"Deh Say I's Ah Madman": Soca Performance, Afro-Caribbean Masculinities, and the Metaphorization of Madness.

Despite its prevalent usage within soca music, little scholarly literature has explored how sonic, lyrical and embodied representations of dis/ability permeate throughout the genre to perform critical genealogies of transgressive Caribbean gender practices. In this article I interrogate the dissemination and deployment of madness as metaphor in soca performance, particularly through embodiments of Carnivalesque sensibilities and the pedagogies of nonnormativity they articulate. Such performances, I argue, position soca as an inherently "mad music" where disruptive ontological methodologies of speaking, sounding, and embodying cultural resistance have been cultivated through explorations of disability. These representations and methods of using such "mad archives" in projects of self-making, and more specifically Afro-Caribbean masculinity, is explored through the "madman" personae (c. 2003) of Machel Montano and recent soca star Uncle Ellis. Simultaneously, I critique these representations for the ways they perpetuate mental health stigma and ableism in the realms of Caribbean popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]