Reggae Pilgrimages: Festivals and the Movement of Jah People (Paperback)
Since its emergence in the mid-1970s, Reggae has had a truly global impact around issues of freedom, unity and human rights. Using reggae festivals as the main site of inquiry, Reggae Pilgrimages accounts for the expansion of the reggae musical landscape through global festivals on all continents with a community of pilgrims united around sound. Looking at the proliferation of festivals - large concert events featuring reggae music - from the US to the UK, reaching to Europe, Asia and Australia and across the Middle East and throughout Africa, it will document, exhibit, publicize and archive the significant impact of reggae and key icons. It will address the process by which reggae and the identity of its community are changed, altered and interpreted as they traverse the globe and explore the political significance of these festival spaces for the complex worldwide network of reggae pilgrims.
Sonjah Stanley Niaah is the inaugural Rhodes Trust Rex Nettleford Fellow in Cultural Studies and a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of the West Indies (UWI) at Mona. She has been researching Black Atlantic performance geographies, ritual, dance, popular culture and the sacred, cultural studies theory and Caribbean cultural studies for many years. She is the author of the award-winning Dancehall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto (2010, University of Ottawa Press), and editor of "I'm Broader than Broadway: Caribbean Perspectives on Producing Celebrity' (Wadabagei, Vol. 12: 2, 2009). She is the Vice Chair of the international Association for Cultural Studies.