Buyers Beware

Insurgency and Consumption in Caribbean Popular Culture

Patricia Joan Saunders

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780813571225, 9780813571232
• eBook ISBN: 9780813572864
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea—Situating Caribbean Pop Culture Globally
• 1. Is Not Everything Good to Eat, Good to Talk: Sexual Economy and Dancehall Music in the Global Marketplace
• 2. Buyers Beware, Hoodwinking on the Rise: Epistemologies of Consumption in “Sistah Lit”
• 3. “Who’s on Top?”: Power, Pleasure, and the Politics of Taste
• 4. “Fashion ova Style”: The Art of Self-Fashioning in Jamaican Pop Culture
• 5. “Outta Order” or “Outta Door?”: Caribbean Women Performing Power, Politics, and Sexuality
• 6. Gardening in the Garrisons: (Un)Visibility in Contemporary Caribbean Art
• Conclusion: “Puuulll Uuuuuuup”
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author