Bigelow,John (Author) and Scholnick, Robert J. (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2006
Published:
Urbana: University of Illinois Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Originally published: New York & London : Putnam, 1851., 214 p, After Jamaican slaves were fully emancipated in 1838, the local economy collapsed. Driven by a belief in the innate inferiority of the black race and bolstered by this apparently disastrous Jamaican example, Americans who defended slavery convinced many that emancipation at home would lead to economic and social chaos. Collecting John Bigelow's vivid firsthand reporting, Jamaica in 1850 challenges that widely held view and demonstrates that Jamaica's troubles were caused not by lazy blacks but by the incompetence of absentee white planters operating within an obsolete colonial system.
This article explores Japanese literary engagement with the Caribbean island of Jamaica, one informed most directly by the recent popularity of Jamaican musical culture in Japan. I link these works to a discursive imagination of the international, including the Third World, as a proving ground for artistic accomplishment and for the acquisition of an ideological cosmopolitanism counterposed against life in insular Japan. This includes the discourse of jibun sagashi, or self-searching, that has emerged in the post-1991 recessionary era. I argue that a consistent trope in many works of fiction and non-fiction on Japanese travel to Jamaica is of their protagonists' or authors' intimate encounter with Afro-Jamaican blackness as both menacing and impoverished, but also vitalizing and endearing. Encountering the Afro-Jamaican, and surviving it, simultaneously affords a sense of toughness and sociopolitical enlightenment impossible elsewhere in Japan. I conclude that although these narratives usually include returns to a Japanese homeland appreciated anew, an ethnographic perspective on these issues - though not the focus of the paper - suggests that the experiences of less famous Japanese youth travelling to Jamaica might complicate these narratives offered to mainstream audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR].
