Carolyn Cooper
Professor
Department of Literatures in English
UWI, Mona

Branding Jamaica: Popular Culture in ‘Post-Colonial’ Context

Focussing on competing conceptions of the Jamaican nation state and the brand, “Jamaica,” the paper interrogates the euphemistic “out of many, one” definition of identity promulgated by the Jamaican elite. It argues that popular culture is the primary site in which pan/africanist definitions of the nation are valorized. Using the example of the contestations around the celebration of Emancipation Day, which was erased from the national calendar at Independence, the paper documents the ways in which popular discourse affirms the salience of memorializing emancipation. It documents the controversy surrounding the provocative monument to Emancipation from slavery, 1838 that currently reposes in Emancipation Park, and argues that the monument, with its consolidation of the myth of mindless African physicality, may be read as a metaphor for the reparations that were paid to the plantocracy for the loss of slave labour. The paper raises fundamental issues about the role of popular culture in the critique of elitist constructions of ‘post-colonial’ nation state.