The purpose of this study is to examine how children of Jamaican parentage, who came of age during the 1980s in Britain and the 1990s in the United States, constructed their identity by using social memory and popular culture. This research project is an interdisciplinary, comparative study that seeks to analyze how the shifting of boundaries, sense of dislocation, and loss of rootedness are grounded in the construction of a new transnational urban Jamaican Black identity, for which I have coined the term yáad/yard-hip hop. Yáad/Yard-Hip Hop characterizes the post-1960s immigrant generation, who found themselves “locked symbiotically into an antagonistic relationship” between their parents’ memories of home and their understanding of self within the socio-political context of Britain and the United States (Gilroy, The Black Atlantic 1-2). The deconstruction of these two narratives exposes the position of this age group as being wedged in-between two temporal spaces. Therefore, the significance of this study serves to demonstrate that the state of ambivalence experienced by this post-1960s immigrant generation not only encapsulated their identity within the period of the 1980s and the 1990s, but can also be viewed as indicative of how Caribbeanness, or more specifically, Jamaicanness, came to be reconfigured outside of the Caribbean region from the 1960s onwards.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:536265 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Brown, La Tasha Amelia |
| Publisher | University of Warwick |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/35719/ |
Page generated in 0.0103 seconds