.Footnote ⁶⁰ Conversely, classical music, which is still very much raced as White, is held up as an exemplar of the achievement of White civilisation. As Gilroy later pointed out in an analysis on Black music in national identity, White nationalist racial politics consistently ‘approach the complex dynamics of race, nationality and ethnicity through … precise, culturalist [musical] equations’.Footnote ⁶¹

With that in mind, the first way in which rebel music functions as decolonial world knowledge is in how the musical stylings of the performers are chosen to be unapologetically Black. This unapologetic Blackness serves two primary and interrelated epistemological functions. First, it reproduces the idea of a global Black identity that transcends the borders of the nation-state in ways central to Pan-Africanism. Second, it undoes the assumption of Black inferiority in the White Racial Frame, by centering, highlighting, and valorising the markers of Blackness.

The importance to the global Black decolonial project of unapologetically valorising Blackness through culture cannot be understated. Du Bois’s early 20th-century writings on Black music and art emerged precisely because he understood that the denigration of Black cultural markers was tied to the process of Black political marginalisation. As he stated:

In the post–World War II period, scholars like Cabral, Fanon, Thiong’o, hooks, Ewell, and Gilroy have similarly recentred markers of Blackness in art, music, and language as part of the programme of Black uplift.Footnote ⁶³ In rebel music, we can hear Black signifiers in the use of traditional African drumming patterns and drums like the akette in songs like ‘Rastaman Vibration’ by the Wailers, ‘’Til I’m Laid to Rest’ by Buju Banton, ‘Fire Pon Rome’ by Anthony B, and ‘One Away’ by Sizzla Kalonji. In the 1980s, Jimmy Cliff recorded a documentary titled Bongo Man, clips of which are available online showing Cliff with Earl ‘Chinna’ Smith and Mortimo Planno (the man who brought Bob Marley to Rastafarianism) beating away on the bass drum in a Nyabinghi drumming circle.Footnote ⁶⁴ Black consciousness is audible not only in the use of African rhythms and instruments, but also in the way each drum represents a specific idea of global African identity in the post-colonial world. The steady, heavy downbeat of the bass and funde drums, accentuated by the higher-pitched improvisational sounds of the akette ‘symbolize the death of oppressive society [and] is the music of adoration [and] a call to Africa’.Footnote ⁶⁵ You can hear this sonic threat against the unjust world order made explicit in the song ‘Kette Drum’ by Beenie Man and Determine, who sing:

As Walter Rodney stated after he left Jamaica: ‘You have to listen to [Rasta’s] drums to get the message of the cosmic power.’Footnote ⁶⁷

Of course, not all rebel music relies on Nyabinghi styles and instrumentation to convey Pan-Africanism. Most reggae, even in the 1970s, used the Western drum kit, and later forms like dub and dancehall relied increasingly on electronic music instead of live instrumentation in their recordings. Yet even these forms create new sonic invocations of Black identity through the use of other raced stylings, like the off-kilter, backbeat guitar arrangements, heavy, emphasised basslines, and the one-drop drum and bass form popularised by musicians like Aston ‘Family Man’ Barrett. In a 2007 interview with Guitar World magazine, Barrett explained the role of drum and bass performance in the meaning of reggae music:

Similarly, dub music, which is primarily instrumental, uses the heavy and ‘dread’ use of drums and bass (which Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry described as the heart of dub) in songs like King Tubby’s ‘Great Stone’ to create a sonic message of Black consciousness as a site of resistance in an unjust world. In tracing the evolution of dub, Philip Maysles explores how ‘Scratch’ Perry, King Tubby, and Scientist de-emphasise or remove the vocals from songs, remixing them to emphasise, distort, and manipulate the drum and rhythm section in ways that sonically:

Musically speaking, this tradition of instrumentation and stylistic choices call into being an intersubjectively understood transnational Blackness. In so doing, we refocus our attention on the impact of race, and by extension colonialism, as the founding principle of the modern world order.

Of course, while the meaning of rebel music is embedded in its musical stylings, it is also important to engage with the textual and lyrical content of the art form, to get a fuller understanding of its decolonial logic. Of particular importance are the ways in which metaphors and imagery reconstitute Blackness as resistance to the dominant world order. First, rebel music regularly refers to the Black Caribbean man or woman as a spiritual African in ways drawn directly from the Garveyite branches of Pan-Africanism. Returning to Bongo Man, one scene shows Jimmy Cliff heading to the drumming circle with Planno, singing about being a ‘Jafrican’ – African in Jamaica. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, reggae musicians like Burning Spear, Buju Banton, and Anthony B likewise referred to themselves as Africans, dislocated from the homeland in the post-colonial world. In the 21st century, the dancehall musician Vybz Kartel described himself as embodying a cosmopolitan Africanness, as someone who is: ‘born Jamaican / deh yah from slavery as an African’Footnote ⁷⁰ in the song ‘Poor People Land’. In the interviews conducted by this author in Trenchtown in 2022, Rose and Moody spoke directly about the importance of early reggae bringing the meaning of Africa and Black pride in the music.

