and poverty at the same time as structural adjustment programmes have reduced government expenditure on health care, education, literacy programmes, and other social services, thereby heightening conditions of instability for the majority of Jamaican families; while on the other hand, contemporary neo-liberal capitalist development has also created new possibilities for realizing ambition, and new opportunities for advancing new or previously marginalized ideologies and practices regarding citizenship and subjectivity. In Jamaica, for example, youth have actively transformed aspects of old colonial hierarchies of race and gender, in part through their consumption and re-signification of aspects of African American style within contemporary dancehall culture (Cooper, 1993; Hope, 2004; Thomas, 2004; Ulysse, 1999). In order to understand the meanings of America and diasporic blackness, then, we must pay attention to what different Jamaicans do with America. More particularly, what use do Jamaicans make of black America? Alternatively put, what has black America allowed variously situated Jamaicans to do in terms of reconceptualizing the meanings of belonging and community? And finally, if we understand power as 'capillary' (Foucault, 1979) - as never fully possessed by any one entity but as circulating through diaspora and always enacted within broader relations of dominance - how might we conceptualize the relationship between black America and black Jamaica as reciprocal?