Babylon boys don't dance : music, meaning, and young men in Accra

This thesis explores the landscape of popular music culture in Accra as it is experienced by a loosely interactive group of young self-identified rastafarians. The global pop-culture idiom born of the Jamaican socio-religious movement of rastafari allows these young Accrans to articulate self-concepts vis-a-vis very current trends in local and foreign youth cultures (such as hiphop), with reference to an ostensibly ageless collective identity. Questions of authenticity are made complex by the movement's weighty historical and political roots, its nuanced symbolic bonds with "local African culture", and the semiotic plasticity of its identifying practices. Ethnographic portions of this thesis are based on three months of fieldwork in Accra, during the summer of 2004. Key theoretical points are gleaned from a critical examination of early British Cultural Studies and its theoretical progeny, including the body of recent work tentatively dubbed "post-subcultural studies"