""Modern Blackness "is an important book. It is well written, it puts forth a creative theoretical apparatus, and it displays Deborah A. Thomas's keen ethnographic eye. It is on a topic of extreme importance to the discipline of anthropology as well as to African diaspora and Caribbean and Latin American studies, engaging as it does some of the effects of neoliberalism and structural adjustment in today's world."--Kevin A. Yelvington, author of "Producing Power: Ethnicity, Gender, and Class in a Caribbean Workplace"

Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: "Out of Many, One (Black) People" 1
Part 1: The Global-National 27
1. The "Problem" of Nationalism in the British West Indies; or, "What We Are and What We Hope to Be" 29
2. Political Economies of Culture 58
Part II: The National-Local 93
3. Strangers and Friends 95
4. Institutionalizing (Racialized) Progress 130
5. Emancipating the Nation (Again) 158
Part III: The Local-Global 193
6. Political Economies of Modernity 195
7. Modern Blackness; or, Theoretical "Tripping" on Black Vernacular Cultures 230
Conclusion: The Remix 263
Epilogue 271
Notes 279
Bibliography 311
Index 341

Deborah A. Thomas is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University.