ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author briefly outlines two versions of a black nationalist theme. The first is drawn from a text published at the turn of the last century, a text whose contributors formed part of the emergent post-emancipation stratum of black middle-class Jamaicans. The second black nationalist theme is grounded in his own ethnographic research in a community in East Rural St. Andrew at the turn of this century. Here, what is emphasized is a more racialized, individualist, autonomous, and consumerist vision of progress whereby a great many lower-class black Jamaican men and women are increasingly bypassing local middle-class leadership to get what they need. The authors’ acceptance of an evolutionary paradigm with respect to progress or, in the terminology of the day, civilization is clear, but here they used Social Darwinism to critique post-emancipation British colonial policy.
