Customer Reviews:
A thought-provoking discussion of globalization and post-modernity.......2007-10-21
Appadurai uses a number of powerful metaphors to talk about globalization. His language of -scapes (financescapes, mediascapes, etc) is an interesting way to look at global flows from different perspectives. He suggests that in the postmodern world, the collapse of time and space through technology gives rise to widespread agency as the work of the imagination. He also suggests the collapse of the modern nation-state, or at least the decoupling of those terms through the removal of the hyphen, as identities and allegiences become more transnational.
While this work is very thought provoking and a useful lens on globalization and global flows of people, goods, ideas and such, Appadurai overstates his points a bit. His prediction of the end of the nation-state seems premature in light of post 9/11 developments (which might be termed, to borrow one of his seciton titles "The Empire Strikes Back"). And while his discussion of works of the imagination is stirring and powerful, it does not adequately take into account power dynamics that are, on the one hand incredibly freeing to the haves, and on the other, quite restrictive to the have-nots.
too rosy of a picture.......2005-12-13
I am going to quote Aihwa Ong - Antrhopology Professor from UC Berkeley who criticized "Modernity at Large" since I cannot state it any better than her:
"When an approach to cultural globalization seeks merely to sketch out universalizing trends rather than deal with actually existing structures of power and situated cultural processes, the analysis cries out for a sense of political economy and situated ethnography."
Appadurai is essentially Thomas Friedman in a graduated sense for academia.
An ambitious attempt, and some provocative thinking.......2005-06-16
Appadurai's book, Modernity at Large, offers quite a few tools to help us think about that big fuzzy thing called "globalization." He coins quite a few words to describe multiply-constituted networks of culture - ethnoscapes, mediascapes, ideoscapes, financescapes, and technoscapes. All are different ways of looking at the global cultural flows that we're trying to describe, and all are strongly influenced by perspective, overlapping, and rapidly shifting (though the term doesn't quite capture the instability and mutability of global cultural flows).
A book like this, to be useful, should help us think about important problems in manageable, intelligible, and useful ways. Appadurai's book offers more than most in this line. His terms, such as the above, are interesting, and his willingness to theorize as well as analyze is valuable. The ways that he situates himself in his analysis is also illuminating and useful. For example, Appadurai describes a trip he and his wife made to a Hindu temple in Bombay. His wife asked about a Hindu priest that she had known before, and they were told that he was in Houston. The point isn't just that they went there and he came here. He's talking about trans-locality, and the production of locality beyond mere connection to a place. Not all Hindus live in India, and not all Indians have to live in India to maintain their Indian-ness. At the same time, Houston is Houston because of both the people and the landscape located there. But part of its identity as a place derives from the trans-local identities of some of its citizens - a "cosmopolitan" city where some citizens are both Indian and American. He does a better job than I'm doing here explaining his thinking about the contemporary experience of diaspora, which is an accomplishment in itself.
There are some flashes of real insight in this text - for me, some of his coinages were brilliant, and the comment that some trans-local modern ethnicities are forced into violent anti-statism through an inability to articulate their identity except through the language of nation and state also resonates - but overall, Appadurai tried to accomplish too much in one book. He finds himself saying things like "the details of this argument are beyond the scope of this chapter," and it seems like this happens too much. It would have been better to flesh out his thinking about the production of locality in greater detail, with more case studies. And some of his terms could use additional explanation - he doesn't seem to notice his own un-critical use of the term "cosmopolitan," and he pays remarkably little attention to literature and film after professing the importance of both in the global exchange of ideas (mediascapes and ideoscapes, as he calls them).
This is a strong book, with some real value, but I wouldn't recommend reading the whole thing all the way through. The table of contents, the index, and the chapter titles are useful signposts. It's the kind of book that might be most useful in small doses.
A waste of time .......2004-11-15
Obtuse and without meaning in the real world. Appaduarai needs to set foot on real soil and realize the world is not created, nor can it be defined behind ivy walls.
Use your time to read something of importance and let Appadurai die on the vine, he may impress other sycophantic scholars with his labeling and vocabulary but you don't need him.
an academic antidote to academia.......2004-07-31
The great strength behind Appadurai's book Modernity at Large is that he breaks out of the binary thinking that many new historians engage in. Instead, he offers what he coins landscapes, five different threads that weave together and influence one another to form our communities, imagined or otherwise. His ideas of how the imagination and imagined communities affect us build on the established works of others, especially Benedict Anderson, but his approach is very down to earth and accessible without pandering to a lowest common denominator. The book is dense, and not something to absorb in one sitting; it savours like a fine wine.
