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

__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. "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"-- Provided by publisher 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”: Dissident Dreams of Cultural Insurgency Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index About the Author Buyers Beware treats Caribbean pop cultural texts with the same critical attention as dominant mass cultural representations of the region to read them against the grain and consider how, and whether, their "pulp" preoccupation with contemporary fashion, music, sex, fast food, and television, is instructive for how race, class, gender, sexuality, and national politics are disseminated and consumed within the Caribbean.