Jamaican cultural symbols as transethnic artifacts: How black immigrant vendors construct boundaries of racial consciousness at a Caribbean festival

Abstract

This study demonstrates how black immigrants strategically deploy symbols of nationality within the context of black spaces to construct a politics of solidarity, rather than ethnic distance, with African Americans and other blacks. It draws from the ethnographic data of black craft vendors at a Caribbean festival and shows the way Jamaican cultural symbols become transethnic artifacts – racialized objects that could be adopted by black people from a range of ethnicities to signal black diasporic consciousness. This study reveals that black immigrant vendors construct boundaries of racial consciousness through transethnic artifacts in three overlapping ways: (1) by explicitly connecting Jamaica to Africa instead of privileging the Caribbean; (2) creating boundaries based on black racial consciousness instead of shared ethnicity; and (3) by prioritizing psychic income, the non-economic returns on their entrepreneurial efforts. This article argues that, within the context of the festival, the symbols that black immigrants wield to signal nationality are neither inconsequential forms of symbolic ethnicity nor are they anti-African American distancing mechanisms, but are, instead, transethnic artifacts that facilitate black place-making. This process reveals the way black immigrant vendors forge diasporic meanings of blackness, rather than foster black ethnic exceptionalism.