Full Description
Buyers Beware offers a new perspective for critical inquiries about the practices of consumption in (and of) Caribbean popular culture. The book revisits commonly accepted representations of the Caribbean from "less respectable" segments of popular culture such as dancehall culture and 'sistah lit' that proudly jettison any aspirations toward middle-class respectability. Treating these pop cultural texts and phenomena with the same critical attention as dominant mass cultural representations of the region allows Patricia Joan Saunders to read them against the grain and consider whether and how their "pulp" preoccupation with contemporary fashion, music, sex, fast food, and television, is instructive for how race, class, gender, sexuality and national politics are constructed, performed, interpreted, disseminated and consumed from within the Caribbean.
Contents
Introduction: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Situating Caribbean Pop Culture Globally
Chapter One: Is not Everything Good to Eat, Good to Talk: Sexual Economy and Dancehall Music in the Global Marketplace
Chapter Two: Buyers Beware, Hoodwinking on the Rise: Epistemologies of Consumption in "Sistah Lit"
Chapter Three: "Who's On Top?": Power, Pleasure and the Politics of Taste
Chapter Four: "Fashion Ova Style" The Art of Self-Fashioning in Jamaican Pop Culture
Chapter Five: "'Outta Order'or Outta Door?: Caribbean Women Performing Power, Politics & Sexuality"
Chapter Six: Gardening in the Garrisons, (Un)Visibility in Contemporary Caribbean Art
Conclusion: 'Puuulll Uuuuuuup:' Dissident Dreams of Cultural Insurgency
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
