Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness
updated 6mo ago
updated 6mo ago
As Britain's empire was disintegrating, and as development policies pursued by successive Jamaican governments began to privilege the type of industrialization by invitation programs implemented in Puerto Rico, those liberal nationalists advocating creole multiracialism found themselves in the contradictory position of reproducing the colonial valu
... See moreFirst, he demonstrates that initiatives that perhaps look like diasporic cultural projects with political implications-such as redeeming the cultural value of "Africa" for people of African descent in the "New World"-might instead be…
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The emergent emphasis on consumption and, alongside it, individualism has destabilized totalizing narratives of revolution and has generated intense debate among sectors of both popular and academic communities. While consumption has become "a privileged site for the fabrication of self and society, of culture and identity" (Comaroff and
... See moreThe 1888 publication of Jamaica's Jubilee; or, What We Arc' and What We Hope to Be was the first published work by black Jamaicans that codified a critique of racism.'
A dim view of these ideological shifts is often promulgated within both academic and popular fora. However, taking "radical consumerism" seriously may reveal that the lower-class black Jamaican man driving a "Bimma" has more on his mind than individualist conspicuous consumption. Instead, he is refashioning selfhood and reshapin
... See moreThe historian Thomas Holt has argued that abolitionists and policy-makers sought to solve the "problem of freedom" by transforming slaves into reliable wage laborers by socializing former slaves to respond to the work incentives of free people and expanding their material aspirations (1992).
Bakan, Abigail. 1990. Ideology and (:lass Conflict in Jamaica. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press.
What does it mean to be "modern"? What is the place of people of African descent in the "modern" world given their cultural heritage (or purported lack thereof)? How have people defined progress and development while simultaneously critiquing the rational logic of universal…
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Vodu spirits-loos in Haitian Kreyol and limscs in Dominican Spanish-Sarni Ludwig points out, are more than spiritual beings, they are signs of history. "Like Bakhtin's language,' " he writes, "the loan are fundamentally rooted in history; they represent the …
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Dominican modernism, as imagined by the country's elite, was not the U.S. modernism of skyscrapers and regional imperialism. Instead, Dominican modernism focused on economic growth, scientific agriculture, the proliferation of technology, and the expansion of urban centers.