Author:
La Tasha Brown, Lecturer for the Black Studies Department.
Title:
I’m working on an article now called “The Social Psychological Effects of Memory and Re-memory in a Construction of Transnational-Jamaican-Black Identity.”
Subject:
It’s interdisciplinary about first generation Jamaican-Americans and Jamaican-British in terms of how they constructed their identity in terms of popular culture and social memory. This group is not quite American and not quite Jamaican or not quite British-Jamaican, so it’s finding a way they can speak to many different localities without caving in to one national identity because at the heart of it it’s a national identity without regard to where they were born.
How long have you been working on this?
I’ve done a couple of conference papers around it and it was also a chapter in my thesis. I would say, if you want to include the Ph.D. process, maybe two years now.
Publication date:
By the end of this year because journals have a quicker turn around.
What makes this project unique?
I think many times when we think about first generation and second generation, we don’t think about a group who is from the Caribbean because there isn’t a language issue that is going on. But I think my group particularly in the states and in New York City, are constructing an identity that is going below the radar.