{"id":25758,"date":"2012-10-04T18:25:04","date_gmt":"2012-10-04T18:25:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=25758"},"modified":"2015-02-16T23:43:34","modified_gmt":"2015-02-16T23:43:34","slug":"ian-thomson-jamaica-was-modern-before-britain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=25758","title":{"rendered":"Ian Thomson: Jamaica was modern before Britain"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ian Thomson: Jamaica was modern before Britain<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Independent<\/a>
\nLondon, England
\n2012-10-04<\/p>\n

Miguel Cullen<\/strong><\/p>\n

To mark Black History Month the author of \u201cDead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica<\/a>\u201d talks to Miguel Cullen about the ways Jamaica is punching above its weight<\/em><\/p>\n

Jamaica<\/a> is a country that exceeds its limitations. For example India\u2019s GDP is 180 times that of the West Indian country and Jamaica could fit inside it 300 times. Yet Jamaica won twice as many medals at the London Olympics, 12 to India\u2019s six.<\/p>\n

Musically it shines beyond its scope too: between the mid-1950s and 2000 Jamaica had produced one new music recording per 1,000 people each year \u2013 making it per capita the world\u2019s most prolific generator of recorded music.<\/p>\n

Jamaican culture has long been fashionable and on Google Trends, a means of measuring how highly words feature in the search engine. In the list of most-searched countries “Jamaica” comes a tight second to “Russia,” a country so big it makes Jamaica look like a minnow.<\/p>\n

In view of Jamaica\u2019s small financial and physical scale, it\u2019s logical to think of it as a statistical freak of nature, an anomaly, to have such a broad world standing. How could such a tiny island, which is only this year celebrating 50 years of independence from the UK, compete with superpowers like India and Russia?<\/p>\n

It was with this question in mind that, on the eve of Black History Month in the UK, I visited the London home of Ian Thomson<\/a>, the author of the hugely successful (and controversial) Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica<\/a><\/em>…<\/p>\n

…The book won the Royal Society of Literature\u2019s Ondaatje Prize, and the Dolman Travel Book of the Year. It combines serpentine, fragile descriptions of Jamaica\u2019s natural beauty with an unafraid look at the horrors of Jamaican violence, in a way that is intransigent and unique.<\/p>\n

\u201cJamaica was modern before Britain was,\u201d Thomson tells me, sitting in his study overlooking the greenery of Alexandra Park. \u201cWhat fascinated me about these Caribbean countries was that for me they\u2019re the first modern societies \u2013 they were the first countries to have intermingling, mixed race people, across the colour bar<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen Jamaicans came to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, they were often very surprised by the conservative reactions to some of them being mixed race \u2013 mixed racing had been going on for centuries in the Caribbean.<\/strong> So in a sense you could say that although Jamaica is in some ways parochial, in other ways it\u2019s incredibly forward-thinking.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ian Thomson: Jamaica was modern before Britain The Independent London, England 2012-10-04 Miguel Cullen To mark Black History Month the author of \u201cDead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica\u201d talks to Miguel Cullen about the ways Jamaica is punching above its weight Jamaica is a country that exceeds its limitations. For example India\u2019s GDP is 180 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,21,8,10],"tags":[12294,80,12293,2502],"class_list":["post-25758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-latincarib","category-media-archive","category-uk","tag-ian-thomson","tag-jamaica","tag-miguel-cullen","tag-the-independent"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25758"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25758\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}