In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Daive Dunkley. Dunkley is Associate Professor in the Department of Black Studies and Adjunct Professor in the Department of History at the University of Missouri. His book is Women and Resistance in the Early Rastafari Movement.
Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?
Daive Dunkley: In recent years the women’s movement has been at the forefront of many progressive social trends in the United States and globally. The #MeToo movement, whose founder, Tarana Burke, also has Caribbean roots, shared much-needed light on the pervasiveness and detrimental effects of patriarchy through women’s sexual exploitation. In Women and Resistance in the Early Rastafari Movement, we examine women’s contestations with patriarchy both inside the movement and in the broader society. The solidarity women built to fight patriarchy included banding together with other Rasta women and non-Rasta women in the broader society. A common assumption is that Rastafari operated like a maroon community, prioritizing separation from the wider society. However, the early history of women in the movement challenges this longstanding notion of disjointedness that has also helped in silencing women’s political agency in the original movement. Looking closely at women’s opposition to male domination expands understanding of the movement as critical to Black women as agents of social change in Black history. The book can help readers understand many of the long-established antihegemonic discussions and strategies of Black women across the African diaspora. They used these conversations and techniques to counter gender inequality, inequitable access to economic and educational opportunities, and to pursue political power.
What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?
I think Women and Resistance highlight the critical importance of solidarity in the Black freedom struggle, whether the battle is against racism as is common in the United States or against postcolonial and imperialistic class injustices in Africa and other parts of the global African diaspora. Solidarity pursued by early Rasta women transcended the movement to which they subscribed. The women showed women outside in different churches and across class boundaries the intersection between patriarchy and the system of class repression and disenfranchisement in society. I think this struggle for solidarity will benefit present-day activists and organizers as they engage in community-building around combatting racism, sexism, and gender and class disproportionalities globally. Rasta women remain on the frontlines of the fight for Black liberation, resisting compromise despite the capitalist commodification of the movement through its reggae music and cannabis use. Women remain vocal proponents of the movement’s beliefs and culture as liberatory. For most women of the movement, reggae should remain a conduit for the message of Black liberation as world liberation. Cannabis should also remain sacramental and medicinal rather than recreational and commercial, as women subscribed to the original conception of cannabis as the “healing of nations.” Another vital lesson from women is the seamless integration of spirituality and the political struggle for Black liberation. Spirituality and theology should not stifle but liberate. One of the critical contributions of early Rasta women was debating men’s conceptions of the movement’s theology. Women argued for the same divinity for women and men, conceptualizing their equality through theology.
We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?
Women and Resistance will show that the Rastafari movement was not outlandish or cultish and that women were critical to the founding of the movement. It was born within the context of widespread political and social ideologies long established in the Black community since slavery and had been a part of the opposition to slavery through various forms of resistance. The impression that the movement was cultish and its practices incomprehensible to most people in Jamaican society was part of the architecture of suppression by the colonial system. The government also attacked the movement’s folk medicinal and herbal traditions mainly by suppressing cannabis as part of maligning it as cultish and dangerous. One need not go further than the current changes to attitudes toward cannabis to realize that the colonial suppression denigrated Black epistemologies, including its scientific knowledge, to suppress Black freedom and prosperity. Viewing women as merely doing the bidding of Rasta men has helped tremendously in silencing women’s sense of independence and role in the movement’s establishment in the 1930s. Empirical sources indicate that women dominated all religions in 1930s Jamaica. Not only were women most of the congregants, but they headed organizations they formed through their religious bodies. That Rastafari would be a departure from this trend is implausible, especially with most of its early women entering from the traditional churches. Readers will unlearn the impression of Rastafari as originally male-dominated and, instead, as approaching male domination in the 1950s as men in the movement and the colonial system silenced women in various ways. For Rasta men, the silencing was part of what scholars such as Ula Taylor call patriarchal promises to protect women from abuse by such anti-Black forces as colonialism. However, women fought these patriarchal assumptions that they could not remain on the frontlines in service of the Black struggle.
Which intellectuals and/or intellectual movements most inspire your work?
Folk intellectuals have inspired me; some scholars might refer to them as ordinary people. That is why I have included in my historical methodology an approach that is not common among historians: ethnography. This research method allows me to connect with folk intellectual traditions at the forefront of popular social movements around the African diaspora. It was folk leaders who inspired the Haitian revolutionaries in 1791. Folk intellectuals inspired Garvey’s African consciousness. Among them stood the inspiring voices of Jamaica’s Great Revival of the 1860s and the hermeneutical visionaries of the native Baptist Church. They guided the people into the anticolonial Morant Bay uprising in 1865. They were the ones whose struggles paved the way for Garvey to find roots among the people for the critical reimagining of African history in the anticolonial work of Africa and the diaspora. They were first to be inspired by Ethiopia’s successful counteraction to European colonization during the great scramble in the late 19th century. I know the modus operandi lists prominent Black intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, George Padmore, and C.L.R. James. Still, if you read their work more closely, you will realize that they referenced the folk intellectual traditions as the significant background of their work. Early Rasta women themselves found in George Padmore, the Trinidadian Marxist in London, a voice for the organizing by the women in Jamaica against the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1934. Padmore was a founder of the International African Friends of Abyssinia, formed in London in 1935. But this organization echoed women’s work in the Caribbean Rasta movement to help organize resistance against Italy’s second attempt to colonize Ethiopia.
Which two books published in the last five years would you recommend to BAR readers? How do you envision engaging these titles in your future work?
The two books I would recommend and which I’m using in my present work cover different periods of Black history. One is set in the context of chattel slavery and the other in the post-slavery period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These both offer a broader context for Black resistance in the Americas, one highlighting the creation of an African-centered Atlantic world through connecting Africa and its diaspora by the political, economic, and social struggle for Black liberation. These books are Vincent Brown’s Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (2020) and Dave Goose’s Alexander Bedward, the Prophet of August Town: Race, Religion and Colonialism (2022). I am using these two books in my work on the rise of Black Christianity, examined in a broader Atlantic context that sheds more light on its critical role in the Black liberation movement. This broader context includes the reclamation of African knowledge to unify the Black diaspora both during and after slavery, as was the case during the Tacky revolt in the 1760s and Bedward’s triumphant church in the early 1900s. The fear these two leaders generated also speaks of their broader Atlantic vision of the Black freedom struggle that necessitated their malignment as purveyors of superstition and ungodly beliefs. For Tacky, it was the folk religious system of Obeah, outlawed after the rebellion. Bedward was confined to a colonial mental asylum to send a clear message of insanity to stifle further belief in his capacity to unify the Black world from tiny Jamaica around a message of African consciousness. A project inherited by Garvey and Rastafari in the 1920s and 1930s, both also faced similar suppressive methods by American imperial and British colonial forces.
Roberto Sirvent is editor of the Black Agenda Report Book Forum.