Overview

Modern Blackness is a rich ethnographic exploration of Jamaican identity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Analyzing nationalism, popular culture, and political economy in relation to one another, Deborah A. Thomas illuminates an ongoing struggle in Jamaica between the values associated with the postcolonial state and those generated in and through popular culture. Following independence in 1962, cultural and political policy in Jamaica was geared toward the development of a universal creole nationalism reflected in the country's motto: ""Out of many, one people."" As Thomas shows, by the late 1990s, creole nationalism was superceded by ""modern blackness""--an urban blackness rooted in youth culture and influenced by African American popular culture. Expressions of blackness that had been marginalized in national cultural policy became paramount in contemporary understandings of what it is to be Jamaican. Thomas combines historical research with fieldwork she conducted in Jamaica between 1993 and 2003.She situates contemporary struggles over Jamaican identity in relation to late-nineteenth and early- to mid-twentieth century nationalists, scholars, and cultural activists; their visions of progress and development; and their efforts to formulate and institutionalize cultural policy. Drawing on her research in a rural hillside community just outside Kingston, she looks at how nationalist policies and popular ideologies about progress have been interpreted and reproduced or transformed on the local level. She chronicles the strategies poorer community members have used to advance their interests and discusses how these strategies are represented in popular culture. With detailed descriptions of daily life in Jamaica set against a backdrop of postcolonial nation-building and neo-liberal globalization, Modern Blackness is an important examination of the competing identities that mobilize Jamaicans locally and represent them internationally. Deborah A. Thomas is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University.

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Reviews

"" ... Modern Blackness is an exploration of the counterculture that has come to dominate Jamaica's national identity--despite what anybody in authority asserts.""--Times Literary Supplement 1 July 2005 "" ... Jamaica-born Thomas presents compelling, multi-layered arguments about the significant shift in conceptualizations of Jamaican national identity over the four decades-plus since independence.""--SHE CARIBBEAN, Nov 2007

""" ... Modern Blackness is an exploration of the counterculture that has come to dominate Jamaica's national identity--despite what anybody in authority asserts.""--Times Literary Supplement 1 July 2005 "" ... Jamaica-born Thomas presents compelling, multi-layered arguments about the significant shift in conceptualizations of Jamaican national identity over the four decades-plus since independence.""--SHE CARIBBEAN, Nov 2007"

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

... Modern Blackness is an exploration of the counterculture that has come to dominate Jamaica's national identity--despite what anybody in authority asserts. --Times Literary Supplement 1 July 2005 ... Jamaica-born Thomas presents compelling, multi-layered arguments about the significant shift in conceptualizations of Jamaican national identity over the four decades-plus since independence. --SHE CARIBBEAN, Nov 2007

Author Information

Deborah A. Thomas is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University.

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