Department of English

This article explores how economic austerity programs implemented in Jamaica in the 1980s by the International Monetary Fund spurred inequalities and affected feelings of belonging to the island through an analysis of Margaret Cezair-Thompson's The True History of Paradise (1999). I argue that unlike her contemporaries, Cezair-Thompson depicts agricultural self-sufficiency and a "return to the land" as an ineffectual means of recuperating the relationship between people and the environment and advocates for migration, which she portrays as an embrace of ancestral roots and diasporic histories.