In my first book project, Hybrid Diasporas in the Age of Rising China: Tracing Contestations of China’s Presence in the Caribbean , I use ethnography, historical analysis, and postcolonial theory to examine how colonially mediated ideas of race and identity are reconstituted in conflicts engendered by the extension of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI-China’s re-construction of the silk route) into Jamaica and the broader Caribbean. Funded by Fulbright Hays, Indiana University, and the Coordinating Council for Women in History, this project stems from 13 months of ethnographic, archival, and spatial data collected between 2015-2018 within Kingston, Jamaica, and in Chinese Jamaican community organizations in Toronto and New York in the years preceding Jamaica’s adoption of the BRI in 2019.
My analysis centers on multi-racial Chinese Jamaican community organizations as they simultaneously navigate complex ideas of racialization and nation making within Jamaica and racialized conflicts resulting from PRC expansion on the island. As part of this analysis, I expand concepts of diaspora and race to include the complex histories of Asian communities within the Caribbean. I make visible the ways in which colonial logics still bind the political, economic, and spatial mobility of both Black and Asian people in the Caribbean, while also reflecting the complex ways Chinese Jamaicans are racialized and bound in the Chinese diaspora. Moreover, I highlight how multi-racial Chinese Jamaicans create captious transnational diasporic networks to support their intersecting Black and Asian identities. By doing so I explore how these transnational identities interplay with global development processes inherent in the BRI.
My analysis centers on multi-racial Chinese Jamaican community organizations as they simultaneously navigate complex ideas of racialization and nation making within Jamaica and racialized conflicts resulting from PRC expansion on the island. As part of this analysis, I expand concepts of diaspora and race to include the complex histories of Asian communities within the Caribbean. I make visible the ways in which colonial logics still bind the political, economic, and spatial mobility of both Black and Asian people in the Caribbean, while also reflecting the complex ways Chinese Jamaicans are racialized and bound in the Chinese diaspora. Moreover, I highlight how multi-racial Chinese Jamaicans create captious transnational diasporic networks to support their intersecting Black and Asian identities. By doing so I explore how these transnational identities interplay with global development processes inherent in the BRI.