Description
Thomas combines historical research with fieldwork she conducted in Jamaica between 1993 and 2003. Drawing on her research in a rural hillside community just outside Kingston, she looks at how Jamaicans interpreted and reproduced or transformed on the local level nationalist policies and popular ideologies about progress. With detailed descriptions of daily life in Jamaica set against a backdrop of postcolonial nation-building and neoliberal globalization, Modern Blackness is an important examination of the competing identities that mobilize Jamaicans locally and represent them internationally.
An ethnographic study of cultural policy in Jamaica as seen from above and below in relation to race, class, and nation
About the Author
Deborah A. Thomas is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University.
Reviews
"Modern Blackness is an important book. It is well written, it puts forth a creative theoretical apparatus, and it displays Deborah A. Thomas's keen ethnographic eye. It is on a topic of extreme importance to the discipline of anthropology as well as to African diaspora and Caribbean and Latin American studies, engaging as it does some of the effects of neoliberalism and structural adjustment in today's world."-Kevin A. Yelvington, author of Producing Power: Ethnicity, Gender, and Class in a Caribbean Workplace
"In its critique of creole respectability, Modern Blackness challenges established views of Jamaican nationalism and the nation-state. Deborah A. Thomas argues that the young and black who live in Kingston have forged social values and transnational links that reflect their disillusion with education and aspirations to the middle class. She confronts the reader with the reality of life among the 'lower sets' and provides a provocative agenda for rethinking blackness."-Diane Austin-Broos, author of Jamaica Genesis: Religion and the Politics of Moral Orders
Book Information
ISBN 9780822334194
Author Deborah A. Thomas
Format Paperback
Page Count 376
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 531g