Buyers Beware

Insurgency and Consumption in Caribbean Popular Culture

By Patricia Joan Saunders

SERIES: Critical Caribbean Studies

Rutgers University Press

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.

In a profound rethinking of free markets and practices of consumption, Patricia Saunders offers one of the most astute cultural interpretations yet of how the most economically dispossessed not only participate in consumer culture but reshape it for their own ends. Buyers Beware stunningly shows how ‘insurgent cultural representations’ can shake the roots of oppression, challenge critical theory, and unsettle the circuits of global capital—while getting the goods. Mimi Sheller, author of Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies

This astutely robust comparative analysis of modes of consumption in the contemporary Caribbean and its diaspora situates black popular cultural expressions as a central animating force in our global society. Traversing genres as diverse as dancehall, literature, cinema and visual art, Patricia Saunders masterfully attends to questions of race, gender and sexuality as she traces the myriad ways that Caribbean communities use and consume popular culture to assert their presence, negotiate spaces to perform visibility and articulate their sense of freedom. Yanique Hume, co-editor of Caribbean Popular Culture: Power, Politics and Performance

With roving curiosity, Patricia J. Saunders unpacks some of the many contradictions of popular culture, taste-making, and money-spending in and around contemporary black diasporic culture. By focusing her attention not solely on how the Caribbean is consumed (which it is, aggressively), but on how Caribbean consumers and makers act as complicated agents within this context, Buyers Beware gives a particular vantage by which to consider the region in contemporary global markets. Nadia Ellis, author of Territories of the Soul: Queered Belonging in the Black Diaspora

In a profound rethinking of free markets and practices of consumption, Patricia Saunders offers one of the most astute cultural interpretations yet of how the most economically dispossessed not only participate in consumer culture but reshape it for their own ends. Buyers Beware stunningly shows how ‘insurgent cultural representations’ can shake the roots of oppression, challenge critical theory, and unsettle the circuits of global capital—while getting the goods. Mimi Sheller, author of Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies

This astutely robust comparative analysis of modes of consumption in the contemporary Caribbean and its diaspora situates black popular cultural expressions as a central animating force in our global society. Traversing genres as diverse as dancehall, literature, cinema and visual art, Patricia Saunders masterfully attends to questions of race, gender and sexuality as she traces the myriad ways that Caribbean communities use and consume popular culture to assert their presence, negotiate spaces to perform visibility and articulate their sense of freedom. Yanique Hume, co-editor of Caribbean Popular Culture: Power, Politics and Performance

With roving curiosity, Patricia J. Saunders unpacks some of the many contradictions of popular culture, taste-making, and money-spending in and around contemporary black diasporic culture. By focusing her attention not solely on how the Caribbean is consumed (which it is, aggressively), but on how Caribbean consumers and makers act as complicated agents within this context, Buyers Beware gives a particular vantage by which to consider the region in contemporary global markets. Nadia Ellis, author of Territories of the Soul: Queered Belonging in the Black Diaspora

PATRICIA JOAN SAUNDERS is an associate professor of English at the University of Miami and a senior editor of Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal. She is the author of Alienation and Repatriation: Translating Identity in Anglophone Caribbean Literature.

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
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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