The history of reggae music is long and complex and, in reference to a common expression within reggae and the Rastafari movement, ‘half the story has never been told’. Record labels in Jamaica are sometimes nothing more than a studio and backyard. The presence of both old and new recordings in people's record collections is not only a question of taste or persistence: in reggae music; the new itself also conveys the old, through a process that is characteristic of reggae – the importance of the ‘riddim’. The lyrics literally ‘make’ the history of reggae music. One of the most powerful tools used by collective memory concerns the remembrance of the dead, because it unites the group through a shared sense of belonging, through the memory and emotion linked to the disappearance of their own people. Among others, two examples are especially significant in the case of reggae music: Bob Marley and Garnett Silk.

Reggae has always been a socially and politically engaged musical style, which conveys a strong and explicit revolutionary message. Indeed, the narrative contained in reggae music is not only a denunciation: it also puts forward a call for political engagement and struggle, and even for revolution. The rejection of paradise and hell, to which the Last Judgment is substituted (eternal life for the righteous, eternal punishment for the sinners, after the return of the messiah and the judgment of God), plays a central role in the constant articulation made, within the Rastafari movement, between eschatology and revolution. The notion of revolution is present in reggae music, throughout its evolution and in Jamaica as much as in Great Britain. Reggae music can be considered as the narrative of a history as much as of a memory, as a tool of communication and of transmission of a religious knowledge and socio-political message. Through it, hope is entertained and redemption promised.

This chapter briefly reviews key debates in Transnational Studies (TS) and Diaspora Studies (DS) before discussing the particular contribution of DS in framing 1990s study of migrant and non-migrant Irish women. As in migration studies more generally, the literature in both TS and DS has only belatedly addressed questions of gender and sexuality. The 1990s saw a proliferation of studies across disciplines in the humanities and social sciences variously invoking the terms transnational(ism) and diaspora in accounting for migration and associated phenomena including transgenerational ethnic identities and cross-border practices. Feminist and queer theory scholarship in Irish DS has begun to address the gender and sexual politics of diaspora by attending to the dynamics of boundary expansion, queering and dissolution. However, the heteronormative logic of Irish diasporic belonging remains hegemonic.

Reggae music expresses a central will: the recognition of a history of struggle – against slavery, segregation and colonisation – which is logically attached to Jamaica, but also goes beyond its borders. This historical memory has three main goals: first, to reveal a history of resistance considered as having been underestimated as well as hidden by Europeans; second, to restore dignity by showing that resistance started with the first captured slave; and third, to transmit this history of resistance, in particular to generations to come. The history of resistance, only ‘half told’, is cherished by the Rastafari movement and transmitted in reggae music, precisely because it has been distorted and mistold. Four major themes that build and form this history in reggae music can be identified: the Jamaican maroon communities and peasant revolts in Jamaica; Marcus Garvey; the figures of the black struggle in the United States; and the independence and anti-apartheid movements in Africa. The socio-political memory conveyed by reggae music concerns the Africans of the diaspora and the Africans of Africa.

The introduction provides a brief overview of the development of the Irish juvenile justice system, highlighting the lack of legislative and policy development throughout most of the twentieth century. It introduces the reader to the key legal and policy developments including legislation underpinning the reformatory and industrial school system, the Children Act, 1908, the Children Act, 2001 and the development of the Irish Youth Justice Service. It also explains how the book adopts a governmentality approach, examining the development of juvenile justice in Ireland from four separate perspectives: how the system itself became visible, in terms of its underlying rationalities, in terms of the technologies of government and finally in the context of the forms of childhood identity employed to govern. It finally provides a brief outline of the book itself.

Chapter 4 examines the range of rationalities that underpin the Irish juvenile justice system. By examining numerous official and unofficial reports as well as other relevant historical literature not accessed before in this context, this chapter unpicks the main governmental rationalities that occupy this space and traces the key lines of government. Recent rationalities to emerge in this regard are those of ‘community’ and ‘citizenship’. Rationalities such as social work, probation and psychology began to gain prominence in the 1960s as the dominant religious discourses began to be challenged. Although the reformatory and industrial school system has been replaced, the underlying rationality of reformation remains active within the juvenile justice field. This chapter highlights the fact that the Irish juvenile justice system is currently underpinned by a wide range of rationalities including, risk, social work, community, youth work and psy expertise.

This chapter reflects on a very simple question: how do sociologists of music analyse songs and interpret lyrics? In the 1950s and 1960s, the analysis of lyrics was the principal activity of sociologists of popular music in the United States: they worked on the songs themselves, and were not concerned with the artists or their audiences. Popular music has often been the soundtrack of protest movements, if only because it represents the people as opposed to the elite: blues, rock, folk, soul, reggae, rap and so on are all musical styles that affirm a ‘different’ identity, even when they do not maintain a strong tie with social or political movements nor transmit an ideological message through their lyrics. Love songs still form the majority of the music charts, and this is true for reggae as well. An analysis of reggae charts in Jamaica shows this quantitative domination. The chapter offers an analysis in terms of meaning – without categorising semantic vehicles – and based on a corpus of songs that includes, but goes beyond, Bob Marley.

Reggae music transmits a multi-leveled memory that relates to historical knowledge – from anti-slavery icons in Jamaica to apartheid in South Africa – but also to religious knowledge: through its close association to the Rastafari movement. In reggae music, memory now appears as a complex process. Indeed, the construction of a ‘time-memory’ mobilises an articulation of both historical and mythical times: a continuity is built between the mythical origin and the present, between the mythical origin and the apocalyptic future, and, ultimately, between religious utopia and profane utopia. This book has shown that reggae music conveys a narrative of the past, which gives the latter a fundamental function in shaping the present. However, this ‘past’ quickly took on a both sacred and profane dimension. The eschatology is not, in the case of reggae music, something that is far away and separate from the present: to a certain extent, it overflows the sacred plane and spills into the profane, historical plane. The book has also articulated three concepts: tradition, revolution and revelation.