Women and Resistance in the Early Rastafari Movement

Description

Women and Resistance in the Early Rastafari Movementis a pioneering study of women’s resistance in the emergent Rastafari movement in colonial Jamaica. As D. A. Dunkley demonstrates, Rastafari women had to contend not only with the various attempts made by the government and nonmembers to suppress the movement, but also with oppression and silencing from among their own ranks. Dunkley examines the lives and experiences of a group of Rastafari women between the movement’s inception in the 1930s and Jamaica’s independence from Britain in the 1960s, uncovering their sense of agency and resistance against both male domination and societal opposition to their Rastafari identity. Countering many years of scholarship that privilege the stories of Rastafari men, Women and Resistance in the Early Rastafari Movement reclaims the voices and narratives of early Rastafari women in the history of the Black liberation struggle. Cover CONTENTS ILLUSTRATIONS Acknowledgments Introduction: Resistance and Early Rastafari Women CHAPTER 1. The First Women to Testify in Court for the Rastafari Movement CHAPTER 2. Petitioning Government: Women and the Colonial Justice System CHAPTER 3. The Middle-Class Woman: Reshaping the Rastafari Family and Community CHAPTER 4. The Rastafari Religion: A Womanist Perspective CHAPTER 5. Women and the “Holy Herb” Dilemma CHAPTER 6. Audrey Lewis and the History of the Early Rastafari’s Development CHAPTER 7. A Prototype of Pinnacle: Edna Fisher and the African Reform Church Conclusion: Disrupting the Status Quo Notes Bibliography Index