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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.
List of contents
Preface
1. Resistance to British Colonialism and the Rise of Two Forms of Subjectivity in “Yamaye”
2. The Genealogy of Rastafari Cosmology and Its Distinctive Ethos of Blackness
3. Rastafari Cosmology, Natural Artifacts, and the Ethos of Blackness
4. Rastafari’s Theology of Blackness: A Eurocentric God Cannot Love Africans and People of African Descent
5. Rastafari I-Talk and Black Consciousness
6. The Limit of Rastafari Cosmology: Gender Inequality and the Failure to Liberate Rasta Women
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Vivaldi Jean-Marie teaches in the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department at Columbia University and is a professor of philosophy at the City University of New York. He is the author of Vodou Cosmology and the Haitian Revolution in the Enlightenment Ideals of Kant and Hegel (2018), Reflections on Jean Améry: Torture, Resentment, and Homelessness as the Mind’s Limits (2018), Kierkegaard: History and Eternal Happiness (2008), and Fanon: Collective Ethics and Humanism (2007).
Summary
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.