An excellent book, especially for students wanting to research deterritorialization and the transnational public sphere but are intimidated or frustrated with assigned texts.
Customer Reviews:
Global/local poetics reign splendidly in this collection..........2003-02-08
Although this book based on a set of talks at SUNY Binghampton in 1989 has been hard to get (except in library collections), its impact has been instant and abiding: the collection is still being used by cultural critics and social science scholars from England to Australia and Taiwan, as I found out during my visit there as National Science fellow in 1995 where it was being used to help map cosmopolitan-yet- local strategies of "Asian/Pacific Cultural Studies."
Anthony King's collection, with a stunning and much-cited essay on transnational and ethnic complications of cultural identity in England by Stuart Hall called "The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity," on the one hand, and rather more homogenizing and predictable mappings of the capitalist culture of globalization by major sociologists like Immanuel Wallerstein and Rowland Robertson on the other, opens up the problematics of mapping global and local interactions, flows, contradictions, and synergies. King's own solid scholarship inquiring into the colonial infrastructures of transnationalizing global cities gave him a solid base on which to construct such cultural and ideological dialogues across disciplines and areas, and the collection remains a site where critical dialogue and trans-disciplinary interaction did take place.
In sum, the collection shows how some emerging new sensibility of "global paradox" complicates the globsl/local power of the local, sub-national, ethnic, and tribal to alter the seamless workings of global domination and transnational restructuration. Noteworthy in the collection, as well, are powerful critiques of reigning globalization models by Ulf Hannerz ("Scenarios for Peripheral Cultures") and an internal critique of the whole collection by Barbara Abou-El-Haj, who shrewdly remarks of such models (as theorized by the keynote speakers in the collection, Hall and Wallerstein), "Our ambition to do equal justice to the global and local is limited at the outset by our failures to generate a comparative language beyond the set of tiny binaries which reproduce the global regime in the very attempt to eviscerate it: center/periphery, core/periphery, western/non-western, developed/developing, etc."
This trans-disciplinary way of theorizing and representing global/local interactions called for in the collection does comprise what Abou-El-Haj notes is "a qualitative step forward." Subsequent collections of national/transnational interaction like Donald Pease and Amy Kaplan, eds., Culture of United States Imperialism (Duke University Press, 1993) and Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, eds., Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minnesota UP, 1994) have been working out the far-reaching implications of these new global/local discourses and frames.
Can i review your indice?.......1999-06-27
My interest is for the impact of globalizacion in México and LA
Book Description
Drawing on 15 years of research in Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, Suriname, and the Netherlands, Livio Sansone explores the very different ways that race and ethnicity are constructed in Brazil and the rest of Latin America. He compares Latin American conceptions of race to US and European notions of race that are defined by clearly identifiable black-white ethnicities. Sansone argues that understanding more complex, ambiguous notions of culture and identity will expand international discourse on race and move it away from American definitions unable to describe racial difference. He also explores the effects of globalization on constructions of race.
Customer Reviews:
challenges previous epistemologies.......2007-03-18
Sansone's book should resonate with students and academics interested in identity studies in general, but especially identity studies in Brazil and in a transnational/diasporan frame. However, the underlying significance of the work is in its historiographical contributions, so readers might not catch any "breakthrough in intellectual thinking and debate on the matter" without having read 15-20 other works on race in Brazil. Much of the studies on Afro-Brazilian identity have been done by North American scholars who brought with them their own ideas of what "blackness" should mean. Sansone is among the first to suggest that such methodologies and assumptions are wrong and have skewed those earlier studies, and then he goes on demonstrating how/why throughout the book.
Attention grabbing title .........2007-01-18
but I didn't get much out of this book. It seems to stray too often from the subject title. Also the book seems to be lacking in anything that might be considered a breakthrough in intellectual thinking and debate on the matter. It also seems a bit jumbled. For general reading on the subject I am not sure if I would recommend it, however if you are a researcher of academic type looking for information that you can quote you may just gleen something useful out of it.
