Citizenship Under Pressure: The 1970s in Jamaican Literature and Culture
is the first book-length study of the interaction of culture, politics and society in Jamaica’s formative postcolonial moment, the years between 1972 and 1980. Through examining literary and other texts from and about the period, Rachel Mordecai argues that the 1970s were defined by the explosion into the public sphere of a long-simmering dispute over the substance and limits of Jamaican citizenship, in which citizenship claims and counter-claims were advanced and contested via the symbolic deployment and re-configuration of race, class, and gender identities.