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REVIEWS
| Family Love in the Diaspora: Migration and the Anglo-Caribbean Experience. By Mary Chamberlain (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2006. xv plus 245 pp.).
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| Like the families whose stories are presented here, this well-written book has a hybrid identity. At once anthropology with its thick descriptions and reliance upon oral testimony, it is also history, with its focus on intergenerational similarities and differences. It is, as well, a work of sociology, since it analyzes a particular group in a particular place and time. There is indeed something for most social scientists in this engaging work, yet it is likely that most readers will come away somehow vaguely unsatisfied, wishing for more from one section or another, hoping for a clearer analytical interpretation than is finally presented here. Nevertheless, readers will learn a great deal simply by considering the narratives that populate these pages. |
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Mary Chamberlain presents readers with three generations of personal family histories. Her sample consisted of around 150 people, drawn from forty-five Caribbean families who now reside in the United Kingdom. They are almost certainly all in England, but there is no explanation of why this might be the case or, indeed, of how the sample was created beyond that contained in a footnote in the introduction (n. 2, p. 15). These families had their origins in one of the big three British Caribbean colonies: Jamaica, Barbados, and Trinidad. Occasionally, a reference to family members in one of the smaller islands will be made. So too are there references to branches of these families in North America. But these lineages are not the book's focal point; they are mentioned only as they relate to the 150 people whose stories are presented in the volume. |
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