Obika Gray, Demeaned but
Empowered: The Social Power of the Urban Poor in Jamaica (Kingston:
University of the West Indies Press, 2004).
Obika Gray has made the political
role of the urban lower-class in Jamaica his central
subject. His earlier monograph, Radicalism and Social Change
in Jamaica, 1960-1972, dealt with urban working class
politics in the early years of independence. This book, by
contrast deals with a vaguer category, “the urban poor”, in
Marxist terms, the poorer urban working class and the
lumpenproletariat.
Gray’s central thesis involves a
dialectical relationship between what he calls the “predatory
state” and a lower class that resists the norms that state seeks to
impose by erecting its own values of “badness-honour”, a rival
standard to the middle-class nationalist values promoted by the
state.