Average customer rating:
|
Language, Citizenship and Identity in Quebec (Language and Globalization)
Leigh Oakes , and
Jane Warren
Manufacturer: Palgrave Macmillan
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ASIN: 1403949751
Release Date: 2007-03-20 |
Book Description
Globalization is calling for new conceptualizations of belonging within culturally diverse communities. This book takes Quebec as a case study and examines how it fosters a sense of belonging through a common citizenship with French as the key element. As a nation without a state, Quebec is driven by two distinct imperatives: the need to affirm a robust Francophone identity within Anglophone North America, and the civic obligation to accommodate an increasingly diverse range of migrant groups, as well as demands for recognition by Aboriginal and Anglophone minorities.
Book Description
Kamari Maxine Clarke and Deborah A. Thomas argue that a firm grasp of globalization requires an understanding of how race has constituted, and been constituted by, global transformations. Focusing attention on race as an analytic category, this state-of-the-art collection of essays explores the changing meanings of blackness in the context of globalization. It illuminates the connections between contemporary global processes of racialization and transnational circulations set in motion by imperialism and slavery; between popular culture and global conceptions of blackness; and between the work of anthropologists, policymakers, religious revivalists, and activists and the solidification and globalization of racial categories.
A number of the essays bring to light the formative but not unproblematic influence of African American identity on other populations within the black diaspora. Among these are an examination of the impact of âblack Americaâ on racial identity and politics in mid-twentieth-century Liverpool and an inquiry into the distinctive experiences of blacks in Canada. Contributors investigate concepts of race and space in early-twenty-first century Harlem, the experiences of trafficked Nigerian sex workers in Italy, and the persistence of race in the purportedly non-racial language of the âNew South Africa.â They highlight how blackness is consumed and expressed in Cuban timba music, in West Indian adolescent girls’ fascination with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and in the incorporation of American rap music into black London culture. Connecting race to ethnicity, gender, sexuality, nationality, and religion, these essays reveal how new class economies, ideologies of belonging, and constructions of social difference are emerging from ongoing global transformations.
Contributors. Robert L. Adams, Lee D. Baker, Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Tina M. Campt, Kamari Maxine Clarke, Raymond Codrington, Grant Farred, Kesha Fikes, Isar Godreau, Ariana Hernandez-Reguant, Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, John L. Jackson Jr., Oneka LaBennett, Naomi Pabst, Lena Sawyer, Deborah A. Thomas
Book Description
A World Beyond Difference unpacks the globalization literature and fills a void by presenting a lively conceptual and historical map of how we think about the emerging socio-political world, and - above all - how we think politically about human cultural differences. Anthropologist Ronald Niezen extracts central themes from the work of recent major theorists, comparing them to classical social theorists in an instructive manner. He also draws on the local work of ethnographers to counter relativist and globalist discourses. Because of its interdisciplinary scope and engaging style, A World Beyond Difference will appeal to non-specialists as well as to those in courses on globalization, cultural theory, history, political science, sociology, and anthropology.
Book Description
Ethnicity and nationalism are pervasive features of the contemporary world, but how far is ethnicity a result of cultural differences, and how much is it in fact dependent on the practical use of, and belief in, such differences? In this book, Thomas Hylland Eriksen demonstrates that far from being an immutable property of groups, ethnicity is a dynamic and shifting aspect of social relationships. Drawing on a wide range of classic and recent studies in anthropology and sociology, Eriksen examines the relationship between ethnicity, class, gender and nationhood, as well as current issues of racism, globalization and multiculturalism. Influential theories are presented and critically compared in a lucid and comprehensive manner.
A core text for all students of social anthropology and related subjects, "Ethnicity and Nationalism" has been a leading introduction to the field since its original publication in 1993. This new edition - expanded and thoroughly revised - is indispensable to anyone seriously interested in understanding ethnic phenomena. New chapters cover recent studies of migration, cultural creolization, racism, gender and nationalism, and the dilemmas of multiculturalism.
Customer Reviews:
First-Rate.......2004-07-13
A first-rate introduction to the anthropological study of ethnicity, using illustrations from the Zambian Copperbelt, Peru, and Mauritius. Great discussions of Barth and Abner Cohen, but very little of Geertz or, most unfortunately, Daniel Bell. Ethnic identities are "fluid, negotiable, situational, analogic (or gradualist) and segmentary [i.e., nested]." Ethnicity doesn't explain everything, but is often a powerful analytic tool. Eriksen does anthropology proud.
