Reggae, Rastafari, and the Rhetoric of Social Control

Reggae, Rastafari, and the Rhetoric of Social Control

Author: Stephen A. King

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2014-07-10

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 1496800397

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Who changed Bob Marley’s famous peace-and-love anthem into “Come to Jamaica and feel all right?” When did the Rastafarian fighting white colonial power become the smiling Rastaman spreading beach towels for American tourists? Drawing on research in social movement theory and protest music, Reggae, Rastafari, and the Rhetoric of Social Control traces the history and rise of reggae and the story of how an island nation commandeered the music to fashion an image and entice tourists. Visitors to Jamaica are often unaware that reggae was a revolutionary music rooted in the suffering of Jamaica’s poor. Rastafarians were once a target of police harassment and public condemnation. Now the music is a marketing tool, and the Rastafarians are no longer a “violent counterculture” but an important symbol of Jamaica’s new cultural heritage. This book attempts to explain how the Jamaican establishment’s strategies of social control influenced the evolutionary direction of both the music and the Rastafarian movement. From 1959 to 1971, Jamaica’s popular music became identified with the Rastafarians, a social movement that gave voice to the country’s poor black communities. In response to this challenge, the Jamaican government banned politically controversial reggae songs from the airwaves and jailed or deported Rastafarian leaders. Yet when reggae became internationally popular in the 1970s, divisions among Rastafarians grew wider, spawning a number of pseudo-Rastafarians who embraced only the external symbolism of this worldwide religion. Exploiting this opportunity, Jamaica’s new Prime Minister, Michael Manley, brought Rastafarian political imagery and themes into the mainstream. Eventually, reggae and Rastafari evolved into Jamaica’s chief cultural commodities and tourist attractions.


Reggae, Rastafari, and the Rhetoric of Social Control

Reggae, Rastafari, and the Rhetoric of Social Control

Author: Stephen A. King

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 9781578064892

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"Visitors to Jamaica are often unaware that reggae was a revolutionary music rooted in the suffering of Jamaica's poor. Rastafarians were once a target of police harassment and public condemnation. Now the music is a marketing tool, and the Rastafarians are no longer a "violent counterculture" but an important symbol of Jamaica's new cultural heritage.".


An Ethos of Blackness

An Ethos of Blackness

Author: Vivaldi Jean-Marie

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2023-09-26

Total Pages: 110

ISBN-13: 0231558104

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Rastafari is an Afrocentric social and religious movement that emerged among Afro-Jamaican communities in the 1930s and has many adherents in the Caribbean and worldwide today. This book is a groundbreaking account of Rastafari, demonstrating that it provides a normative conception of Blackness for people of African descent that resists Eurocentric and colonial ideas. Vivaldi Jean-Marie examines Rastafari’s core beliefs and practices, arguing that they constitute a distinctively Black system of norms and values—at once an ethos and a cosmology. He traces Rastafari’s origins in enslaved people’s strategies of resistance, Jamaican Revivalism, and Garveyism, showing how it incorporates ancestral religious traditions and emancipatory politics. An Ethos of Blackness draws out the significance of practices such as avoiding technological exploitation of natural artifacts and the belief in living in harmony with the natural order. Jean-Marie considers Rastafari’s theology, exploring its reinterpretation of biblical scriptures and its foundations in the rejection of Christianity’s Eurocentrism and racism. However, he insists, before Rastafari can fulfill its promise of liberation for people of African descent, it must confront its failure to include women and redress sexism. Through rigorous and sensitive reflections on Rastafari culture and cosmology, this book offers deeply original insights into the Black theological imagination.


The Resisting Muse

The Resisting Muse

Author: Ian Peddie

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 9780754651147

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This volume examines the various ways popular music has been deployed as anti-establishment and how such opposition both influences and responds to the music produced. The book's contemporary focus (largely post-1975) allows for comprehensive coverage of extremely diverse forms of popular music in relation to the creation of communities of protest. The Resisting Muse examines how the forms and aims of social protest music are contingent upon the audience's ability to invest the music with the 'appropriate' political meaning.


Icons of Dissent

Icons of Dissent

Author: Jeremy Prestholdt

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-07-01

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 0190092599

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The global icon is an omnipresent but poorly understood element of mass culture. This book asks why audiences around the world have embraced particular iconic figures, how perceptions of these figures have changed, and what this tells us about transnational relations since the Cold War era. Prestholdt addresses these questions by examining one type of icon: the anti-establishment figure. As symbols that represent sentiments, ideals, or something else recognizable to a wide audience, icons of dissent have been integrated into diverse political and consumer cultures, and global audiences have reinterpreted them over time. To illustrate these points the book examines four of the most evocative and controversial figures of the past fifty years: Che Guevara, Bob Marley, Tupac Shakur, and Osama bin Laden. Each has embodied a convergence of dissent, cultural politics, and consumerism, yet popular perceptions of each reveal the dissonance between shared, global references and locally contingent interpretations. By examining four very different figures, Icons of Dissent offers new insights into global symbolic idioms, the mutability of common references, and the commodification of political sentiment in the contemporary world.


