Academic literature on the topic 'Jamaica – History'

The History traces the development of libraries in Jamaica from the late seventeenth century to the present day. It examines reasons for the spate of anti-popery material in the earliest collections, and treats the subsequent story within the context of socio-economic conditions. Note is taken of the efforts of Ministers of Religion to inculcate the habit of reading among both the white and black population, as a means of improving their minds and strengthening their moral fibre. Increasing respect for books and demand for information appear, as the country puts aside its colonial status and assumes responsibility for its own destiny. The History documents the growth of the Jamaica Library Service, the emergence of the National Library of Jamaica, and the establishment of NACOLADS (the National Council on Libraries, Archives and Documentation Services) now regarded as a model for such development in the Third World.

In this dissertation, I trace academics' attitudes to writing and its instruction through the six-decade history of The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, in Jamaica. I establish that while the institution's general writing courses facilitate students' initiation into the academy, these courses reflect assumptions about writing and learning that need to be reassessed to yield versatile writers and disassociate the courses and writing from the alarmist rhetoric that often emerges in the media and in academe. In Jamaica, critics of university students' writing often promote what Mike Rose calls the "myth of transience" and perpetuate the "the rhetoric of transparent disciplinarity." According to the myth of transience, if writing is taught correctly at pre-university levels, students will not need writing instruction in the academy. The concept that I call "the rhetoric of transparent disciplinarity" is defined in the work of David Russell, who examines the view that writing is a single, mechanical, generalizable skill that is learned once and for all. Advocates of this view consider writing as a transparent recording of reality or completed thought that can be taught separate from disciplinary knowledge. Based on my analysis of archival materials and data gathered from questionnaires and interviews with past and current writing specialists, this view has been evident at the UWI, Mona, since the institution's earliest years. Academics there have perpetuated a certain tacit assumption that writing is a natural process. By recalling the country's history of education, I demonstrate how this assumption parallels colonial administrators' determination that Jamaican Creole speakers should naturally learn English to advance in society. I argue that if the university wants to widen participation while maintaining excellence, then academics should foster knowledge production (rather than only reproduction) by acknowledging the extent to which disciplines are rhetorically constructed through writing. If writing specialists and other content faculty draw on rhetoric's attention to audience, situation, and purpose, they can foster learning by helping students see how writing contributes to knowledge-making inside the academy and beyond. This study contributes to international discussions about how students learn to write and use writing in higher education.

In Jamaica the economic environment is characterized by abiding foreign dependence, stagnant growth, and deficient development. This thesis, based on fifteen months of fieldwork in Montego Bay is concerned with the everyday understanding and management of Jamaica's adverse economy. This is explored through an ethnographic analysis of economic practice among five groups variously involved in Montego Bay's tourist sector. These groups include Sindhi merchants, local craft vendors, an artisan cooperative, a Rastafarian tour village, and local lottery scammers. Their dynamic case studies illustrate a diverse set of responses to the constricted political, economic, and social structures of the Jamaican economy, depicted as one of comprehensive and inescapable precariousness, or as a state of sufferation. This thesis examines these groups' everyday strategies and ethics of survival in sufferation, which include articulations of market failure, production, commercial skill, cultural property, and capital seizure. From these strategies emerges an understanding of how notions of history, citizenship, race, and cooperation structure the formation of economic practice, and bear upon constructions of the market.

This dissertation is an economic impact assessment of Jamaica's plantation economy from 1750 to 1805. In doing so, it measures and examines growth in completely new ways by employing, as indicators, output, land prices, labour flows and prices, national income, and productivity trends. The study maintains that, rather than declining, the economy was growing, with most of that growth taking place during the decade before the Transatlantic Trade in Africans was abolished in 1807. Growth was also facilitated by the policies adopted by planters to reorganize the plantation system. The presence of enslaved labour did not render the system inefficient. In fact, the economic reality was quite the opposite. The conclusion, therefore, is that with sufficient evidence of growth and productivity, abolition was not predicated only on negative cost benefit considerations.

This thesis attempts to chart the development of a Jamaican musical form known as dub. This development is considered primarily in terms of the island's encounter with a series of new playback, amplification, recording, and sound treatment technologies. Section I focuses on the formation of the Jamaican sound system (a network of powerful mobile discos) and its pivotal role in the birth of a fertile domestic record industry. Section II extends the investigation to the Jamaican recording studio and record industry. What distinguishes this work from others on Jamaican dub is its emphasis on technology, and theories of technology, within a geo-political framework. In Section I, this emphasis is most notably informed by the work of Harold Innis, Karl Marx and Lewis Mumford, with Marshall McLuhan and Walter Benjamin becoming more prominent in Section II. Key technologies in this analysis include mechanization (mechanical reproducibility), the Williamson amplification circuit, the House of Joy speaker, the dub plate (acetate phonograph) and vinyl record, twin-turntables and the microphone, the magnetic tape recorder, and perhaps most importantly, the multi-track recorder and interface (the multi-track mixing-board).