ABSTRACT
Cezair-Thompsons novel opens with a young Jamaican woman standing at her veranda surveying Kingston during the 1981 state of emergency. Regardless of the historical moment portrayed, and of the degree of explicit political engagement, the literatures voice hails from the period in which the texts were written, a period that reaped dire consequences of neoliberal globalization. Like other Jamaican novels of the 1980s, such as Vanessa Spences The Roads are Down and Elean Thomas The Last Room, this one is structured by conflicted relationship between the middle class woman and the surrounding conditions of austerity and instability that threaten to drive her into voluntary exile. An awareness of transnational forces can be seen quite consistently, in the movement of characters within the region or away across the globe; in the references, present in all the works, to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), foreign corporations, and client regimes; and thematic and artistic connections between these works and other postcolonial literatures.
