The intensification of transnational migration and the creation of Caribbean diasporas have also raised another major issue for Caribbean States, one that has to do with the level of 'Americanization' occurring throughout the region. With the United States' economic, political, and cultural influence strengthening over the course of the twentieth century, the nature of many governments' much cherished post-colonial independence has been called into question. Yet Caribbean people have always engaged 'America' critically, negotiating its power and promise while actively building new notions of national belonging and racial mapping. These new notions have had complex, and sometimes unexpected, effects upon Caribbean nationalisms, even as these nationalisms are being reformulated 'at home'. If we agree that 'social spaces are constructed in tandem with processes of racial formation' (Brown, 1998, p. 291), then new understandings of space and community - such as those reflected during the Jamaica Diaspora Conference - raise important questions regarding emergent concepts of blackness, both in Jamaica and among Jamaicans (and their descendants) elsewhere. For example, how might we situate contemporary black America with respect to new configurations of diasporic blackness? Where does Jamaica stand in relation to (black) America, and how might this standing be interpreted differently by different generations of Jamaicans? These questions, in turn, implore us to consider the two sets of issues raised here migration and the reconfiguration of nationalisms, and Americanization and the reconfiguration of blacknesses - within the same spatial frame of analysis.