An Ethnography of Cosmopolitanism in Kingston, Jamaica

This ethnography of social life in Kingston, Jamaica, is also a study of the relationship between two major and often conflicting forces in current cultural experience: community and cosmopolitanism. People from the Caribbean - subject to slavery, the plantation economy, the labour migration - have experienced one of the longest exposures to a global political and economic order of any social grouping. For centuries, Jamaicans have lived at a crossroads of transnational, economic, social and cultural dynamics. The Jamaican social milieu is characterized by massively heterogeneous and creative cultural activity. A central proposition of this book is that Jamaicans in the capital, Kingston, are still living out the aesthetic and moral consequences and contradictions of the Enlightenment and modernity.