Noting Progress
Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization,
and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica
By Deborah A. Thomas
Duke University Press, 2004/2005
376 pp., $84.95 Cloth ISBN: 0-8223-3408-9; $23.95; paperback ISBN 0-8223-3419-4
Modern Blackness is a rich ethnographic exploration of Jamaican identity in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Analyzing nationalism, popular culture and political economy in relation to one another, Deborah A. Thomas illuminates an ongoing struggle in Jamaica between the values associated with the postcolonial state and those generated in and through popular culture. With detailed descriptions of daily life in Jamaica set against a backdrop of postcolonial nation-building and neo-liberal globalization, Modern Blackness is an important examination of the competing identities that mobilize Jamaicans locally and represent them internationally.
Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education By William G. Bowen, Martin A. Kurzweil and Eugene M. Tobin
University of Virginia Press, April 2005
480 pp., $27.95 Cloth ISBN: 0-8139-2350-6
Thomas Jefferson once stated that the foremost goal of American education must be to nurture the "natural aristocracy of talent and virtue." Although in many ways American higher education has fulfilled Jefferson's vision by achieving a widespread level of excellence, it has not achieved the objective of equity implicit in Jefferson's statement. After identifying the "equity" problem at the national level and studying 19 selective colleges and universities, the authors urge all selective colleges and universities to continue race-sensitive admissions policies, while urging the most selective (and privileged) institutions to enroll more well-qualified students from families with low socioeconomic status.