Even in songs that do not explicitly mention Africa, musicians like Burning Spear would invoke historic traumas of slavery in presentist forms, connecting the state of contemporary Black people with the colonial and imperial history of the continent. For example, in the song ‘Slavery Days’, Burning Spear asks the listener in a repeated call-and-response pattern: ‘do you remember the days of slavery? / My brothers feel it / Do you remember the days of slavery? / Including my sisters too’. In 2013, the musician Jah9 released the song ‘Steamers a Bubble’, which uses classic reggae music stylings to locate the nation-state of Jamaica in the political orbit of the African continent:

This connection between the Black subject in Jamaica, and the continent of Africa was one of the core contributions of Pan-Africanism. As scholars like Du Bois and Malcolm X stated, the political destiny of Black people in Africa was intimately connected with that of Black people in whichever national context, both before and after colonialism. It is this idea to which rebel music speaks:

Second, one of the central metaphors in rebel music, present throughout dub, dancehall, reggae, and dub poetry, is a condemnation of Babylon (sometimes described as ‘Rome’, as in the song ‘Kette Drum’). To be clear, Babylon is a term that was in use among Rasta communities before the invention of contemporary reggae. Babylon is understood in rebel music as composed of multiple actors at the local, transnational, and international level, who function in different spheres of power to maintain a global system of racialised power. As iterated in songs like ‘Babylon System’ by the Wailers, ‘From Mi Born’ by Vybz Kartel, and ‘Fire Pon Rome’ by Anthony B, Babylon encompasses local police and state violence, the formal education system, the church and religious institutions, the national government, Western powers, and international financial institutions, in particular the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) since the 1940s. As described in a 1967 ethnographic study on the Rasta community in Kingston:

This is an explicitly Gramscian and Pan-African way of describing power. It sees local political violence in the post-colonial world as a phenomenon reinforced through the manufactured consent by the ruling class, and as a necessary byproduct of the global functioning of capital, in the same way as did Eric Williams, C. L. R. James, Angela Davis, and others.Footnote ⁷⁵

Consider, for example, the following commentaries on the colonial and post-colonial world. To Marcus Garvey, the dominant mode of education was so attuned to White supremacy, that even Black people who were formally educated could no longer be trusted to act in the interest of Black liberation. As he argued, ‘the traitors among the Negro race are generally to be found among the men highest placed in education and society, debase [their] race in the worst form, humiliate [their] own manhood, and thereby win the sympathy of the “great [White] benefactor”’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Similarly, ‘the islands produce colored men of great intellectual brilliance’, C. L. R. James observed in 1938. ‘They grumble at racial discrimination, but their outlook is the same as that of the rich Whites, and indeed their sole grievances are that they do not get all the posts they want, and that the Whites do not often invite them to dinner.’Footnote ⁷⁷ For Walter Rodney, ‘a Black man ruling a dependent state within the imperialist system has no power. He is simply an agent of the Whites in the metropolis, with an army and a police force designed to maintain the imperialist way of things in that particular colonial area.’Footnote ⁷⁸ In religion, we can read Malcolm X’s critique that ‘Christianity was used in America on us, on our people, not to take us to Heaven, but to make us good slaves’.Footnote ⁷⁹

Compare those statements to the following critiques in rebel music. In ‘Fire Pon Rome’, Anthony B laments that the ‘metropolitan officer … [that] take yuh hustling outta yuh hand’ to perpetuate the Babylon order is none other than ‘yuh own Black man’. In ‘IMF’, Terry Lynn opens the song condemning IMF structural adjustment policies and loan conditionality. Later, she transitions to local politics, linking internationally derived austerity politics with police violence and the disciplinary function of the Jamaican state:

In ‘No White God’, Sizzla points out that the White image of Christ is part of a ‘system designed’ to perpetuate ‘White man oppression’. Finally, the 1979 song by the Wailers referenced at the start of this section clarifies that the result of the ‘Babylon System’ in religion and education is that the power structure will continue to ‘[suck] the blood of the sufferah’. Rebel Music is a body of knowledge that critiques the international system and articulates a counter-hegemonic narrative of how global power truly operates.