Politically correct, otherwise rather useless.......2004-01-07
In line with most of this author's work, it seems very much focused geographically on the places with which he is personally familiar, Norway primarily (Mauritius secondly). Norway is, however, not necessarily a good choice as a representative for the general topics discussed, and no credible rationale for this is presented. This peculiar choice of geographical and cultural starting point is obviously convenient for the author, but serves the discussion of the topics chosen poorly. Further, the reader quickly suspects that the author's underlying motivation is political, while the argumentation in the book takes a anthropological form. This is a point of criticism which the author, openly left-wing politically speaking, often is met with, and for good reason in this reader's opinion. Best avoided.
Highly informative.......2001-11-07
Eriksen blends both historical and recent contributions to the subject, then adds his own analysis. His writing style is clear and concise and his analysis is very carefully reasoned - a refreshing change from much of the social science literature. The work is more thorough on ethnicity than nationalism, but serves as a good starting point for more reading on the latter. This is an academic work, but suitable for any student of social science, and certainly anyone that has taken an introductory anthropology course.
dry but informative.......2000-08-09
The author, a Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo, has written a clear and concise book about ethnicity and nationalism from an anthropological perspective. Written in a very dry style, however, this book is not recommended as an introduction to nationalism for non-anthropologists, especially since Eriksen likes to draw on his own experiences in Mauritius and Norway a bit too much. Instead, this is a good introduction to anthropological debates about nationalism.
Eriksen is succssful in pointing out the constructive and fluid nature of ethnic and national identities: he shows how ethnicity is not an inherent property but merely an aspect of a relationship. Nonetheless, he argues, we should not therefore discount the importance of ethnicity or nationhood to those who hold it dear. He also addresses typical anthropological issues like kinship and argues for more efforts from anthropologists in studying the past to help create a better understanding of ethnicity and nationalism.
Finally, Eriksen manages to spend an equal amount of time on ethnicity and nationalism, something very rare in the literature.
All in all, a good book.
Book Description
This book tests a new approach to understanding ethnic mobilization and considers the interplay of global forces, national-level variation in inequality and repression, and political mobilization of ethnicity. It advances the claim that economic and political integration among the world’s states increases the influence of ethnic identity in political movements.
Drawing on a 100-country dataset analyzing ethnic events and rebellions from 1965 to 1998, the author shows that to the degree in which a country participates in international social movement organizations, ethnic identities in that country become more salient. International organizations spread principles of human rights, anti-discrimination, sovereignty, and self-determination. At the local level, poverty and restrictions on political rights then channel group demands into ethnic mobilization. This study will be of great importance to scholars and policy makers seeking new and powerful explanations for understanding why some conflicts turn violent while others do not.
Book Description
Modern Blackness is a rich ethnographic exploration of Jamaican identity in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first. 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 policies in Jamaica were geared toward the development of a multiracial creole nationalism reflected in the country’s motto: âOut of many, one people.â As Thomas shows, by the late 1990s, creole nationalism was superseded by âmodern blacknessââan 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 was to be Jamaican.
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.
Customer Reviews:
Music for a new generation.......2005-12-01
Forget your troubles and dance!
Forget your sorrows and dance!
Forget your sickness and dance!
Forget your weakness and dance!
Lyrics to Them Belly Full (But We Hungry). (1974) Composed by Legon Cogill and Carlton Barrett.
Bob Marley's music helped define a generation of Jamaican culture through reggae. In Modern Blackness, Deborah Thomas proposes that the reggae "soundtrack" for Jamaica has been succeeded by dancehall, just as cultural identity has evolved to fit a new vision of blackness. She suggests that the "modern blackness of late-twentieth century. . . is urban, migratory, based in youth-oriented popular culture, and influenced by African American popular style" (p. 229). Thomas also asserts that black identity in Jamaica is not post-modern, which suggests a break with the past, rather connected to the development of an identity rooted in the local and historical yet dependent on national and transnational pressures. Thomas explores modern blackness by dissecting these influences on culture in Jamaica. She breaks her analysis into three sections: the global-national, the national-local, and the local-global. This separation allows for a critical analysis of the various influences while displaying both the connections and dissonances.
