Please join the Comparative Politics Workshop on Thursday, February 15th from 4:15-6:15pm. Please note that for this time only we will be meeting in room 5383 (5th floor), not in the Thesis Room.

Myles Osborne (University of Colorado Boulder) will be presenting his paper, “Rastafari and politics in Jamaica.” The paper is attached and the abstract is below. Come to support your peer, engage in a lively discussion, share free wine and snacks, and network with your department.

Abstract:

Common perceptions of early Rastafari history hold that before 1960, the date of the University of the West Indies-run study into their social conditions, Rastafari were a class apart in Jamaica. In popular and to an extent scholarly imagination, they were said to live separately, and avoid contact and interaction with the institutions of “Babylon,” such as political elections and government systems.

This article reveals how between the 1930s and early 1960s, Rastafari built their own versions of state institutions to recreate an alternate world beyond Babylon. They learned to manipulate and “work” the institutions of Babylon from law courts to the political machine in order to survive. They followed national and international news – often from Africa – and absorbed knowledge about the United Nations they could use to fight legal cases and write petitions protesting the conditions of their existence.

All this suggests a novel stream of Rastafari intellectual thought and action that we must add to our understandings of the movement. Studying Rastafari in this manner – possible because of extensive research in its rich history – provides an opportunity to understand the actions of more marginalized groups acting beyond the traditional nation state in the moment of decolonization.

To download the paper, click here