As David Murray has noted for Martinicans during the mid-1990s, 'America, or more particularly a set of mostly media-generated images of "black" America, occupied an increasing amount of attention in discussions about self and society' (Murray, 2002, p. 159). Because young people were the primary consumers of these images, Murray found that youth had become the 'new metaphor through which dissatisfaction or disappointment with Martinican society was voiced' (Murray, 2002, p. 158). Similar processes were afoot in Jamaica during this period, and the generational difference Murray identifies - a difference that seems to mark a particular shift in political worldview - has also been key to the consolidation of what I am calling modern blackness in Jamaica. That is, modern blackness reflects a changed geopolitical environment, one in which the gaps between rich and poor, developed and underdeveloped, North and South have been exacerbated by worldwide de-industrialization and the rise of the service and informal economic sectors, the proliferation of information technologies, and (throughout the Third World) the implementation of structural adjustment policies. This new environment has undermined the earlier contention that formerly colonial territories should be sovereign in order that they may participate meaningfully in international forums, and instead has generated what several scholars have insisted is a 'new imperialism', a capitulation to the dictates of global (American and European Union) markets regardless of the sociocultural, political, economic, and environmental costs (Harvey, 2003).  
That youth often symbolically occupy the contested terrain of nationalists' deferred (or even derailed) development dreams does not preclude them from elaborating their own. In other words, on the one hand, current processes of globalization throughout the Caribbean have generated increased rates of violent crime, unemployment,