Patricia Saunders recently celebrated the launch of her new book Buyers Beware: Rebellion and Consumption in Caribbean Popular Culture (Rutgers University Press) at the Trinidad and Tobago Writers’ Center in St. Clair, Port-of-Spain. About the book, Mimi Sheller (author of Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies) writes: “In a profound rethinking of free markets and consumption practices, Patricia Saunders offers one of the sharpest cultural interpretations yet of how the most economically dispossessed not only participate in consumer culture but reshape it for their purposes. Buyers Beware stunningly demonstrates how ‘insurgent cultural representations’ can shake the roots of oppression, challenge critical theory and disrupt the circuits of global capital – while getting the goods.”
Description: Buyers Bewareoffers a new perspective on critical questions about consumption practices in (and) Caribbean popular culture. The book revisits commonly accepted representations of the Caribbean by “less respectable” segments of popular culture such as dancehall culture and ‘sistah lit’ who proudly reject any aspirations towards middle-class respectability. Treating these texts and pop cultural phenomena with the same critical attention as the dominant mass cultural representations of the region allows Patricia Joan Saunders to read them against the grain and examine whether and how their “pulp” preoccupation with contemporary fashion, music , sex, fast food. , and television, is instructive about how race, class, gender, sexuality, and national politics are constructed, performed, interpreted, disseminated, and consumed from within the Caribbean.
PATRICIA JOAN SAUNDERS is an associate professor of English at the University of Miami and senior editor ofAnthurium: A Journal of Caribbean Studies. She is the author ofAlienation and Repatriation: Translating Identity in Anglophone Caribbean Literature.
For more information, see https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/buyers-beware/9780813571225
