Jah Kingdom

Jah Kingdom
Author: Monique A. Bedasse
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2017-08-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1469633604

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 Routes

Reggae Routes
Author: Kevin O'Brien Chang
Publisher: Temple University Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1998
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781566396295

Jamaican music can be roughly divided into four eras, each with a distinctive beat - ska, rocksteady, reggae and dancehall. Ska dates from about 1960 to mid-1966, rocksteady from 1966 to 1968, while from 1969 to 1983 reggae was the popular beat. The reggae era had two phases, 'early reggae' up to 1974 and 'roots reggae' up to 1983. Since 1983 dancehall has been the prevalent sound. The authors describe each stage in the development of the music, identifying the most popular songs and artists, highlighting the significant social, political and economic issues as they affected the musical scene. While they write from a Jamaican perspective, the intended audience is 'any person, local or foreign, interested in an intelligent discussion of reggae music and Jamaica.'.

Rastafari

Rastafari
Author: Ennis Barrington Edmonds
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2003
Genre: History
ISBN: 0195133765

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.

In This Land of Plenty

In This Land of Plenty
Author: Benjamin Talton
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2019-07-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812296338

On August 7, 1989, Congressman Mickey Leland departed on a flight from Addis Ababa, with his thirteen-member delegation of Ethiopian and American relief workers and policy analysts, bound for Ethiopia's border with Sudan. This was Leland's seventh official humanitarian mission in his nearly decade-long drive to transform U.S. policies toward Africa to conform to his black internationalist vision of global cooperation, antiracism, and freedom from hunger. Leland's flight never arrived at its destination. The plane crashed, with no survivors. When Leland embarked on that delegation, he was a forty-four-year-old, deeply charismatic, fiercely compassionate, black, radical American. He was also an elected Democratic representative of Houston's largely African American and Latino Eighteenth Congressional District. Above all, he was a self-proclaimed "citizen of humanity." Throughout the 1980s, Leland and a small group of former radical-activist African American colleagues inside and outside Congress exerted outsized influence to elevate Africa's significance in American foreign affairs and to move the United States from its Cold War orientation toward a foreign policy devoted to humanitarianism, antiracism, and moral leadership. Their internationalism defined a new era of black political engagement with Africa. In This Land of Plenty presents Leland as the embodiment of larger currents in African American politics at the end of the twentieth century. But a sober look at his aspirations shows the successes and shortcomings of domestic radicalism and aspirations of politically neutral humanitarianism during the 1980s, and the extent to which the decade was a major turning point in U.S. relations with the African continent. Exploring the links between political activism, electoral politics, and international affairs, Benjamin Talton not only details Leland's political career but also examines African Americans' successes and failures in influencing U.S. foreign policy toward African and other Global South countries.

Politics and Policies in Upper Guinea Coast Societies

Politics and Policies in Upper Guinea Coast Societies
Author: Christian K. Højbjerg
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2016-11-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1349950130

This book examines the radical changes in social and political landscape of the Upper Guinea Coast region over the past 30 years as a result of civil wars, post-war interventions by international, humanitarian agencies and peacekeeping missions, as well as a regional public health crisis (Ebola epidemic). The emphasis on ‘crises’ in this book draws attention to the intense socio-transformations in the region over the last three decades. Contemporary crises and changes in the region provoke a challenge to accepted ways of understanding and imagining socio-political life in the region – whether at the level of subnational and national communities, or international and regional structures of interest, such as refugees, weapon trafficking, cross-border military incursions, regional security, and transnational epidemics. This book explores and transcends the central explanatory tropes that have oriented research on the region and re-evaluates them in the light of the contemporary structural dynamics of crises, changes and continuities.

The War Machines

The War Machines
Author: Danny Hoffman
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2011-09-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822350777

Based on ethnographic research among militias in Sierra Leone and Liberia, Danny Hoffman considers how young men are made available for violent labor on battlefields and in dangerous unregulated industries.

Race, Class, and Political Symbols

Race, Class, and Political Symbols
Author: Anita M. Waters
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2017-09-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1351495062

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.

OUR DAY HAS COME

OUR DAY HAS COME
Author: Brenda Flournoy
Publisher: Trafford Publishing
Total Pages: 119
Release: 2014-05
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1490735364

Our Day Has Come is an invitation to Black Israel who is a remnant of Ancient Israel, and to the entire Remnants of Israel, and to Christians all over the world to worship JAH, the God of Israel. The book was written to enlighten the descendants of the American slaves of their Divine and Sanctified heritage. It is a Bible-based invitation from the King James version of the Holy Bible. The book highlights: 1) Who is our Creator, the God of Israel, and what is His name? Psalm 68:4 of the King James version of the Holy Bible tells us his name is JAH. 2) Who is JAH's only begotten son and what is his name? The Bible tells us that the son of God was there at the beginning of creation. And through research, His name was not Jesus but Jahshua (which means JAH is salvation); although it is ok to call him Jesus. 3) Who am I, a scorned Black child of the World? 4) Who is Lucifer and the Children of Lucifer? 5) Heaven and Home and last but not least: 6) Where do we go from here?