Living the West Indian Dream: Archipelagic Cosmopolitanism and Triangulated Economies of Desire in Jamaican Popular Culture
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Published:May 2017
Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo, 2017. "Living the West Indian Dream: Archipelagic Cosmopolitanism and Triangulated Economies of Desire in Jamaican Popular Culture", Archipelagic American Studies, Brian Russell Roberts, Michelle Ann Stephens
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US engagements with the Caribbean (Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine among them) have long been rooted in the notion that US-Americans are the divinely ordained leaders of their inferior neighbors to the south, especially of those whose geographical smallness provides concrete and clearly divinely determined evidence of their inferiority. The US-Anglophone Caribbean relationship is also shaped by both the archipelago and the continental nation’s relationship with another island—England. Attending to this archipelagic triangulation facilitates increased awareness of Anglophone Caribbean representational agency. The Caribbean is not only an object of the gaze. It is also a gazer. It is not just an exoticized, consumed, represented, and constructed object. It is also an exoticizer, consumer, representer, and constructor of its Others, and its list of exotic Others includes the United States. This essay reveals and analyzes signal engagements with the United States in Anglophone Caribbean television, music, and popular culture.
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