Taking as her point of focus the relationships that link global political and economic processes, state-orchestrated nationalist ideologies, and emerging local popular subjectivities, Deborah A. Thomas chronicles the transformation in Jamaica from mid-20th-century, postindependence “creole nationalism” to present-day manifestations of “modern blackness,” that is, urban popular expressions of blackness, notably, dancehall culture and its styles of gendered performativity, and working class–based consumer practices. Situated in Mango Mount, a pseudonymous community of about 2,500 located outside Kingston, this study explores the significance of this transformation within a world in which current processes of globalization maintain social and economic inequality and the promises of sovereignty (various forms of development and prosperity) under neoliberal economic structures and weak state power have failed much of the population, particularly the “poorer sets” and younger generations. Emphasizing the ways that definitions of cultural distinctiveness and economic and political progress are reproduced through institutional structures at the village level, Thomas traces the decline of the Jamaican state’s role in cultural leadership and the rise of a black subjectivity that demands visibility and legitimacy, challenging its devalued marginality under creole nationalism. Thus, whereas creole nationalism’s emphasis on national boundaries, on the symbolic primacy of Africa and local “folk” cultural practices, on multiracial representations, on pursuing middle-class forms of respectability, and on an acceptance of patriarchy once held sway, modern blackness presents transnational points of reference and influence, an unapologetic black identity without the centrality of either Africa or “multiculturalism,” and challenges to patriarchal, bourgeois values about respectability. In the process, Mango Mount villagers are experiencing such social transitions as the demise of traditional, patron–client relationships that have tied the “poorer sets” to the middle and upper classes and marked, generation-specific shifts in ideas about progress, development, and getting ahead. These challenges to creole nationalism, however, are neither revolutionary nor a new form of nationalism. Modern blackness is complex resistance: Not a theoretical agenda or entirely counterhegemonic, it represents a pragmatic and nuanced form of agency. This book joins the scholarship that understands agency as manifest in multivalent forms. Although they are disfranchised under the global structures of inequality with which creole nationalism contends, and that it reproduces locally, Mango Mount villagers are not passive, disengaged victims. They are agents in transforming stigmatized cultural production into modern blackness—increasingly approved emblems of the Jamaican nation that simultaneously reflect the affirmation of the “dominant elite ethos of globalization” in “racialized working-class” terms (p. 229). Agency may be assumed in these processes, but it possesses no uniform character of resistance, nor is resistance uniformly counterhegemonic, as, for example, when conventionally disreputable alternatives become (inter)national symbols. Given these important considerations, further probing the character of modern blackness would be revealing. That is, because modern blackness’s “racially based claims to national belonging” are not “exclusionary” (p. 269), what might be the foundations and patterns of its inclusiveness? Despite the failure (and at times pretense) of creole nationalism’s rhetorical “out of many, one people,” the Indians, Chinese, Syrians, “mixed,” and so on, who also compose Jamaica’s population (many of whom embrace younger generations’ perspectives as well as belong to “poorer sets”) play a part in the construction and expression of this emerging black subjectivity. Contributing to the racial tenor of modern blackness are the inadequacies of creole nationalism, African American cultural influences, and the particular contours of Mango Mount; yet because modern blackness is internally multifaceted, could there be more that makes its external boundaries “black”? How might one get at the meanings of blackness that are encased within the abiding power of racial discourse in the Caribbean? All of this points to an important criterion for the success of a book: the kinds of additional questions it provokes. Presented with conviction, this book should stimulate readers to ponder further, providing, as it does, a clear statement of the ways global forces may be engaged, and disengaged, by governments and communities, the latter of whom energetically redefine themselves, and in some respects the wider world, along the way.