ABSTRACT
Defined as a “rooted exchange of knowledge between the academy and community,” Walter Rodney's application of Groundings is an affirmative methodological tool and a critical decolonial pedagogy that can be mobilized to explore ways of knowing, teaching and learning in the Caribbean. This chapter demonstrates Groundings as an affirmative Caribbean research methodology rooted in Rastafari ways of knowing. Drawing from our positionality, as authors raised in Rastafari principles from three separate disciplines (history; law; and political theory), our contribution engages with Groundings in three ways: (i) contextualizing knowledge, where we reaffirm Rastafari in the Caribbean within Black radical thought through contextualizing groundings as an indigenous way of knowing that emerged during a period of political violence and urban unrest, (ii) interpreting knowledge, where we explore the emergence of Rastafari language, commonly referred to as “Dread Talk,” as a dialectical mode of exchange that formed part of a decolonial praxis and (iii) applying knowledge, where we recentre Rastafari thought within contemporary Caribbean discourse, paying particular attention to the recent campaigns for reparatory justice for transatlantic slavery. This chapter shows how Rastafari has produced – and continues to produce – epistemologies and ontologies that disrupt Eurocentric ways of knowing and being.
