“Yu a Brand”: Making a Mark as a Road Scholar from Jamaica

This essay traces the author’s intellectual trajectory as a Road Scholar translating academic discourse into the language of the street. Cooper acknowledges the trademarks by which she has come to be known: cultural critic, language-rights activist, feminist scholar, incisive newspaper columnist, television talk show host. These trademarks represent the interwoven strands of the ideas she elaborates in her academic work and her interventions in the media, both local and international. Her brand is an assemblage of identities sharing a common ideological core: contesting many of the “givens” she inherited as a Black girl growing up in the 1950s when institutional racism and class prejudice defined the appropriate place for African Jamaicans. On the periphery! As a public intellectual, Cooper interrogates the fictive national motto—“Out of many, one people”—that reinscribes the diminution of the “many.” She locates the culture of the African Jamaican majority at the very center of national consciousness.