The work includes a detailed historical account of the Manley years, focusing on shifting relations between contending social forces and on the interaction between economics and politics. Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The preeminent sociologist and National Book Award–winning author of Freedom in the Making of Western Culture grapples with the paradox of his homeland: its remarkable achievements amid continuing struggles since independence. There are few places more puzzling than Jamaica. Jamaicans claim their home has more churches per square mile than any other country, yet it is one of the most murderous nations in the world. Its reggae superstars and celebrity sprinters outshine musicians and athletes in countries hundreds of times its size. Jamaica’s economy is anemic and too many of its people impoverished, yet they are, according to international surveys, some of the happiest on earth. In The Confounding Island, Orlando Patterson returns to the place of his birth to reckon with its history and culture. Patterson investigates the failures of Jamaica’s postcolonial democracy, exploring why the country has been unable to achieve broad economic growth and why its free elections and stable government have been unable to address violence and poverty. He takes us inside the island’s passion for cricket and the unparalleled international success of its local musical traditions. He offers a fresh answer to a question that has bedeviled sports fans: Why are Jamaican runners so fast? Jamaica’s successes and struggles expose something fundamental about the world we live in. If we look closely at the Jamaican example, we see the central dilemmas of globalization, economic development, poverty reduction, and postcolonial politics thrown into stark relief.

In 1974, following a successful parliamentary election, Michael Manley and his People's National Party took Jamaica onto a self-proclaimed democratic socialist path. The project failed even prior to the subsequent electoral defeat of the PNP in 1980. This short-lived experiment has evoked considerable interest among development scholars. In this book, Nelson Keith and Novella Keith challenge current interpretations of Jamaican events and develop an alternative theoretical model: national popularism. Without dismissing the negative machinations by the United States, internal mismanagement, and a variety of other problems, the authors argue that the events in question speak less of a failure of socialism than of the fragility of a national class alliance that coalesced temporarily, amidst a crisis, around a "new" politics. While incorporating radical impulses "from below" as well as socialist policies, the new politics was rooted in liberal democratic strains that had evolved historically in ways that could accommodate these impulses. The Manley project can thus be better understood as the "management" of peripheral capitalism rather than a budding socialism, for which there were few supports in the society. In their rich historical analysis of race and class in Jamaica, the authors trace the emergence and demise of progressive "alternative paths to development" in the Third World. Their approach provides a model for class analysis that avoids over-reliance on economic factors, gives socio-historical elements their full due, and contributes to a reassessment of significant events in Jamaican history. The authors' conceptual model allows important insights to surface that are obscured in the discourse on "socialism and its failure." There was, in particular real cultural and ideological change in Jamaica in the 1970s, as the Rastafarian worldview made inroads into an erstwhile neo-colonial culture.

Situated Lives brings together the most important recent feminist and critical research that situates gender in relationship to the historical and material circumstances where gender, race, class and sexual orientation intersect and shape everyday interaction. Contributors include: Barbara Babcock, Jean Comaroff, Sarah Franklin, Faye Ginsburg, Matthew Gutmann, Faye V. Harrison, Louise Lamphere, Ellen Lewin, Jos^'e Lim^'on, Iris Lopez, Emily Martin, Mary Moran, Kirin Narayan, Aihwa Ong, Devon G. Pe^~na, Beatriz Pesquera, Helena Ragon^'e, Rayna Rapp, Judith Rollins, Leslie Salzinger, Denise Segura, Carol Stack, Ann Stoler, Donald D. Stull, Brett Williams, Patricia Zavella.

A ground-breaking work in Africana political thought that links the plight of progressive political endeavors in Africa with those in the Diaspora and beyond, Democratic Tragedy in the Postcolony engages with two of the defining political sagas of the postcolonial era. The book presents Michael Manley of Jamaica and Nelson Mandela of South Africa as tragic political leaders at the helm of popular democratic projects that run aground in the face of the constraints that a subordinate position in the global economy presents for such endeavors. Jamaica’s experiment with democratic socialism as an alternative path to development at the height of the cold war is considered alongside post-Apartheid South Africa’s search for a development model consistent with the demand for civic empowerment and equitable distribution of social goods in the aftermath of Apartheid. Democratic Political Tragedy in the Postcolony theorizes the defining tragic impasse and the telling vacillations by which the postcolonies in question are brought to the neoliberal catastrophes that currently prevail.

Argues that another form of development — by the poor and for the poor — is not only possible but necessary.