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This book is the first comprehensive treatment of gender in the works of Samuel Selvon and George Lamming, two important West Indian writers who are rarely analysed together. It demystifies nationalist discourses and discourses of creolization showing that these have masked gender inequalities and complexities in West Indian society, and that the maskings are in turn part of a larger masking of neocolonial threads within nationalism. Forbes situates the fictions of Selvon and Lamming within the wider field of West Indian social thought and practice, and she demonstrates that gender is foundational within West Indian revolutionary action - a fact consistently ignored in mainstream discourses, including feminist ones. These two West Indians' treatments of gender belong to a revolutionary poetics of liberation in West Indian culture but are deeply compromised by the nationalist engagements and the nationalist context of the 1950s-1970s. The unorthodox character of West Indian gender, as seen in Selvon's and Lamming's treatment of it, anticipates and problematizes the concepts of ""postmodernity"" and ""postmodernism"", which have entered West Indian discourse via postcolonial discourse and the work of migration on West Indian theory and criticism. The book concludes by looking towards these discourses that are now playing major roles in West Indian thought. Forbes links West Indian nationalism and the fictions of Selvon and Lamming into a dialogue with the concepts of diasproa, postmodernity and postmodernism, raising the issue of how the latter have impacted on the representation and formation of West Indian gender identities. She then considers the implications of these discourses for West Indian writing, West Indian theory and, above all, West Indian survival and identity in a postmodern, essentially neocolonized world.

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Riddle me this, riddle me that, guess me this riddle, and perhaps not: A we run things, things no run we. Who could that be? One possible answer: Jamaican sprinters.

Enquiring minds want to know: Why do Jamaicans run so fast? Usain Bolt may be the most recent and the most spectacular Jamaican practitioner of the art of speed, but he and Shelly-Ann Fraser stand on the shoulders of giants of both genders, heirs to a pedigree that goes back at least a hundred years to the teenaged Norman Manley and before.

For years before the explosion of Lightning Bolt on the Beijing Olympics track, the consistent speediness of men and women from this small island had been the subject of serious and humorous speculation, pride and su-su. What is the gold that is mined so consistently by Jamaican sprinters that permits the little country to claim a place among the top five countries, measured in terms of medals per capita of population, in almost every Olympics since the Second World War  and all on the basis of athletics, mostly the sprints (400 metres and under)?

Can science explain it? Does the touchy area of genetics  even though, scientifically speaking, theres no such thing as race  explain it? For instance, all the current world record holders for the sprints  and most of the former for the past fifty years or so  have been born in the Americas, descendants of slaves of West African lineage. Is running fast in the blood, so to speak? Or is it as simple as the varieties of yam (twenty-two at last count) to be found on the hills of Jamaica and in the stomachs of its people?

Behind the simple tales of the tape are theories and questions that have attracted fourteen specialists from a range of disciplines, from biochemistry to physiology, from genetics to psychiatry, each with an insight, a piece of the puzzle. Jamaican Gold presents research and argument, history and biography  and much more  for the specialist and the sports fan, for the academic and the coach, in one attractive, easy-to-read volume, packed with photographs and illustrations, including a special section of memorable photos of the heroes of yesteryear and today.
With Jamaican Gold to hand, the London Olympics will be just as thrilling, and youll be closer to answering the question: Why do those Jamaicans run so fast?