In order to guide her analysis of modern blackness in Jamaica, Thomas uses two years of ethnographic research conducted between 1993 and 2003. In this book, she brings us to a real community outside Kingston, fictitiously named Mango Mount, as a means of illustrating the concepts of modern blackness on a local community. Using this community as an example of the influence of modern blackness and a source of information provides a tangible illustration of how modern blackness is set in the everyday, yet linked to a national and global community. In addition to information about Mango Mount, Thomas delves into the historical influences on Jamaica prior to independence, as a new state, and within the context of a transnational society. She looks at modern blackness in the context of race issues, gender identity, socioeconomic differences and as an aspect of Jamaican culture. Her research also pulls in national and international institutions and their influences within Jamaica and Mango Mount. This wide scope provides the reader with a comprehensive yet contextualized understanding of cultural influences in Jamaica while illustrating that "culture is both the problem to solve and the recipe to follow" (p. 87).
Thomas begins her book with the global-national. She illustrates how the modern identity and culture are connected to pre-independence institutions, norms, and social hierarchies. Here she connects Jamaican identify to religious doctrines, emancipation literature, and the remnants of colonialism. In providing a historical context for her book, she links "blackness (a racial identity) and Jamaicanness (a national identify)" in order to elucidate the complex origins of the modern blackness (p. 30). In her focus on race and nationality, Thomas explores how concepts of blackness and brownness as well as notions of what it means to be Jamaican have contributed to national and global influences in the creation of modern blackness.
In understanding the national-local, Thomas' discussion of the reemergence of state-supported Emancipation Day celebrations provides insight into community connections to national policies. She pairs sections from the Report on National Symbols and Observations with quotes from Mango Mount community members regarding the renewed state interested in the celebration of Emancipation Day. She notes that "the dominant sense among nationalist elites was that the removal of Emancipation Day as a public holiday had left Jamaican youth without an awareness of their heritage and the steps in Jamaica's evolution toward modern statehood" (p. 162). However, community members generally did not see the Emancipation Day celebration as an educational movement, rather they viewed it as related to political maneuvering, as a distraction from "the government's ability to implement successful economic policies," or as "meaningless and irrelevant" to the average person (p. 168-169). Thomas also shows how the local celebration of Emancipation Day celebrations did not escape contemporary influences; inclusion of traditional kumina dance rhythm into the Emancipation Day play in Mango Mount was replaced by steps to a dancehall beat (p. 172). Thomas' illustration of the contrasting visions regarding the purpose of the reinstatement of Emancipation Day reflects the greater disparity between national and local views of modernity.
As Thomas explores the local-global, she places Mango Mount within the global economy. She illustrates the influences of global institutions and marketing in local choices and looks at how trends at the local level reflect global influences. She notes, the "entrepreneurial zeal with which people in Mango Mount seek to take advantage of migratory possibilities has facilitated their relative success within a global labor market," yet it has contributed to leadership deficits at the local level, problems for those unable to migrate, and "perpetuated an outward outlook whereby local ambitions require foreign realization" (p. 261). Nevertheless, in interviewing people in Mango Mount, Thomas finds that many people feel that "the United States was the place to make a living while Jamaica was the place to make life," illustrating that while economic opportunities necessitate global movement, local lifestyles continue to define aspects of national identity (p. 224). She also identifies the influences of the global on local music choices (such as dancehall rather than drumming) and culture. For example, she notes that dancehall music is a function of global influences tempered by Jamaican underclass definitions. Thomas notes, "Dancehall is not merely a response to hegemonic power but marks the changing aesthetic and political space that both contests and (re)produces broader relations of power" (p. 243).
Thomas provides a readable, enjoyable, yet critical look at modernity in Jamaica that bridges the past to connect to the future. She demonstrates that the global society has complex influences on blackness that are intertwined within Jamaica's historical context and national identity. Thus, Bob Marley's command, "You're gonna dance to Jah music" continues to push people to dance, even as the background music of modern blackness has changed from reggae to dancehall.
Redefining Jamaicanness in the Evolving Global Climate.......2005-11-30
"Feel the rhythm, feel the rhyme, gear on up, it's bobsled time!" This quote from the all-too forgettable movie Cool Runnings about a team of Jamaicans that made it to the Olympics accentuates how music becomes a part of the transnational Jamaican identity through global popular culture. An association to identity, such as music, reflects what Deborah Thomas refers to as "modern blackness," which has superceded the postcolonial identity of a creole nation with the motto "Out of many, one people." By ethnographically exploring Jamaican nationalism from the end of the 19th century to the present, Thomas sorts out the complex effects of colonialism and globalization on inequalities of race, class, and gender in her inspiring work Modern Blackness. Cultural practices, such as reggae, which were developed by lower class Jamaicans are unrecognized as part of the broader national identity.
