Publisher's Synopsis
Both eloquent and intimate, the book is based largely upon a series of 90 rare and detailed interviews Brodber conducted with people who lived in Jamaica from around 1900 to the 1970s, and it reveals their aspirations, struggles, defeats, and victories from childhood on. Brodber focuses on their family lives--often marked by separations--and on their opportunities for education, travel, courtship, and religious practice. Her interviews expose the limited employment options of black Jamaicans in the early 20th century and document their political situation and their long road to suffrage, finally granted in 1944. Brodber also records how they were affected both by man-made disasters, such as the World Wars, and by natural ones, including several hurricanes. Their stories reveal the problem-solving devices they inherited from their ancestors and also the existence of "ancestral anger," an emotion and attitude that finds expression in contemporary Jamaican society.
The testimonies are placed in the wider context of British colonial policy and the political economy of the island and bring to life the people who often figured only as statistics in censuses and colonial governors' dispatches. Using oral accounts and archival sources in Jamaica and Great Britain, the work offers a "bottom up" view of Jamaican society, a corrective to much of the past historiography that has been limited by the "great man" approach to scholarship. With its colorful accounts of tea meetings and marches and its recital of rhymes, songs, and proverbs, the book also offers a treasury of folk materials.
In language that will engage the general reader, this talented writer presents a new perspective on the impact of slavery in Jamaica; it also will be valuable to historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists.
