Social Death and Rastafari Reason
Category
Keynote lecture
Date & Time
As we slowly return to in-person events on campus, PIR and RACE.ED are excited to welcome Professor Robbie Shilliam to give a guest talk to our University of Edinburgh community.Venue
Meadows Lecture TheatreWilliam Robertson Wing (Old Medical School, doorway 4)
University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh
EH8 9AG
Description
Abstract: In this paper, I focus on Orlando Patterson’s early works leading up to his famous book, Slavery and Social Death, and consider how they laid a path toward his celebrated concept of “social death”. I demonstrate how this framework emerged out of his interactions with the Rastafari movement in post-independent Jamaica. But I also argue that, through his social anthropological evaluation of the movement, Patterson denuded Rastafari of all reason. What politics might be emanative of the concept of social death if we situate the early Patterson not only in an imperial academy but also in its contested black spaces of post-emancipation independence?
Key speakers
- Professor Robbie Shilliam (Johns Hopkins University)