Transnational Yearnings

By exploring circuits of migration and personal exchange between Toronto and Jamaica, this book maps a new way to look at postcolonial contact zones and transnational migration.

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The global pathways that connect cities and nations are congested with people, money, and cultural transmissions. Transnational Yearnings is about the migrations and uneven exchanges that bind postcolonial Jamaica to the diasporic city. It is about the desires, intimacies, and power relations that at once inform and reflect transnational migration and the diasporization of urban space.

This innovative and provocative book maps out a new way to look at contemporary contact zones and global interconnections as it traces circuits of migration and leisure travel between the Caribbean and Toronto, a city that has become for Jamaican Canadians both a place of promise and cultural vitality and a site of criminalization and exclusion through deportation.

Transnational Yearnings is an important addition to recent scholarship on Caribbean transnationalism and Canadian-Caribbean relations, one that paints a fuller portrait of Jamaican immigrants than we often see.