channels to Britain, many more Jamaicans began to avail themselves of the perceived opportunities presented by migrating to the United States. And while the nature of the influence of American cultural practices upon (especially) poor and working-class Jamaicans has been vigorously debated since the turn of the twentieth century, the current period of 'fragmented globality' (Trouillot, 2001, p. 129) has given these debates new vigour, not only in Jamaica but throughout the region as a whole. Michel Rolph Trouillot uses the term 'fragmented globality' to underline the effects of contemporary neo-liberal capitalist processes, and to draw our attention to how worldwide deindustrialization and the concomitant rise of the service and informal economic sectors, the phenomenal proliferation of information technologies, and (throughout the Third World) the implementation of structural adjustment policies, have widened the gaps between rich and poor, developed and underdeveloped, North and South.