Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies

Black and LatinX Knowledge Formations Speaker Series

April 1st: Dr. W. Gabriel Selassie I (Los Angeles City College)

4:30 pm, Smathers Library 100: “Chant Down Babylon: Rastafari-Its Roots, Its Legacy”

This event is part of the Beyond Borders, Across Boundaries: Black and LatinX Knowledge Formations speaker series presented by Mellon Intersections Group on Global Blackness and Latinx Identity

In the 1970s’ Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer, and numerous other Jamaican musicians exported Afro-Jamaican culture to the world and became international stars. The popularity of reggae music brought the once-shunned Rastafari out of the slums of Trenchtown, Jamaica to international cultural, political, and social respectability. The now popularized reggae message of peace, redemption, and love obscures the religious ethos of the Black Liberation theology of which Rastafari was founded.  My work has been to separate the popular misunderstandings surrounding Rastafari by an examination of the history and salvific message of Rastafari as theology, a way of life, and as a spiritual message born out of the Jamaican Maroon communities and given a religious ethos by Proto Rastafarian prophets: Shepherd Robert Athlyi Rogers, Leonard Howell and Fitz Ballantine Pettersburg.

W. Gabriel Selassie I holds a joint appointment as the Ralph Bunche associate professor of History, Religion and African American studies at Los Angeles City College.   Dr. Selassie is also a Scholar-In-Residence at Prairie View A & M University of Texas.  Dr. Selassie’s published works include the examination of the religious ethos Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association & African Communities League (U.N.I.A – ACL) and exegetical and historical examinations of Shepherd Robert Athlyi Rogers’ The Holy Piby, Leonard Howell’s The Promised Key and Fitz Ballantine Pettersburg’s The Royal Parchment Scroll of Black Supremacy.  Dr. Selassie graduated with a Bachelors of Architecture and civil engineering from Prairie View A & M University of Texas (HBCU).  He obtained his M.A. in African American studies at the University of California at Los Angeles where he did extensive coursework in African American nationalism and the Garvey movement under Robert Hill.  His theological work in ritual and liturgical studies was undertaken at the University of Notre Dame where he earned a master’s degree in theology.  Dr. Selassie earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in history from the Claremont Graduate University.

This event is organized by the Mellon Intersections Group on Global Blackness and Latinx Identity with support from the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, George A. Smathers Libraries, Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies Research, Center for Latin American Studies, and Club Creole. This event is free and open to the public.

https://intersections.humanities.ufl.edu/upcoming_events/chant-down-babylon-rastafari-its-roots-its-legacy-with-w-gabriel-selassie-i/