Deborah Thomas structure's the text in an interesting way by outlining the relationships between the global-national, national-local, and local-global. By contextualizing the evolution of Jamaican identity, Thomas' argument flows from historical perspective during the "Crown Colony rule" to a contemporary understanding that effectively "clarifies the links between global processes, nationalist visions, and local practices (p. 31, then 19)." The capstone of her fieldwork is in Mango Mount where she uncovers the culture being shaped under neoliberal policies that continue to economically restrain the community.
The diasporal feeling of nationalism before Jamaica's independence from Britain in 1962 is based on the ongoing struggle of asserting an identity of the "respectable state." The early works by black Jamaicans such as Jamaican's Jubilee highlight their attempt to prove advancements in the black community, both morally and culturally. Asserting various aspects of Jamaicanness was an effort to unite one people with values held by the middle-class. Thomas posits, "As black intellectuals, the Jubilee writers insisted that they articulated important mass concerns on the basis of their shared blackness, but they distanced themselves from lower-class blacks and African-derived cultural expressions (pg. 48)." Jamaican pride was racially characterized through forms of artistic expression and reflections of Creole multiracialism. The author adds that this identity "more closely resembled classical European nationalism (which) was founded on a concept of common history and culture rather than race and, as in Europe, obscured the conflation of class with race (pg. 55)." By embracing Jamaican heritage, the country demarcated themselves from historical representations of Africanness, as well as the practices of the poorer urban class. This reflected the attitudes of many previously enslaved individuals coming from rural areas with "values" and "respectable" culture. Thomas argues that references to "values" emulate the history of colonialism and reinvent the inequalities of power and class.
The national-local relationship is displayed by the author through the cultural politics of a tiny village with the fictitious name Mango Mount, just outside of Kingston. Throughout the end of the twentieth century, the leadership of the national government followed global economic policies through democracy and capitalism; therefore disconnecting themselves from the indigenous localities, one of which is Mango Mount. Thomas explains, "It has remained difficult for many Jamaicans to sustain the imagination of a community whose primary political, economic, and sociocultural institutions have been developed by black lower-class Jamaicans (pg. 91)." In her work in Mango Mount, the author demonstrates the practices that distinguish lower-class and local youth culture as forthcoming in flamboyant ways, especially during celebrations in the town square. The square becomes a noisy dancehall that is routinely scrutinized by middle-class residences. Thomas describes her experience and the comments of a participant in the following way: "Rhythm and blues and reggae gave way to hardcore dancehall toward the wee hours of the morning...and (unfortunately) were never as good as in other communities because the "rich people" would always call the police to `lock down the music' because `dem nuh like fi see wi do wha we a do' (pg. 114)." Although I do not understand exactly what this Jamaican was trying to express, it is valid to see how the shift to youthful urban blackness has been influenced by American popular culture and has redefined what it means to be "very, very, Jamaican." The ordinary lower class is challenging the previously held Afro-Jamaican identities of their postemancipation history. Thomas justifies these contradicting attitudes by stating, "Their worlds were increasingly urban and transnational and because they had apprehended the fundamental disjuncture between political and economic development strategies and cultural development initiatives they had to (look back, take pride, but move forward) (pg. 190)." Moving forward has caused a transition of political hegemony and has been characterized by activism and agency at the local level.
The racialized version of nationalism, which excluded urban culture, is now personified as contemporary `modern blackness'. Distinctions are being made between definitions of black and brown, as well as what constitutes Africanness and Blackness. Thomas adds, "If consciousness of an African heritage operated primarily on a symbolic level, even within popular expressive culture, racial consciousness was continually through day to day experiences of color prejudice and discrimination, both in Jamaica and abroad (pg. 183)." The relationship between local and international now bypasses state efforts that hold identities of British imperialism and further define Jamaicanness in terms of globalization and popular style. Thomas focuses on the influences of America on Jamaican culture, as well as Jamaica's ability to influence American culture. The irony of this "two-way process" is the size of Jamaica as a country and their power to impose Jamaicanness globally. The author states, "The frequency of these invocations also suggests a need to carve out spaces in which Jamaicans feel, and indeed have, power and recognition within a global public sphere (pg. 250)." Many Jamaican immigrants have spread this power and presented future possibilities for `moving ahead.'
