Demeaned but Empowered: The Social Power of the Urban Poor in Jamaica

Obika Gray asserts that state power in Jamaica is predatory in its reach, incorporating contradictory social forces in an arrangement that is hierarchical, often brutal and ultimately debilitating to democracy. In this groundbreaking study, he introduces a series of constructs to support this argument, but the more interesting and novel theses are to be found in his vivid description of the social forces that resist the predatory state and how they have carved out a modicum of autonomy based on what he describes as an elaborate value system of "badness-honour".

• | Author: Obika Gray
• | Publisher: University of the West Indies Press
• | Publication Date: Jul 31, 2004
• | Number of Pages: 429 pages
• | Binding: Paperback or Softback
• | ISBN-10: 9766401535
• | ISBN-13: 9789766401535