Jamaica Diaspora Annual Roundup 2011

Annual Review | Published: 31 December 2011 | Jamaica Homes News

Key Takeaways: 2011 in Six Lines

• Simpson Miller and PNP Return to Power in December Jamaica Election
• Arab Spring Sweeps the Middle East: Tunisia, Egypt, Libya Fall
• Osama bin Laden Killed in Pakistan on 2 May
• England Riots of August Test Caribbean-British Community Relations
• Japan Earthquake, Tsunami, and Fukushima Nuclear Crisis in March
• Jamaica Remittances Recover Toward US$2.0 Billion

The Year in Review

2011 ended with a Jamaican political outcome that diaspora communities had anticipated and widely welcomed: Portia Simpson Miller’s PNP victory in the 29 December general election, winning forty-two seats to the JLP’s twenty-one in an emphatic return to government. For diaspora communities that had found Bruce Golding’s tenure — and particularly the Dudus extradition crisis of 2010 — difficult to navigate publicly in their host societies, the election result was a political reset. Simpson Miller’s commanding majority gave her administration the mandate to pursue economic reform, crime reduction, and diaspora engagement with greater political authority than Golding’s one-seat majority had permitted.

The year had opened with the Arab Spring — the wave of popular uprisings that swept Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Syria, and Yemen from January onwards, overturning governments that had appeared permanent and demonstrating the speed with which civic mobilisation, amplified by social media, could produce political transformation. For diaspora communities long accustomed to navigating the relationship between island governance and international democratic norms, the Arab Spring was a compelling global story whose resonances extended beyond the Middle East. Osama bin Laden’s killing by US Special Forces in Abbottabad, Pakistan on 2 May closed the dominant security narrative of the post-2001 decade; the celebration in parts of the United States was watched with more ambivalence by diaspora communities whose experience of the “war on terror”’s domestic consequences had included heightened scrutiny of minority communities.

The August 2011 England riots — which spread from Tottenham to Brixton, Hackney, Peckham, Birmingham, Manchester, and other cities following the police shooting of Mark Duggan on 4 August — directly engaged the neighbourhoods and communities of the British-Jamaican diaspora. The riots were not a Caribbean community movement, but they unfolded in the same south London and Midlands geography where British-Jamaican communities were concentrated, and the political and media debate that followed reactivated questions about policing, race, inequality, and community relations that the diaspora had been navigating for decades. Japan’s triple disaster of 11 March — earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima nuclear crisis — tested global solidarity networks while raising the Caribbean’s own anxiety about seismic and climate risks. Remittances to Jamaica recovered toward US$2.0 billion as diaspora household finances stabilised after the 2008-2009 recession.

Jamaica Diaspora Annual Roundup 2011 | Jamaica Homes News. Compiled from four quarterly editions published April, July, October 2011, and January 2012.

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