Leonard Percival Howell and the Genesis of Rastafari

Clinton A. Hutton, Michael A. Barnett, D.A. Dunkley, and Jahlani A.H. Niaah, eds., Leonard Percival Howell and the Genesis of Rastafari. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2015. xi + 274 pp.REVIEWED BY CHARLES V. CARNEGIETHE EDITORS OF LEONARD PERCIVAL HOWELL AND THE GENESIS OF RASTAFARI have done a fine job putting together an interdisciplinary collection that includes interpretive and biographical essays as well as primary source material on this seminal figure in counter-colonial thought.The volume builds on the work of other scholars, notably, Robert Hill's pathbreaking essay Dread History, first published in 1981, which served to open up new directions of scholarship on the beginnings of Rastafari, and to establish Leonard Howell as one of the principal founding figures in the formation of a movement whose counter-hegemonic originality continues to exert widespread influence in the world. Shortly after returning to Jamaica from the United States in 1932 at age thirty-four, Howell began addressing sizable audiences in Kingston and St Thomas parish, proclaiming the divinity of the newly crowned Haile Selassie, and denouncing the religious and colonial order of the day. For his efforts, Howell was relentlessly persecuted by the authorities over a period of several decades: imprisoned on various occasions, in the first instance for two years for sedition from 1934 to 1936; certified insane and, on more than one occasion, committed to the asylum. The large community agricultural settlement he established at Pinnacle was raided on numerous occasions and eventually destroyed.The book is divided into two parts. Part 1, Analysing Leonard Howell, consists of nine chapters whose authors draw from a variety of disciplinary frameworks including history, political science, cultural studies, art history, and management studies. Part 1 ends with a short bibliographic essay providing an overview of scholarship about the Rastafari movement that should prove particularly useful to students. Part 2, Remembering Leonard Howell, includes an interview with Howell's two sons who grew up at Pinnacle, and three short pieces contextualising and celebrating Howell's political significance. Regrettably, though perhaps reflecting the male-dominated character of the field of Rastafari studies, there appears to be only one woman among the contributors to the volume, and important questions about gender relations and the position of women in the community Howell established receive little attention.One central question the volume addresses is: How did the Rastafari movement come to take root and flourish when the campaign of state repression against it was apparently so successful? The authors provide nuanced and mutually supportive answers to this question. Clinton Hutton and other contributors describe the fertile local and international conditions that lent credibility and impetus to the movement. Michael Barnett points to the multiple, mutually reinforcing strands of the founding leadership of Rastafari that, implicitly, would have made the movement more difficult to put down. Other contributors, notably D.A. Dunkley and Jahlani Niaah, discuss Howell's skilful, tactical shift from the more visible strategy of public platform speaking to the organisation of socially and economically self-sustaining community enterprises.Of equal and related significance is the radical transformation of the prevailing ethos that emerged out of Rastafari: the movement's effective overthrow, as Hutton puts it, of prevailing epistemic, ontological and psychological orientations. As he and other contributors show in different ways, Howell and early Rastafari drew from multiple traditions, engaged artfully in cut 'n' mix collage-making, artistic modes of assemblage comparable to, and recognisable from, other spheres of Creole/creolising cultural practice.Another useful feature of the book is its demonstration of the value of archive re-assemblage, and archive making

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