Emancipating the nation (again): Notes on nationalism, “modernization,” and other dilemmas in post‐colonial Jamaica

Abstract

This paper is a preliminary discussion of some of the issues raised by the restoration of Emancipation Day to the calendar of public holidays in 1997, the 35th anniversary of independence in Jamaica, in relation to the ways in which cultural nationalism has evolved during the post‐colonial period. Based on fieldwork both amongst members of the artistic community and in a rural village, it addresses the multiple and complicated relationships between blackness, Africanness, and Jamaicanness, and the articulation of these with ideas about progress, development, and modernization. It concludes that the extent to which purveyors of an officially designated Jamaican nationalism maintain a hegemony that appears fundamentally inpenetrable at the institutional level is dependent upon the extent to which they can (1) control the ways in which Africa is inserted into discourse regarding Jamaica's heritage, and (2) accommodate racialized understandings of citizenship while never giving them explicit priority.