An Ethos of Blackness : : Rastafari Cosmology, Culture, and Consciousness / / Vivaldi Jean-Marie.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Columbia University Press Complete eBook-Package 2023
• VerfasserIn: Jean-Marie, Vivaldi,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Columbia University Press, , [2023]; ©2023
• Year of Publication: 2023
• Language: English
• Series: Black Lives in the Diaspora: Past / Present / Future
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- 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