Reggae, Rastafari, and the Rhetoric of Social Control

Reggae, Rastafari, and the Rhetoric of Social Control PDF

Author: Stephen A. King

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2014-07-10

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 1496800397

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

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 PDF

Author: Stephen A. King

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2014-05-27

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 1604730382

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

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. Stephen A. King is associate professor of speech communication at Delta State University. His work has been published in the Howard Journal of Communications, Popular Music and Society, and The Journal of Popular Culture.

Rastafari and Reggae

Rastafari and Reggae PDF

Author: Becky Mulvaney

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 1990-08-13

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0313064237

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A combination dictionary and annotated discography, videography and bibliography, this sourcebook brings together listings of materials on the Rastafarian movement and reggae music. . . . This sourcebook serves as a good introduction to Rastafari and reggae. Reference Books Bulletin Coinciding with the sixtieth anniversary of Rastafari, this reference book traces the relationship between two intertwined aspects of Jamaican culture: Rastafari and reggae music. As important voices in the ongoing dialogue concerning Jamaica's search for a national identity, Rastafari and reggae have had a significant impact on international music and culture. This work is the first to document and describe these areas for researchers, providing a comprehensive dictionary of terms, people, places, and concepts relevant to Rastafari, reggae music, and their related histories. In a unique collaboration from the American and Jamaican perspectives, Mulvaney and Nelson have supplied annotated references and cross references for written materials, audio recordings, videocassettes, and films that cover the first sixty years of Rastafari and over twenty years of reggae music. The book is comprised of four main sections. The dictionary serves as the focal point for the cross referencing of the entire book and offers entries that are either directly related to Rastafari and reggae or provide a historical context. The discography, which includes 200 entries, represents a cross section of reggae music from 1968 to 1990 and is organized by musician or band name. A small, representative sample of documentary, concert, and narrative fiction videocassettes that address aspects of Rastafari or reggae music are catalogued in the videography, along with selected films. Finally, the bibliography, prepared by Carlos I.H. Nelson, provides a thorough overview of journal and magazine articles, creative works, dissertations, books, interviews, parts of books, reviews, and theses written by and about Rastafarians and reggae musicians. It covers the past importance, present significance, and future legacies of the movement and the music. The work also includes two appendices that list relevant periodicals and representative musicians and bands. Music students and researchers will find Rastafari and Reggae to be a valuable reference source, as will students in Caribbean and cultural studies, communication, history, and anthropology courses. For academic, public, and music library collections, the book will be an important addition.

Race, Class, and Political Symbols

Race, Class, and Political Symbols PDF

Author: Anita M. Waters

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-08

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 1351495062

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

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.

Babylon East

Babylon East PDF

Author: Marvin Sterling

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2010-06-29

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 0822392739

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

An important center of dancehall reggae performance, sound clashes are contests between rival sound systems: groups of emcees, tune selectors, and sound engineers. In World Clash 1999, held in Brooklyn, Mighty Crown, a Japanese sound system and the only non-Jamaican competitor, stunned the international dancehall community by winning the event. In 2002, the Japanese dancer Junko Kudo became the first non-Jamaican to win Jamaica’s National Dancehall Queen Contest. High-profile victories such as these affirmed and invigorated Japan’s enthusiasm for dancehall reggae. In Babylon East, the anthropologist Marvin D. Sterling traces the history of the Japanese embrace of dancehall reggae and other elements of Jamaican culture, including Rastafari, roots reggae, and dub music. Sterling provides a nuanced ethnographic analysis of the ways that many Japanese involved in reggae as musicians and dancers, and those deeply engaged with Rastafari as a spiritual practice, seek to reimagine their lives through Jamaican culture. He considers Japanese performances and representations of Jamaican culture in clubs, competitions, and festivals; on websites; and in song lyrics, music videos, reggae magazines, travel writing, and fiction. He illuminates issues of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class as he discusses topics ranging from the cultural capital that Japanese dancehall artists amass by immersing themselves in dancehall culture in Jamaica, New York, and England, to the use of Rastafari as a means of critiquing class difference, consumerism, and the colonial pasts of the West and Japan. Encompassing the reactions of Jamaica’s artists to Japanese appropriations of Jamaican culture, as well as the relative positions of Jamaica and Japan in the world economy, Babylon East is a rare ethnographic account of Afro-Asian cultural exchange and global discourses of blackness beyond the African diaspora.

