Cosmopolitanism from the Global South by Shelene Gomes

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Cosmopolitanism from the Global South by Shelene Gomes

This is a book about the power of the imagination to move persons from the Global South as they reinvent themselves. This ethnography focuses on Caribbean Rastafari who have undertaken a spiritual repatriation to Ethiopia over several decades particularly, though not exclusively, from Jamaica. Shelene Gomes traces the formation of a Rastafari community located in the multicultural Jamaica Safar or Jamaica neighbourhood in the Ethiopian city of Shashamane following a twentieth century grant of land from the former Ethiopian Emperor, Haile Selassie I. In presenting narratives of spiritual repatriation, everyday behaviours and ritualised events, Gomes provides an ethnographic account of Caribbean cosmopolitan sensibilities. Situated in the historical conditions of colonial West Indian plantations and the asymmetries of freedom and bondage within modernity, a recognition of global positionalities and local situatedness characterises this case of cosmopolitanism from the Global South.

Shifting the centre of worldviews from Europe to Africa, Rastafari both challenge global disparities as well as reproduce hierarchies in the local space of the Jamaica Safar. In positioning Ethiopia as the spiritual birthplace of humanity, Rastafari also engage in ontological and epistemological reinvention. This spiritual repatriation, in its emic sense, foregrounds the Caribbeanist contribution to anthropology. Ethnographies of the Caribbean have been at the forefront of anthropological enquiries into global interconnections. This discussion of spiritual repatriation is both specific to the diasporic Caribbean and relevant to wider world-making processes and representations.

Shelene Gomes teaches social anthropology and the sociology of culture at The University of The West Indies, St. Augustine campus in Trinidad and Tobago. She is a senior research associate in the Department of Anthropology and Development, University of Johannesburg. 

SKU Unavailable
ISBN 13 9783030822712
ISBN 10 3030822710
Title Cosmopolitanism from the Global South
Author Shelene Gomes
Series Palgrave Studies In Literary Anthropology
Condition Unavailable
Binding Type Hardback
Publisher Springer Nature Switzerland AG
Year published 2021-09-15
Number of pages 209
Cover note Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.