# Modern blackness in Jamaica  
By the late 1990s in Jamaica, when urban popular expressions of blackness became paramount within contemporary invocations of Jamaican particularity, the hegemony of the Creole multiracial nationalism that had been consolidated by political and intellectual elites at the time of independence in 1962 had been displaced (Thomas, 2004). This shift is critical because it marks a partial triumph of the ideologies, styles, and political and economic practices developed by working-class and poor black Jamaicans over the notions of respectable citizenship that have been (and to a degree, still are) promulgated by political and cultural elites, middle-class professionals, and most religious communities. As a result, it reflects a broader transformation in terms of who (and what) has public power to define and represent Jamaican culture in the contemporary era.  
This transformation has not been due to any one specific social movement, or even to the work of several different movements. It has been, instead, the result of a confluence of factors that have had a variety of (sometimes unexpected) effects. One of these factors has been the intensification of transnational migration and the proliferation of media technologies, which have facilitated the amplification of a diasporic consciousness. Another has been the increased political, economic, and social influence of the United States, which has opened avenues for many black Jamaicans to circumvent the colonial hierarchies of colour, class, gender, culture and progress that were institutionalized by the British. These two factors are related, of course, since after independence and the closing of emigration