Reggae and Hip Hop in Southern Italy

Reggae and Hip Hop in Southern Italy

Author: Susanna Scarparo

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-10-10

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 3319965050

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This book explores the significance of reggae and hip hop in Southern Italy from the beginning of the 1980s to the present. Focusing on groups and solo artists located predominantly in the Southern Italian regions of Apulia and Sardinia, it examines the production and distribution of their music, lyrics and video clips. To this end, Reggae and Hip Hop in Southern Italy emphasizes the linguistic aspects of cultural marginalization as well as marginalities linked to geographical location, gender, and to social and political identification. The authors put forward three key arguments, namely: that the Southern Italian transcultural and multilingual musical productions defy the cultural stereotype of the South; that the musicians discussed are creating new alliances and transcultural exchanges that engage critically with the challenges and opportunities offered by globalization; and that these musical productions represent one of Italy’s most significant forms of creative political expression since the 1970s. Reggae and Hip Hop in Southern Italy brings to light the distinctive characteristics of Italy’s independent and marginal musical contexts of reggae and reggae-inflected hip hop. It will serve as an invaluable resource for academics and students of Italian cultural studies, global studies, and the politics of non-hegemonic cultural production. It also provides an engaging reference for those with an interest in southern Italy, Apulia, Sardinia, the southern question and independent and popular music more generally.


Cosmopolitanism from the Global South

Cosmopolitanism from the Global South

Author: Shelene Gomes

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-09-14

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 3030822729

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This is a book about the power of the imagination to move persons from the Global South as they reinvent themselves. This ethnography focuses on Caribbean Rastafari who have undertaken a spiritual repatriation to Ethiopia over several decades particularly, though not exclusively, from Jamaica. Shelene Gomes traces the formation of a Rastafari community located in the multicultural Jamaica Safar or Jamaica neighbourhood in the Ethiopian city of Shashamane following a twentieth century grant of land from the former Ethiopian Emperor, Haile Selassie I. In presenting narratives of spiritual repatriation, everyday behaviours and ritualised events, Gomes provides an ethnographic account of Caribbean cosmopolitan sensibilities. Situated in the historical conditions of colonial West Indian plantations and the asymmetries of freedom and bondage within modernity, a recognition of global positionalities and local situatedness characterises this case of cosmopolitanism from the Global South. Shifting the centre of worldviews from Europe to Africa, Rastafari both challenge global disparities as well as reproduce hierarchies in the local space of the Jamaica Safar. In positioning Ethiopia as the spiritual birthplace of humanity, Rastafari also engage in ontological and epistemological reinvention. This spiritual repatriation, in its emic sense, foregrounds the Caribbeanist contribution to anthropology. Ethnographies of the Caribbean have been at the forefront of anthropological enquiries into global interconnections. This discussion of spiritual repatriation is both specific to the diasporic Caribbean and relevant to wider world-making processes and representations.


Political Authority, Social Control and Public Policy

Political Authority, Social Control and Public Policy

Author: Cara E. Rabe-Hemp

Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing

Published: 2019-07-04

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 1787560503

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This edited collection examines the intersections of social control, political authority and public policy, providing an insight into the key elements needed to understand the role of governance in establishing and maintaining social control through law and public policy making.


Sacred Schisms

Sacred Schisms

Author: James R. Lewis

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2009-05-14

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 0521881471

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This first book-length study of religious schisms as a general phenomenon draws widely from different traditions and geographical areas.


National Pride - People (Volume 1)

National Pride - People (Volume 1)

Author: Indiana Robinson

Publisher: Lulu.com

Published: 2017-07-17

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 1387129333

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People (Volume 1) Jamaican topics covered in the book include our slave fore-fathers, our national heroes, our political and religious leaders, our educators, our youths, our nurses and doctors, our lawyers, our journalists and authors, our beauty queens, our talented athletes, our vendors, and our Jamericans and JAGlobians. Naturally, our multi-talented brothers and sisters are saluted including those still here and those who have since departed to the great beyond. So dear readers, enjoy the mind "triggers" and heart-wrenching "diggers" you will find in this book honouring the 55th year of celebrating Jamaica's independence and the tantalizing trip down memory lane with this unofficial reference/resource guide by your side.