BLACKNESS ACROSS BORDERS: JAMAICAN DIASPORAS AND NEW POLITICS OF CITIZENSHIP

Abstract

“Blackness across borders” outlines the effects of the currently weakened hegemony of the creole multiracial nationalism that had been consolidated by political and intellectual elites at the time of independence. The essay examines how intensified transnational migration and the proliferation of media technologies have contributed to a situation in which urban popular expressions of blackness have become paramount within contemporary invocations of Jamaican particularity. Arguing that these factors have facilitated the amplification of a diasporic consciousness, this essay explores how working-class Jamaicans negotiate American (and in particular, African American) hegemony through this consciousness. It seeks to illuminate the ways newly powerful notions of national belonging and transnational racial mapping affect the development of nationalist discourses and strategies “at home,” arguing that Jamaicans use “America” in part to mitigate the effects of a global political economy that has reinstated the national-racial hierarchies of an earlier imperial moment.

Key Words:

• diaspora
• blackness
• Caribbean
• popular culture

I thank numerous people for valuable and productive comments on various versions of this essay, including John Jackson, Tina Campt, Karla Slocum, Ana Yolanda Ramos, and the two anonymous readers for Identities. Audiences at Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Northwestern University were gracious and generous interlocutors who also pushed me to clarify one or another aspect of this discussion. The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (Grant 6063) funded the ethnographic research that generated some of the material used in this essay, and Wesleyan and Duke Universities supported additional research and writing.

Notes

1. This conference was the outgrowth of a symposium held 20 October 2003 at the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies entitled “The Jamaican Diaspora Reciprocal Relations: Way Forward.”

2. From September 1996 to December 1997 and then during the summers of 2000 and 2001, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in a rural hillside Jamaican community just outside Kingston to gain insights into the ways working- and middle-class Jamaicans apprehended and mobilized national initiatives and institutions regarding Jamaican cultural identity and to see what expressive materials they themselves generated to provide a sense of self and belonging.

3. Michel Rolph Trouillot uses the term “fragmented globality” for the effects of contemporary neoliberal capitalist processes, which have widened the gaps between rich and poor, developed and underdeveloped, north and south (2001).

4. Here, I mean to evoke Lisa Rofel's discussion of the importance of generation, both as an analytic category and as a critical factor in the formation of sociopolitical cohorts (1999).

5. The Jamaica Gleaner is the country's premiere daily paper and is the longest continuously published newspaper in the Western hemisphere. Owned by a family whose holdings include longstanding sugar interests, the paper tends to reflect a more conservative position on many issues having to do with national development. The Observer, Jamaica's other morning daily, tends to be more left-leaning and reports more often on American (and African American) topics, including sporting events such as the NBA Finals, scandals such as the Jayson Blair fraud and the Kobe Bryant case, and musical collaborations between hip hop and dancehall artistes. The Observer has also been more consistently critical of Colin Powell, who as an African American with Caribbean roots was expected to stand up for the region as a whole but who has disappointed many West Indians by playing a role in Aristide's removal from Haiti, in ignoring CARICOM's collective stand against the United States-led war in Iraq, and in undermining support for the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.

6. Mutabaruka is a Rastafarian dub poet known for his afrocentric (and revolutionary) lyrics.

7. This essay was originally written in 1973 and published in 1975 but was republished in the 1987 volume.

8. The recent debate about Affirmative Action in higher education provides an example of some of the political dimensions of African, Caribbean, and African American identity formation across generations. The New York Times report on a 2004 meeting of Harvard University's black alumni noted that celebrations of the increased number of black undergraduates at elite colleges and universities were tempered by concerns about exactly where these black students were coming from. At that meeting, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Lani Guinier argued that “the majority of [Harvard's black undergraduates]—perhaps as many as two-thirds—were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples” (Rimer and Arenson 2004). This means that only about a third of the students were “from families in which all four grandparents were born in this country, descendants of slaves,” prompting several professors to question whether Affirmative Action policies were benefiting those whom they felt “were intended as [the] principal beneficiaries.” For these professors and administrators, African Americans whose roots in the United States were generations deep were being “left behind” (Rimer and Arenson 2004).

9. Unfortunately, space limitations make it difficult to fully explore the gender implications of this movie and how they articulate with broader gender dynamics within Jamaica (but see Barnes 1997; Cooper 1993; Ford-Smith 1997; Thomas 2004; and Ulysse 1999 for more extensive treatments). Suffice it to say here that although Chiquita may have been the fiercest killer here, her ferocity does not signify that she is the “top don.” Rather, the power she wields in this instance is symbolic of more general ideologies about violence and retribution in Jamaica.

10. See Pierre 2004 for an extended critique of these arguments, and a discussion of how the deployment of ethnic identities draws from older culture of poverty language and can be manipulated to undermine resistance to racism (see also Kasinitz 1992 for insights into how this has transpired within the realm of formal political action in New York City).