As a result, Paulette's comments also show that history matters to the development of personal and community consciousness, and that the histories that matter are not limited to Jamaica and the West Indies, but can also include those of black people in the United States. For her, television shows like the original miniseries 'Roots' were additional resources through which to view race and class relations within her own community and nation, giving her another language through which to develop what she called her 'black consciousness'. Here, then, African American cultural productions became diasporic resources that extended their relevance across national borders because they helped provide insight into the kinds of structural inequalities faced by poor and working-class people, not only in the United States, but also elsewhere in the black Atlantic. Equally important, they could inspire the pride needed for surviving incidences of racial and class prejudice, both those experienced within Jamaica and those expected overseas.  
Yet the circulation of African American cultural production does not occur outside broader relations of power and privilege, and this is what so many commentators are identifying as they decry the encroachment of American blackness upon the nationalist sensibilities of Jamaicans. In other words, as several scholars have argued, diaspora is not a unified field of experience and should be theorized in terms of power relations/asymmetries across communities, relations that are about race and nation but that are mediated by class and gender (Brown, 1998; Campt, 2004; Edwards, 2003). These insights should direct us towards two related points of inquiry. The first has to do with how current processes