The article analyzes Jamaican education policies formed by Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley and his government. The author is mainly interested in assessing the influence of Manley's notion of equality on his educational reforms for Jamaica's poor black citizens. Manley's understanding of equality is explained, which was largely influenced by a commitment to black pride and social justice. The educational standards and curricula developed by the Jamaican government are then detailed, with emphasis given to vocational programs and content dealing with Jamaicans' African heritage. The author concludes by evaluating the government's stance on educating Rastafarians.
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].
Health disparity and socio-biological determinants of the poorest quintile and the wealthiest quintile have never been examined for Jamaica. The current study examines health status, illness, age at which the lower and upper classes indicate having illness and particular illnesses, and parameters that explain health status of the upper and lower quintiles in Jamaica as well as the social context of disparities between the two groups.
Uses data from a sample of working age Jamaicans to explore dimensions of their attitudes towards homosexuals. The results confirm strong negative attitudes towards homosexuals and suggested alignment with attitudes emanating from sources as distinct as the church, the state and the proponents of popular culture.
Examines the colonial experiences of eight formerly British-controlled territories- Barbados, Jamaica, Botswana, Nigeria, Kenya, India, Burma, and Singapore -to identify how the processes and policies of the colonial enterprise affected their respective contemporary rule of law outcomes.
Jamaica's water supply sector is recognized as the largest electricity consumer in the island's public sector. This paper evaluates whether replacing high-cost groundwater abstraction with surface water treatment and distribution is a viable option to minimize electricity consumption in the water sector.
Throughout the 19th century, political migration within the Caribbean coincided with large-scale labor migration. This essay reconstructs the long-overlooked experience of political refugees who fled from Cuba to Jamaica during the Wars for Independence, focusing on their early reception and their eventual assimilation. Despite the official position of neutrality, white and brown elites, anxious to increase the number of Europeans, welcomed the Cubans who were mainly white.
Literary criticism of the book "A Description of Millennium Hall" by Sarah Scott. Focuses on the roles of slavery and imperialism in the novel. Details on the charitable transfer of wealth gained and the narrator's identity as a creole planter and slaveowner in Jamaica are also discussed.
This paper focuses primarily on the challenges of nurse migration, although it makes reference to the crisis in education as it argues that the two are inter-connected. Also, while it acknowledges the problem as a regional one and speaks to this, its focus is on Jamaica, especially in assessing the feasibility of a 'training for export model.' It draws primarily on secondary literature, supported by interviews.
Analyzes the separate roles and functions of the police and the military in the context of the current security environment in the Caribbean, which now includes such diverse factors as trans-national organized crime, corruption, links between politics and crime, natural disasters, oil dependency, high levels of public debt and the chronic marginalization of large sectors of the population. This paper argues that rapidly evolving challenges require that the roles, functions and training of the police and the military be kept separate and distinct, and that the policy community needs to understand why the purpose and architecture of the training has to be appropriate for the different missions of the respective organizations.
Analyses Sistren Theatre Collective's theatrical and organizational collective model by contextualizing the company's commitment to collectivity in terms of political and social shifts in Jamaica during the 1980s. Argues that race- and class-based divisions within Jamaican society were masked by collectivity masked.
In 2008, a new style in Jamaican dancehall music and dance culture known as "Daggering" emerged. Daggering music and dancing, which included lyrics that graphically referred to sexual activities and a dance which has been described as "dry sex" on the dance floor, took Jamaica by storm. The Broadcasting Commission of Jamaica was forced to crack down on broadcasting and cable stations preventing them from playing any Daggering content. This article focuses on the subsequent clash between the government and the dancehall, and seeks to identify an appropriate method for monitoring and enforcing these new standards.
Develops data from interviews about stereotypes of Jamaican and Barbadian men and women. The popular music from Jamaica and Barbados is used as a lens for understanding the cultures within which the respondents develop their gender stereotypes. The stereotype data is then compared with the music that is popular during the interviews.
Colorism and skin bleaching is evident in contemporary Jamaica as expressed in some dancehall songs which praise skin bleachers, and the explanatory narratives of skin bleachers that bleaching makes them pretty and sexually attractive to potential spouses. Similar themes are reflected in the criticism that the browning Dancehall Queen Carlene was deemed sexually attractive and choreographically talented only because of her brown physicality. Some spouses request that their partner acquire the bleached physicality because they find it sexually attractive similar to many male clients in 'massage parlors' who only request female sex workers who bleach their skin.
Uses the content analysis of publicly available information to explore the posture of key public-policy actors on homosexuals and homosexuality. Concludes that this discourse evinces a settled heteronormative value system, reflecting a consensus on either side of the political divide and applauded by popular culture and popular opinion.
Examines the work of Jamaican writer Una Marson for her engagement with the ideas of modernity and her cultural expectations as she traveled from Jamaica to London, England in the 1930s. Topics include colonialism, race and gender, modernism, and the magazine "Cosmopolitan: A Monthly Magazine for Business Youth of Jamaica and the Official Organ of the Stenographer's Association."
Presents a case study with background information to assess the gender structure of trade unions under the Jamaica Confederation of the Trade Unions (JCTU) to better understand the relationship between gender and leadership in trade union organizations.
Examines changes in enslaved women's working lives as planters sought to increase birth rates to replenish declining laboring populations. Establishes that enslaved women in Jamaica experienced a considerable shift in their work responsibilities and their subjection to discipline as slaveholders sought to capitalize on their abilities to reproduce. Enslaved women's reproductive capabilities were pivotal for slavery and the plantation economy's survival once legal supplies from Africa were discontinued.
