Transnational Yearnings
The global pathways that connect cities and nations are congested with people, money, and cultural transmissions. These routes are also hampered by uneven power relations and the efforts of groups to maintain or change them. How do hopes and dreams, feelings of guilt or loss affect transnational migration and the way migrants relate to their environment and to one another?
This book is about the migrations and uneven exchanges that bind postcolonial Jamaica to the diasporic city. It is about the desires, intimacies, and power relations that at once inform and reflect transnational migration and the diasporization of urban space. Transnational Yearnings maps a new way to look at contemporary contact zones and global interconnections as it traces circuits of migration and leisure travel between the Caribbean and Toronto, a city that has become for Jamaican Canadians both a place of promise and cultural vitality and a site of criminalization and exclusion through deportation.
Transnational Yearnings is an important addition to recent scholarship on Caribbean transnationalism and Canadian-Caribbean relations. By merging the study of large-scale processes, local opposition movements, and interpersonal connections, it paints a fuller portrait than Jamaican immigrants often receive in the media and will appeal to anyone interested in tourism, migration, postcolonialism, and global exchange.
This book will appeal to anyone interested in tourism, migration, postcolonialism, multiculturalism, and transnational studies.
Burman provides compelling insights into transnationalism and the circular exchanges that occur, both in regards to the Jamaican Canadian diaspora and to Canadian tourism in Jamaica. The field of Caribbean Canadian Studies is expanding, and Transnational Yearnings will make a useful and important contribution to the areas of diasporic studies, migration studies, immigration and settlement studies, as well as cultural studies.
As a study of Caribbean transnationalism, this is one of the best and most inviting I have read. Burman’s scholarship is excellent and her prose is well-written and accessible. Perhaps her book’s most intriguing contribution to studies of globalization is in its focus on the ‘host’ community as more than simply a static entity but as something that actively shapes global Caribbean identities. Transnational Yearnings would be a valuable text in undergraduate courses on tourism, Caribbean societies, and transnationalism.
Introduction: Mobilities, Immobilizations, and Transnational Desires
1 Disservice Industry: Colonial and Postcolonial Tourism Development in Jamaica
2 Global Subjects, Tourist Objects: The Souvenir Trade in Jamaica
3 Charged Circuits: Transmigration and Diasporic Conditions
4 Migrant Remittances: Cultural Economies of Yearning
5 “Danger to the Public”: Targeting and Deporting Jamaican-Born Torontonians
6 Masquerading Toronto through Caribana: Diasporic Carnival Meets the Sign “Music ends here”
Conclusion: “It is not enough/to be pause”
Notes
References
Index