Deborah Thomas' work is important in understanding the lasting effects of colonial rule, as well as the changing socio-political climates of globalization. What is clear is that Jamaicanness is not American, European, African, black, white, or brown. It is its own evolving identity that has become shaped by all these identities within the global environment. Finally, Modern Blackness presents possibilities for change and improvement where dreams become realized in the context of Jamaica's future.
Simply a superb ethnography.......2005-01-27
Deborah A. Thomas is a cartographer of culture who maps the topography of Jamaican culture through time, across class, between urban and rural locales, and over a variety political landscapes. What emerges from her work is a detailed analysis of the various contours of culture that follow the shifting fault lines of Jamaica's political economy. Deborah Thomas has written a beautiful ethnography. Central to her analysis are several questions: what does it mean to be Jamaican? what role does culture play for a black and brown nation? and, what role does a black and brown nation play in shaping Jamaica's culture?
Dr. Thomas frames her important study by documenting the way a multi-racial creole culture was significantly eclipsed, during the late 1990s, by a culture of blackness forged in modernity but produced and re-produced in decidedly post-modern ways. Aligning this shift with shifts in the global economy, she 'reads' these changes through a variety of performances. Some of the performances she explores explicitly claim to represent Jamaica's national culture, but other performances she describes explicitly claim to counter notions of respectability to represent a sort of in-your-face booty grinding blackness, which ends up emerging as the cultural practices of the nation's people.
Thomas brilliantly illustrates how culture, nation, and the ideology of progress are implicated in an understanding of what blackness and Jamaican identity actually mean in various contexts. As she notes, "context is everything" and she takes the reader inside a variety of institutions that seek to define and redefine both race and culture in turn-of-the-century Jamaica. This approach is refreshing. She not only identifies structural entities that dictates cultural policy in Jamaica, but she identifies the agents within those structures, actually putting a name to both the powerful and the powerless, who constantly jostle over who gets to claim and name what constitutes Jamaican culture. From the organized and powerful National Dance Theater Company to the unorganized and entertaining "roots" theater performances, she allows the reader to experience the way the participants (dancers/actors and audience) perform, respond, and contest ideologies of race, nation, and progress. She does not stop there, however, weddings and dance hall session, movies and newspaper clippings are each scrutinized in an effort to buttress her argument that the multi-racial creole nationalism is waning as a modern blackness tied to the global economy waxes and the meaning of what it means to be Jamaican hangs in the balance.
Deborah Thomas has written a bold, refreshing, and powerful ethnography that grapples with some of the most sticky theoretical issues in contemporary theory today -- blackness, globalization, modernity, and the idea progress.
Book Description
Borders represent an intriguing paradox as globalization continues to leap barriers at a vigorous pace, yet the political boundaries separating peoples remain pervasive and problematic. The first text to explore global borders, this reader brings together key essays on border societies, politics, and economies to explore this complex dynamic. With its careful selection of accessible essays, this text will allow professors in a variety of courses to easily globalize their classroom. The readings have been carefully selected to appeal to undergraduates, offering theoretical concepts for understanding the overarching context of globalization as well as focusing on the experiences of specific peoples and communities.
Books:
- Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution
- Neither Poverty Nor Riches: A Biblical Theology of Possessions (New Studies in Biblical Theology)
- Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
- Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
- Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
- Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
- Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869
- O.J. Is Guilty But Not of Murder
- Papers Clarence Mitchell V 1: 1942-1943 (Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr)
- Program Evaluation: An Introduction
Books Index
Books Home
Recommended Books
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- The Doolittle Raid: America's Daring First Strike Against Japan
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- Organizing Plain and Simple: A Ready Reference Guide with Hundreds of Solutions to Your Everyday Clu
- Pride and Prejudice
- Review of the Export Control Authorities: Hearing Before the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urba
- College Accounting, Chapters 1-29
- Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf: Power Politics in Transition
- Lectins
Globalization (A Public Culture Book)
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, New Edition
Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality
Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Public Planet)
Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection
