Through Jamaican Lenses - Fern June Khan

Centering on her early life in Jamaica in the 1940s and '50s, this memoir reveals Khan's childhood as one rich with opportunities to observe and experience the complexities of Jamaican life and history. Khan's childhood memories revel in the community's vivid folklore, Jamaica's music and food, and popular idioms and sayings, as well as the implications of color and class. Then a British colony, Jamaica still bore the legacies and social impacts of slavery and emancipation. Jamaica was becoming increasingly globalized and along with that transition came a growing interest in cultural exchange. Stories of economic success poured in from relatives and friends who had traveled abroad, whether as seasonal workers or as immigrants.

As Khan grew, ambition brought her to the United States as a foreign student. She graduated from New York University with a BSc in sociology and a graduate degree in social work. Following a brief career in social work, Khan next cultivated a forty-four-year career in higher education, using her social work skills to inform her work developing education programs for children, youth, and adults alike in New York City and beyond. Bolstered by her early education in Jamaica, these achievements would not have been possible without the support of her community. Examining not only Jamaica's contribution to the arts, its customs and traditions, and its social and cultural heritage, Through Jamaican Lenses explores honestly the diasporic experience of Caribbean immigration, postcolonialism, collective and individual memory, and transnational identity.

EAN: 9781496852946