ABSTRACT
Much of the growing literature on transnationalism has related to economic and political transnational transactions, or to occupational, religious or migratory transnational behaviors. Rosina Brodber Wiltshire first coined the term —the transnational family—referring to those bifurcated networks that were a feature of Jamaican/North American families. The role of Caribbean families in transnationalism in the UK-based literature is a relatively underexplored one. Transnationalism refers to actions that take place across, or have consequences across, national boundaries, where the actors involved have an active involvement, over time, in more than one nation state. Fransnational kinship was an integral dynamic of this—and other—families, and the international network of kin in which the family was situated formed a continuing backdrop to Benson's perceptions of himself and his family. The case studies have articulated both the symbolic and the practical, discourses of transnational family narratives. Membership of a transnational family contains within it a "transnational imagination."
