Vivaldi Jean-Marie teaches in the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department at Columbia University and is a professor of philosophy at the City University of New York. He is the author of Vodou Cosmology and the Haitian Revolution in the Enlightenment Ideals of Kant and Hegel (2018), Reflections on Jean Améry: Torture, Resentment, and Homelessness as the Mind’s Limits (2018), Kierkegaard: History and Eternal Happiness (2008), and Fanon: Collective Ethics and Humanism (2007).
An Ethos of Blackness takes a unique approach to the social and religious history of Rastafari and how the practice identifies, advances, and meets the ideals of Blackness more broadly, but rooted within Jamaican society specifically. Jean-Marie reevaluates Rastafari in its development and practice within the framework of cosmology to explain its origin, evolution, and, to some extent, its future. -- Iyabo Osiapem, William & Mary