HomeBooksJamaica in the Canadian Experience

Jamaica in the Canadian Experience

A Multiculturalizing Presence

edited by Andrea Davis and Carl E. James

In 2012, Jamaica celebrates its fiftieth anniversary of independence from Britain. In the short period of its life as a nation, Jamaica’s increasingly powerful influence on global culture cannot go unremarked. The growth of Jamaican diasporas beyond Britain to the United States, Canada and West Africa has served to strengthen Jamaica’s global reach, so that today Jamaica’s cultural, economic and political achievements are felt way beyond its national borders. This anthology commemorates Jamaica’s independence by acknowledging the immense and widespread contributions of Jamaica and Jamaicans to Canadian society.

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August 2012
ISBN: 9781552665350
320 pages
CA$35.00
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About the book

Race & Anti-Racism African Heritage & Black Diaspora

What people are saying

Alissa Trotz, Associate Professor and Director, Caribbean Studies, University of Toronto
“This important interdisciplinary collection pays tribute to the transnational migrations that are such an integral part of the fabric of Caribbean life, and that have also fundamentally shaped the Canadian landscape. The book offers us generous and hopeful vision of multiculturalism, peopled by the daily joys, trials and aspirations of generations of Jamaican-Canadians who are neither simply urban residents nor recent arrivals, and whose presence is key to understanding what it means to be Canadian today.”

Sheila Sealy Monteith, High Commissioner for Jamaica to Canada
“I am pleased to be associated in a modest way with the genesis and conceptualization of this work and even more gratified by its completion and the high quality of its content.”

Authors

Andrea Davis

ANDREA DAVIS is an associate professor in the Department of Humanities at York University. She is also the interim director of the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean.

Carl E. James

Carl E. James holds the Jean Augustine Chair in Education, Community & Diaspora at York University, where he teaches in the Faculty of Education and in the Graduate Program in Sociology. For many years, he taught annually in the Teacher Training Department at Upsala University, Sweden. With an interdisciplinary lens, he explores how race intersects with other identity markers – like ethnicity, gender, class, generational status, etc. – to shape individuals’ experiences and life trajectories. A Distinguished Research Professor and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, he also holds the 2022 Killam Prize in Social Sciences, the Outstanding Contribution Award (Canadian Sociological Association), and honorary doctorates. With the belief that that longitudinal studies provide significant, in-depth and valuable insights into people’s lived realities, Carl often conducts follow-up studies with research participants — one of which is represented in the short NFB film Making It. In his work, he highlights the significant ways in which economic, social, and cultural conditions structure institutional policies, programs, and practices which mediate the educational, employment, and career opportunities and achievements of Canadian youth. He seeks to move us beyond the essentialist and homogenizing discourses that are used in the representation of racialized.