Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Power Of Stories: A Communicative Investigation Of Dancehall Narratives And Caribbean Culture, Marlon Emmanuel Douglas

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This study investigates the power of stories told within Caribbean dancehall music and culture that present “good reasons” that are adopted by members of that culture. In addition, these “good reasons” were further investigated through participants’ communicative cultural performances at two dancehall related events. I adopted a qualitative interpretive approach to data collection and employed Walter Fisher’s narrative paradigm theory to engage in narrative analysis of collected Caribbean dancehall stories. My findings show that dancehall stories reveal powerful ideological frames that “naturalize” ways of being within Caribbean dancehall culture. Moreover, various relationships between “good reasons” presented in lyrical stories and …