Race Formation and Morally Configured Black Identities
Race Formation and Morally Configured Black Identities
This chapter discusses how Blackness and its various permutations—especially the morally configured ones—develop in Jamaica and persist to the present. It looks at the lineage of Rastafari rhetoric and practice, the varied routes they traveled in becoming who they are, and how on the eve of the twenty-first century, a people who only four decades earlier were feared and despised, had become cultural exemplars of Blackness. In Jamaica, morally configured Black identities like Rastafari draw deeply upon the cultural resources of racialized moral economies. These are cultural artifacts created and reinforced through Black people's experience of uprisings, reprisals, dashed hopes, marginalization, and a strong desire for better and for building genuine communitas.
Keywords: Blackness, Black identities, racialized moral economies, Rastafari rhetoric, Rastafari practice, cultural artifacts
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