ABSTRACT This article is part of the special issue “Racialization and the gig economy”, Anthropology of Work Review 47(1), June 2026, edited by Shreya Subramani and Christien Tompkins. Amidst the economic precarity exacerbated by neoliberal policies of the 20th century, Jamaican women look beyond the island's shores to find financial stability. Beyond this, these women embrace the move to indulge in a creative process of self‐growth and development. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews with Black Jamaican women employed as English‐language instructors in Japan, this article focuses on the mechanisms that set the stage for South‐East migratory circuits from the Caribbean to Asia. In this practice of transcontinental “gig work,” Black Jamaican women navigate racialized and gendered regimes of value to access markets for their linguistic expertise as native speakers of English. Intervening in scholarship on seasonal migrant labor and neoliberal precarity, I discuss the ways that migration functions as an option for economic stability in a landscape of scarce employment. To this end, I incorporate Bianca Williams' study of Black American women who travel to find happiness in Jamaica and Jonathan Rosa's work on raciolinguistics to address the ways Jamaican women experience and observe language, race, and ethnic categorization in Japan. From this discussion, Japan emerges as a site of discovery, encounter, and struggle in contemporary gig economies. Here, women question their larger life goals, stake claims to a more fulfilling work‐life experience, and negotiate different versions of themselves.
Roxanne Kimberly Dobson (Wed,) studied this question.