Rastafarianism read scripture against the grain to decolonize Caribbean minds

Evidence

Like all these movements, Rastafarianism represented itself as a “return.” But what it “returned” us to was ourselves. In doing so, it produced “Africa again”—in the diaspora. Rastafarianism drew on many “lost sources” from the past. But its relevance was grounded in the extraordinarily contemporary practice of reading the Bible through its subversive tradition, through its unorthodoxies, its apocrypha: by reading against the grain, upside down, turning the text against itself. The “Babylon” of which it spoke, where its people were still “suffering,” was not in Egypt but in Kingston—and later, as the name was syntagmatically extended to include the Metropolitan Police, in Brixton, Handsworth, Moss Side, and Notting Hill. Rastafarianism played a critical role in the modern movement that made Jamaica and other Caribbean societies, for the first time, and irrecoverably, “black.” In a further translation, this strange doctrine and discourse “saved” the young black souls of second-generation Caribbean migrants in British cities in the 1960s and 1970s, and gave them pride and self-understanding. In Frantz Fanon’s terms, it decolonized minds. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 859

Categorization

• DEFINE: Model of ‘reading against the grain’ as strategy for subaltern re-signification — a transferable mechanism for how colonized subjects repossess meaning.
• XREF: Directly invokes Fanon’s decolonizing-minds framework; parallels the reading-against-the-grain method used in postcolonial critique of Orientalist texts.
• SEED: The extension of ‘Babylon’ from biblical exile-site to Kingston to Notting Hill police is a compact case study in how diasporic vocabulary reterritorializes — an essay angle on how key signifiers travel and reanchor in new political spaces.