Buyers Beware: Insurgency and Consumption in Caribbean Popular Culture (Critical Caribbean Studies)

Buyers Beware: Insurgency and Consumption in Caribbean Popular Culture (Critical Caribbean Studies)

Professor Patricia Joan Saunders
$48.24
Publication Date: May 13th, 2022
Publisher:
Rutgers University Press
ISBN:
9780813571225
Pages:
240

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.

 

About the Author

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.
 

Praise for Buyers Beware: Insurgency and Consumption in Caribbean Popular Culture (Critical Caribbean Studies)

“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

"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

"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

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