Rastafari and Reggae

Rastafari and Reggae PDF

Author: Rebekah Michele Mulvaney

Publisher: Greenwood

Published: 1990-08-13

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0313260710

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A combination dictionary and annotated discography, videography and bibliography, this sourcebook brings together listings of materials on the Rastafarian movement and reggae music. . . . This sourcebook serves as a good introduction to Rastafari and reggae. Reference Books Bulletin Coinciding with the sixtieth anniversary of Rastafari, this reference book traces the relationship between two intertwined aspects of Jamaican culture: Rastafari and reggae music. As important voices in the ongoing dialogue concerning Jamaica's search for a national identity, Rastafari and reggae have had a significant impact on international music and culture. This work is the first to document and describe these areas for researchers, providing a comprehensive dictionary of terms, people, places, and concepts relevant to Rastafari, reggae music, and their related histories. In a unique collaboration from the American and Jamaican perspectives, Mulvaney and Nelson have supplied annotated references and cross references for written materials, audio recordings, videocassettes, and films that cover the first sixty years of Rastafari and over twenty years of reggae music. The book is comprised of four main sections. The dictionary serves as the focal point for the cross referencing of the entire book and offers entries that are either directly related to Rastafari and reggae or provide a historical context. The discography, which includes 200 entries, represents a cross section of reggae music from 1968 to 1990 and is organized by musician or band name. A small, representative sample of documentary, concert, and narrative fiction videocassettes that address aspects of Rastafari or reggae music are catalogued in the videography, along with selected films. Finally, the bibliography, prepared by Carlos I.H. Nelson, provides a thorough overview of journal and magazine articles, creative works, dissertations, books, interviews, parts of books, reviews, and theses written by and about Rastafarians and reggae musicians. It covers the past importance, present significance, and future legacies of the movement and the music. The work also includes two appendices that list relevant periodicals and representative musicians and bands. Music students and researchers will find Rastafari and Reggae to be a valuable reference source, as will students in Caribbean and cultural studies, communication, history, and anthropology courses. For academic, public, and music library collections, the book will be an important addition.

Dread Talk

Dread Talk PDF

Author: Velma Pollard

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2000-05-15

Total Pages: 134

ISBN-13: 077356828X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Dread Talk examines the effects of Rastafarian language on Creole in other parts of the Carribean, its influence in Jamaican poetry, and its effects on standard Jamaican English. This revised edition includes a new introduction that outlines the changes that have occurred since the book first appeared and a new chapter, "Dread Talk in the Diaspora," that discusses Rastafarian as used in the urban centers of North America and Europe. Pollard provides a wealth of examples of Rastafarian language-use and definitions, explaining how the evolution of these forms derives from the philosophical position of the Rasta speakers: "The socio-political image which the Rastaman has had of himself in a society where lightness of skin, economic status, and social privileges have traditionally gone together must be included in any consideration of Rastafarian words " for the man making the words is a man looking up from under, a man pressed down economically and socially by the establishment."

Rastafari

Rastafari PDF

Author: Ennis B. Edmonds

Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0195133765

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Traces the history of the Rastafarian movement, discussing the impact it has had on Jamaican society, its successful expansion to North America, the British Isles, and Africa, its role as a dominant cultural force in the world, and other related topics.

Jah Kingdom

Jah Kingdom PDF

Author: Monique A. Bedasse

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2017-08-11

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1469633604

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

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.

Reggae, Rasta, Revolution

Reggae, Rasta, Revolution PDF

Author: Chris Potash

Publisher: Schirmer Trade Books

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Here is the first ever anthology on Jamaican music forms that have changed the shape of Western popular music. Beginning with Bob Marley, music reviewer Chris Potash explores the roots of Jamaican pop from mento, ska, calypso, and rock steady. The book also profiles such roots pioneers as Toots and the Maytals, the Skatalites, Jimmy Cliff, and more.