Given the alienation of the post-colonial Black subject in Jamaica, it is unsurprising that the rebel music tradition also has a strong element calling for the repatriation of Black people out of the Babylon system of Jamaica, and back to Africa. In 1961, Mortimo Planno led the first delegation to the African continent, ‘to find if there is any African state willing to take back Black people in Africa on a repatriation basis’.Footnote ⁸⁰ The idea of repatriation out of Babylon is a constant theme in songs like ‘One Away’ by Sizzla and ‘’Til I’m Laid to Rest’ by Buju Banton, which vary in their understanding of where, exactly, in Africa the homeland is – either in Ethiopia, or in the continent writ large – but which are clear that due to the legacy of colonialism, ‘there’s no life in the West’. Thus we have Banton singing about his sojourns to the promised land of the East:

Finally, we should recognise the way in which rebel musicians have continued to engage with Pan-African political thought and have used music as a site for the dissemination of political philosophy. The importance of Garvey cannot be overstated, as his words and image can be found in Buju Banton’s ‘’Til I’m Laid to Rest’, the Wailers’ ‘Redemption Song’, ‘Marcus Garvey’ by Burning Spear, and ‘Propaganda’ by Midnite, but it should be noted that engagement between political thought and music did not end with him. For example, when Rodney arrived in Jamaica in the late 1960s and started his ‘grounding’ sessions with the urban poor, he immediately attracted a following among the Black proletariat because of their interest in post-colonial political thought. As Robin ‘Jerry’ Small recalled:

As Rodney gathered a following among the dispossessed Black poor, he became the target of hostile attention from the Jamaican government. In 1968, one of Rodney’s followers presciently wrote: ‘I don’t doubt that he’ll soon be deported and made persona non grata. This young Guyanese is aware of the threat and this has increased the intensity of his living.’Footnote ⁸² Shortly thereafter, Rodney was banned from re-entering Jamaica from a trip abroad, and demonstrating the importance of his outreach to the masses and to the post-colonial Black movement, Rastas and the urban poor joined university students in citywide protests in what is now called the Rodney Riots. ‘Horsemouth’ Wallace, former drummer for Burning Spear, Prince Far I, Inner Circle, and one of the Rasta musicians who attended the Riots remembered it thus:

Post-exile, a small group of Jamaican academics from the University of the West Indies started Abeng magazine, a weekly journal distributed to the mass public, which reprinted speeches by Garvey, Rodney, and Malcolm X, critiques by Trevor Munroe and George Beckford on the global economy, and commentary by Rastafarians on political violence. After Rodney was assassinated in 1980, two pieces that lamented his passing were the reggae song ‘Walter Rodney’ by Louis Lepkie (quoted below), and the dub poem ‘Reggae Fi Radni’ by Linton Kwesi Johnson, which commemorated his death by improvised explosive device (IED):

Much later, Jah9 described in a 2019 interview the impact of Rodney’s writing and Pan-Africanism on her growing consciousness about global Black identity:

Burning Spear, who was an avid proponent of using music to spread Garvey’s message, also engaged with the writings of other Black scholars, in particular Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, in songs like ‘Subject in School’. As he stated in 1997:

Given these connections throughout, it is unsurprising that rebel music constitutes decolonial knowledge. It is a body of knowledge produced primarily by the urban poor in the post-colonial world. Sonically, lyrically, and thematically, it is oriented around a construction of global Black awareness and solidarity. This solidarity is constituted by the identity of the Black subject as a post-colonial subject, whose position in the ‘new’ world is due to the historic practice of imperialism, which violently remade the world under an extractivist and White-supremacist political-economic order. In so doing, it challenges the idea of the nation-state as the bringer of civilisation and order and highlights the unrecognised violence of the post-colonial system. Rebel music has consistently reproduced Pan-African thought and philosophy since the 1960s. It decentres the nation-state as the locus for understanding security and identity, linking White supremacy and colonial and post-colonial violence in the African continent with White supremacy and colonial and post-colonial violence around the world. Finally, whereas Disciplinary IR understood and still understands international peace as the absence of war among great powers, rebel music knows that the quest for world peace is a global process, not an international one, and understands that, as was the case in colonialism, the absence of war among states is entirely compatible with the global use of state violence against the unruly dispossessed in the service of the global order. Peter Tosh made the distinction between Disciplinary understandings of peace and real emancipation clear in 1977: