Echoes from the Dub Diaspora

Dub is a term that resonates in multiple aspects of electronic dance music culture. In the crates of DJs, the search terms of online record shops, and echoing throughout scholarly and cultural genealogies, dub signifies a signature style of spatialized rhythm and sound that derives from the studio practices pioneered by Jamaican dance sound systems since the late 1960s, in which versions—“dubs”—were crafted from instrumentals of reggae recordings. Eventually, the techniques of this type of remix, both disruptive and echoic, became an end in itself. This special issue of Dancecult responds to the need to better understand the multiple practices that can be said to articulate the dub diaspora. Likewise, this issue’s scholars represent a diverse set of research practices that reveal different questions as to what the dub diaspora means as a conceptual and critical research concept.