Rasta and Resistance


Book Description




Rasta and Resistance


Book Description




Women and Resistance in the Early Rastafari Movement


Book Description

Women and Resistance in the Early Rastafari Movement is a pioneering study of women’s resistance in the emergent Rastafari movement in colonial Jamaica. As D. A. Dunkley demonstrates, Rastafari women had to contend not only with the various attempts made by the government and nonmembers to suppress the movement, but also with oppression and silencing from among their own ranks. Dunkley examines the lives and experiences of a group of Rastafari women between the movement’s inception in the 1930s and Jamaica’s independence from Britain in the 1960s, uncovering their sense of agency and resistance against both male domination and societal opposition to their Rastafari identity. Countering many years of scholarship that privilege the stories of Rastafari men, Women and Resistance in the Early Rastafari Movement reclaims the voices and narratives of early Rastafari women in the history of the Black liberation struggle.




Becoming Rasta


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Reveals the personal experiences of those who adopted the Rastafari religion in the 1950s to 1970s. This title explores the identity development of the religion, demonstrating how shifts in the movement's identity have led some of the elder Rastafari to adopt, embrace, and internalize Rastafari and Blackness as central to their concept of self.




Rastafari and Other African-Caribbean Worldviews


Book Description

Rastafari has been seen as a political organization, a youth movement, and a millenarian cult. This lively collection of papers challenges these categories and offers a "new approach" to the study of Rastafari. Chevannes and his contributors suggest that we can better understand Rastafari-and Caribbean culture, for that matter-by seeing the movement as both a departure from and a continuance of Revivalism, an African-Caribbean folk religion. By linking Rastafari to Revival, we can enrich our understanding of an African-Caribbean worldview, and we can appreciate Rastafari not only as a political force but as a powerful expression of African-Caribbean culture and tradition. Barry Chevannes provides a concise overview of Rastafari and Revivalism and clearly lays out the volume's "new approach." Leading scholars of Rastafari illustrate and develop the theme with chapters on Rastafari as resistance, the origin of the dreadlocks, Rastafari and language, women in African-Caribbean religions and more. With chapters that range from the specific to the general, this volume will be important to specialists of Caribbean religion and the African diaspora and to those with a burgeoning interest in Rastafari. The contributors include Jean Besson, Ellis Cashmore, Barry Chevannes, John P. Homiak, Roland Littlewood, H.U.E Thoden van Velzen, and Wilhelmina van Wetering.




Jah Kingdom


Book Description

From its beginnings in 1930s Jamaica, the Rastafarian movement has become a global presence. While the existing studies of the Rastafarian movement have primarily focused on its cultural expression through reggae music, art, and iconography, Monique A. Bedasse argues that repatriation to Africa represents the most important vehicle of Rastafari's international growth. Shifting the scholarship on repatriation from Ethiopia to Tanzania, Bedasse foregrounds Rastafari's enduring connection to black radical politics and establishes Tanzania as a critical site to explore gender, religion, race, citizenship, socialism, and nation. Beyond her engagement with how the Rastafarian idea of Africa translated into a lived reality, she demonstrates how Tanzanian state and nonstate actors not only validated the Rastafarian idea of diaspora but were also crucial to defining the parameters of Pan-Africanism. Based on previously undiscovered oral and written sources from Tanzania, Jamaica, England, the United States, and Trinidad, Bedasse uncovers a vast and varied transnational network--including Julius Nyerere, Michael Manley, and C. L. R James--revealing Rastafari's entrenchment in the making of Pan-Africanism in the postindependence period.




Rastafari: A Very Short Introduction


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Rastafari has grown into an international socio-religious movement, with adherents of Rastafari found in most of the major population centres and outposts of the world. This Very Short Introduction provides a brief account of this widespread but often poorly understood movement, looking at its history, central principles, and practices.




Chanting Down Babylon


Book Description

This anthology explores Rastafari religion, culture, and politics in Jamaica and other parts of the African diaspora. An Afro-Caribbean religious and cultural movement that sprang from the streets of Kingston, Jamaica, in the 1930s, today Rastafari has close to one million adherents. The basic message of Rastafari—the dismantling of all oppressive institutions and the liberation of humankind—even has strong appeal to non-believers who are captivated by reggae music, the lyrics, and the "immortal spirit" of its enormously popular practitioner, Bob Marley. Probing into Rastafari's still evolving belief system, political goals, and cultural expression, the contributors to this volume emphasize the importance of Africana history and the Caribbean context. Author note:Nathaniel Samuel Murrellis Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, and Visiting Professor at the Caribbean Graduate School of Theology in Kingston, Jamaica.William David Spencerserves as Pastor of Encouragement at Pilgrim Church in Beverly, MA, and was an Adjunct Professor of Theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary's Center for Urban Ministerial Education in Boston. He has authored, co-authored, or editedThe Prayer of Life of Jesus, Mysterium and Mystery: The Clerical Crime Novel, God through the Looking Glass, Joy through the Night, 2 Corinthians: Bible Study CommentaryandThe Global God.Adrian Anthony McFarlaneis Associate Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Hartwick College in Oneonta, NY. He is author ofA Grammar of FearandEvil–A Husserlian-Wittgensteinian Hermeneutic.




Race, Class, and Political Symbols


Book Description

Dr. Waters is one of a new breed of analysts for whom the interpenetration of politics, culture, and national development is key to a larger integration of social research. Race, Class, and Political Symbols is a remarkably cogent examination of the uses of Rastafarian symbols and reggae music in Jamaican electoral campaigns. The author describes and analyzes the way Jamaican politicians effectively employ improbable strategies for electoral success. She includes interviews with reggae musicians, Rastafarian leaders, government and party officials, and campaign managers. Jamaican democracy and politics are fused to its culture; hence campaign advertisements, reggae songs, party pamphlets, and other documents are part of the larger picture of Caribbean life and letters. This volume centers and comes to rest on the adoption of Rastafarian symbols in the context of Jamaica's democratic institutions, which are characterized by vigorous campaigning, electoral fraud, and gang violence. In recent national elections, such violence claimed the lives of hundreds of people. Significant issues are dealt with in this cultural setting: race differentials among Whites, Browns, and Blacks; the rise of anti-Cubanism; the Rastafarians' response to the use of their symbols; and the current status of Rastafarian ideological legitimacy.




Rastafari


Book Description

The first comprehensive work on the origins of the Jamaica-based Rastafaris, including interviews with some of the earliest members of the movement. Rastafari is a valuable work with a rich historical and ethnographic approach that seeks to correct several misconceptions in existing literature—the true origin of dreadlocks for instance. It will interest religion scholars, historians, scholars of Black studies, and a general audience interested in the movement and how Rastafarians settled in other countries.