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].
This article addresses how Northamptonshire Afro-Caribbeans c. 1960-1990 were simultaneously part of the transformation from people of the Caribbean with individual island identities or nationalities into Afro-Caribbean British people whilst helping to shape this ethno-racial development. Oral history has been integral in conducting this research. Northamptonshire Black History Association (NBHA) interviews from 2002 to 2005 supplemented the interviews conducted by the author in 2009-10. Economic concepts derived from understanding monetary currencies and flight to quality will be used to help historians understand how culture and its manifestations are forms, and have systems, of exchange. These monetary concepts will also be used to create an understanding of cultural currency, as well as the frameworks for analysing how acquiring strong cultural currencies often leads to a process of exchange for other strong cultural currencies. Northamptonshire Afro-Caribbean organisations and individuals' usage of their historical and developed cultural currencies to obtain greater ethnoracial pride will be illuminated in this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR].
Although the Americas and Caribbean region are purported to comprise different ethnic groups, this article’s focus is on people of African descent, who represent the largest ethnic group in many countries. The emphasis on people of African descent is related to their family structure, ethnic identity, cultural, psychohistorical, and contemporary psychosocial realities. This article discusses the limitations of Western psychology for theory, research, and applied work on people of African descent in the Americas and Caribbean region.
