Buyers Beware

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.

"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

• Introduction: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Situating Caribbean Pop Culture GloballyChapter One: Is not Everything Good to Eat, Good to Talk: Sexual Economy and Dancehall Music in the Global MarketplaceChapter 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 TasteChapter Four: "Fashion Ova Style" The Art of Self-Fashioning in Jamaican Pop CultureChapter Five: "'Outta Order'or Outta Door?: Caribbean Women Performing Power, Politics & Sexuality"Chapter Six: Gardening in the Garrisons, (Un)Visibility in Contemporary Caribbean ArtConclusion: 'Puuulll Uuuuuuup:' Dissident Dreams of Cultural InsurgencyAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliography    Index