The Confounding Island

Jamaica and the Postcolonial Predicament

ISBN 9780674988057

Publication date: 11/12/2019

The preeminent sociologist and National Book Award–winning author of Freedom in the Making of Western Culture grapples with the paradox of his homeland: its remarkable achievements amid continuing struggles since independence.

There are few places more puzzling than Jamaica. Jamaicans claim their home has more churches per square mile than any other country, yet it is one of the most murderous nations in the world. Its reggae superstars and celebrity sprinters outshine musicians and athletes in countries hundreds of times its size. Jamaica’s economy is anemic and too many of its people impoverished, yet they are, according to international surveys, some of the happiest on earth. In The Confounding Island, Orlando Patterson returns to the place of his birth to reckon with its history and culture.

Patterson investigates the failures of Jamaica’s postcolonial democracy, exploring why the country has been unable to achieve broad economic growth and why its free elections and stable government have been unable to address violence and poverty. He takes us inside the island’s passion for cricket and the unparalleled international success of its local musical traditions. He offers a fresh answer to a question that has bedeviled sports fans: Why are Jamaican runners so fast?

Jamaica’s successes and struggles expose something fundamental about the world we live in. If we look closely at the Jamaican example, we see the central dilemmas of globalization, economic development, poverty reduction, and postcolonial politics thrown into stark relief.

Praise

Fascinating…Such breadth makes this an eye-opening volume. It is also illuminating because Patterson carefully explores the complexity of the structural machinery behind Jamaica’s dazzling successes and dismal failures, rather than just chalking these up to simple causes. Although at times Patterson is critical of and disappointed by his fellow Jamaicans, his admiration for the nation’s independent spirit shines through.

—Carrie Gibson, New York Times Book Review
An exploration of politics, economic development, and popular culture in the nearly 60 years since the island’s independence, the book seeks to understand what became of the promises of decolonization…In the ruins of postcolonial Jamaica, Patterson unearths a vibrant popular culture, centered in particular on dancehall music, that can provide new resources to address the postcolonial predicament…He uses the ‘confounding island’ as the site from which to understand the world.

—Adom Getachew, The Nation
Excellent…One thing I like so much about this book is that it tries to answer actual questions you might have about Jamaica.

—Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution
Patterson explores the paradoxes of his native Jamaica in a series of stimulating essays.

—Richard Feinberg, Foreign Affairs
Everybody wonders what makes Jamaica so different. The prominent Harvard sociologist dares to ask. Dares to answer, too.

—Stephen L. Carter, Bloomberg Opinion
Unlike many observers of Jamaica, Patterson is thoroughly balanced in his assessment of Jamaica’s postcolonial failures…Patterson’s masterpiece covers a wide range of topics from democracy to culture, thus making it a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the paradox of Jamaica.

—Lipton Matthews, Jamaica Observer
[A] masterful study.

—Paget Henry, American Journal of Sociology
Filled with piercing insights and written in Patterson’s crystalline style, The Confounding Island exemplifies the universalization of the particular that is the hallmark of great art and great social science. Patterson draws on research as well as personal experience and family history to shed light on some of the paradoxes, great failures, and outsized successes of postcolonial Jamaica.

—George Steinmetz, author of The Devil’s Handwriting
Jamaica, the birthplace of reggae, a fiercely democratic island with staggeringly high crime rates, and a case study in the history of extractive colonialism, is an enigma that still fascinates the world. In this masterful history infused with personal feeling and detail, Orlando Patterson, the eminent scholar of the Caribbean, delivers a memorable, nuanced, and insightful social analysis of the island and its place in global history. Highly recommended.

—Daron Acemoglu, coauthor of Why Nations Fail: Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
In The Confounding Island, Patterson challenges established dogma and slays old shibboleths by employing historical and cultural analyses to explain contemporary Jamaican social and economic phenomena, and he succeeds in taking the ‘confound’ out of ‘confounding’. The result is a clearer understanding of what makes Jamaica and Jamaicans tick.

—Ian Randle, Chairman, Ian Randle Publishers
Patterson draws upon vast amounts of data, literature, and first-hand policy experience to present a rigorous and deeply insightful analysis of the paradox of Jamaica. This is an indispensable work for anyone interested in Jamaica’s development.

—Nigel Clarke, Minister of Finance and the Public Service of Jamaica
Orlando Patterson weaves together an extraordinarily diverse range of disciplines to give us a comprehensive explanation of Jamaica’s history of success in some areas, yet chronic failure in others. This book is a game-changer whose themes resonate far beyond Jamaica to the challenges of economic development more generally; it will be assigned to generations of students to come. I predict that, despite its completely different subject matter, The Confounding Island will give Patterson’s iconic Children of Sisyphus strong competition as a must-read among West Indians. What a book!

—Eleanor Marie Brown, Pennsylvania State University
In positioning Jamaica’s global impact in athletics and music against endemic violence and poverty, Patterson challenges the reader to engage with the stark contrasts between individual success in popular music and athletic sprints and failures in economic, social, and political pursuits that require sustained collective efforts.

—Rupert Lewis, sx salon
Demonstrates how one place—in this case, Jamaica—can provide critical insights into the broad theoretical and political issues of our time…A welcome capstone to a long and committed engagement with the legacies of slavery, the way the imperial era damaged us (rather than tutoring us, as is so often touted), and the ways the past lives in the present.

—Deborah A. Thomas, New West Indian Guide

Awards

2020, Winner of the PROSE Awards

Author

Orlando Patterson is John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University; the author of Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, and Slavery and Social Death (Harvard); and the editor of The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth (Harvard), for which he was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement. His work has been honored by the American Sociological Association and the American Political Science Association, among others, and he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He served as Special Advisor for Social Policy and Development to Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley and was awarded the Order of Distinction by the Government of Jamaica.