An Ethos of Blackness: Rastafari Cosmology, Culture, and Consciousness(Black Lives in the Diaspora: Past / Present / Future)

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:
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

About the Author :
Vivaldi Jean-Marie teaches in the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department at Columbia University and is a professor of philosophy at the City University of New York. He is the author of Vodou Cosmology and the Haitian Revolution in the Enlightenment Ideals of Kant and Hegel (2018), Reflections on Jean Améry: Torture, Resentment, and Homelessness as the Mind’s Limits (2018), Kierkegaard: History and Eternal Happiness (2008), and Fanon: Collective Ethics and Humanism (2007).

Review :
This book is an essential read for scholars of African diaspora studies, religious studies, and postcolonial philosophy. It offers deep insights into Rastafari’s intellectual and cultural foundations while engaging with broader discussions on race, spirituality, and resistance. Readers interested in the intersections of religion, history, and social movements will find it particularly illuminating. For anyone wishing to understand the complexities of how Rastafari came about…this book is an essential read. Highly recommended. Vivaldi Jean-Marie's extraordinary study of Rastafari has the virtues of historically situating the movement while articulating its philosophical dimensions without fetish but with the virtue and respect of critique. Rastafari Cosmology, Culture, and Consciousness is a must read not only for anyone interested in Rastafari and the complex history of Jamaican struggles for freedom that led to its emergence but also for all interested in the contradictions and humanity of communities struggling for liberation. This is a highly engaging work of intellectual history that illuminates the origins, originality and future of the Afrocentric thought of the Rastafarians of Jamaica. Moving deftly through earlier expressions of intellectual and cultural resistance—the Maroons, Myalism, Obeah, Revivalism, and Garveyism—Jean-Marie's account is both comprehensive and highly revealing. Written with great clarity, it is a must for scholars of Caribbean religious and philosophical thought. An Ethos of Blackness takes a unique approach to the social and religious history of Rastafari, showing how the practice identifies, advances, and meets the ideals of Blackness broadly while remaining rooted within Jamaican society. Jean-Marie reevaluates Rastafari in its development and practice within the framework of cosmology to explain its origin, evolution, and, to some extent, its future.