Rastafarian Cultural Identity and Jamaican Nationalism

Excerpts from the Paper

Rastafarian Cultural Identity and Jamaican Nationalism: African Music, Religion and Politics in Recent Jamaican History
Introduction
The intersection of cultural heritage, religion, national identity and politics in Caribbean history is arguably nowhere more apparent than in the remarkable prominence of Rastafarianism in Jamaica in the 1970s. The Rastafarian religion and cultural movement, which was denounced by the Jamaican establishment as a scourge to the nation’s social order in the 1960s, was co-opted in the 1970s by the Manley government as an integral element in their shaping of a Jamaican national identity and its people’s cultural connection to their African heritage (King, Bays and Foster 2002, 105).
This paper proposes to...

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