12 'The Jamaican Diaspora Conference is just the beginning', Daily Observer, 18 June 2004.  
The invocation of globalization here is strategic, and the proposal that diasporic Jamaicans might ameliorate its effects stands as a response to the diminished power of Caribbean (and other Third World) States to provide the resources citizens need in an environment in which the United States, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank set the terms for social and economic development.  
Thus, Jamaicans' use of the United States to advance new goals and new understandings of community becomes a critical node in transforming nationalisms 'at home' and in the mitigation of the effects of a global political economy which, through the development of new spatial relations of production, has reinstated the national-racial hierarchies of an earlier imperial moment. In other words, redefining the spatial reach of Jamaica and America has become part of a broader project of racial vindication, one that is manifest not only through performative consumption, but also through a politics of citizenship that draws upon nationalist identifications while also extending notions of community across territorial boundaries. Black America and black Jamaica, therefore, exist in one transnational sociocultural and political field, a field that is characterized by power relations that are historically contingent yet dynamic. Only a commitment to apprehending diaspora as a process rather than as a historical event or state of being can empower us to render more complexly the ways this field transforms over time.