On the one hand, therefore, diasporic resources include the kinds of music, food, fashion, and political sensibilities that accompany people and media as they circulate and that become the raw materials from which communities of black folk in various locations might draw in order to produce innovative racial and national subjectivities at particular moments. On the other hand, because people (through remittances) have become Caribbean countries' largest foreignexchange earners, they are themselves important resources. Jamaicans themselves have become diasporic resources mobilized in a transnational sociocultural and political sphere towards national development goals that now, by necessity, must be explicitly formulated in trans-territorial terms.  
What was notable about the Diaspora Conference I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, then, was ultimately its attempt to imagine a new means by which to survive globalization - by changing nationalist notions of collective belonging in ways that would broaden what it means to be both American and Jamaican. Jamaican communities abroad were positioned as representing not only significant economic interests, but also a fair amount of political power - power that could be used for the advancement of Caribbean interests in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. As the Observer editors argued,  
Jamaica as a nation state does have influence beyond its size and economic power, driven substantially by the creative energy of its people, at home and in the Diaspora. If those abroad can be organised politically, there is the capacity to add another dimension to Jamaica's capacity on the international stage. But perhaps more critical is their ability to help add insulation against the turbulence of the globalised environment. ${ }^{12}$  
12 'The Jamaican Diaspora Conference is just the beginning', Daily Observer, 18 June 2004.