Building on Robin D. G. Kelley's (1998) argument that hip hop constitutes a form of play-labor for working-class black youth, this article argues that the creation of hip hop as a form of racialized play-labor in the 1970s constitutes an Afro-diasporic labor regime and can best be understood as such when located within a specific period of racial capitalism in the United States characterized by a low demand for formal black labor. Accordingly, this paper argues that the emergence of hip hop in the South Bronx can be explained by the way in which several social-political factors dictated by the needs of the world economy converged with the resistance and labor of black people in the United States and the Anglo-Caribbean in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Faith Smith's analysis, in Creole Recitations, of the nineteenth-century scholar John Jacob Thomas's often contradictory allegiances offers us a way of reading the counterintuitively parallel career of the poet Eric Roach a century later. Roach is the subject of Laurence Breiner's monograph Black Yeats: Eric Roach and the Politics of Caribbean Poetry (2008). The positions Smith and Breiner ascribe to Thomas and Roach, respectively, articulate an enduring Caribbean contradiction between an aspiration to erudition on the one hand and the urgency of self-representation on the other. This essay argues that by obscuring the full range of Thomas' positions, which Smith's study so fully recuperates, and denigrating those same positions in Roach's work, which Breiner's study resuscitates, nationalist elites obfuscate their own connections to the full range of colonial and nationalist values by which they, too, have been influenced.
Although André Schwarz-Bart's first novel, Le dernier des justes, was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1959, the novel and author remained in the margins of 'canonized' Shoah literature. Numerous readers and anthologies exclude the francophone Polish Jewish author who turned to the African diaspora as a parallel universe to write about the haunting specter of the concentration-camp universe and Auschwitz. In this article, I will demonstrate how two of the most prolific and talented young African-American novelists and critics have 'borrowed' from this tour de force (without openly admitting it). John Edgar Wideman and Caryl Phillips write back, in various ways, to this neglected masterpiece. Both have recognized in this pioneering cross-racial approach the 'multidimensional' memory connecting black and Jewish diasporas. Indeed, André Schwarz-Bart intertwined all of his (auto-) fictional writing with the traumas suffered by black (Caribbean) people. It is, therefore, all the more problematic that this writer in the margins has been doubly excluded: almost absent in 'Holocaust Studies,' he remains 'silenced' in the francophone Caribbean realm by novelists and critics of the post-Négritude movement (Chamoiseau and Confiant, Glissant). This deception left the author shattered and hollow, like his main protagonists, Ernie Lévy from The Last of the Just, Mariotte in Un plat de porc (1967), or Solitude from La mulâtresse Solitude (1972), as he confesses in his posthumous 'circumfession/testament' L'Etoile du matin (Morning Star, 2009).
This essay examines C. L. R. James's relationship to the heroic and inspiring arc of labour rebellions that swept the colonial British Caribbean during the 1930s. The essay begins by discussing James's 1932 work putting the case for West Indian self-government, The Life of Captain Cipriani, and its generally positive reception in the Caribbean. We then turn to the 'outbreak of democracy' represented by the Trinidad general strike in 1937 and James's attempt to rally solidarity with this and subsequent rebellions elsewhere while in the imperial metropole itself as a leading member of the International African Service Bureau. Finally, this essay stresses how the Caribbean labour rebellions themselves, with their demonstration of the 'modernity' of the mass of working people in the West Indies and apparent vindication of the Marxist theory of permanent revolution, played their part in the shaping of James's majestic The Black Jacobins.
This article argues against the long-standing penchant to interpret the architecture of enslaved and free Africans in the Americas as evidence of West African cultural survivals. Conversely, this article reflects on the recent practice of repurposing amortized and discarded shipping containers to suggest that the earliest generation of free blacks in Jamaica similarly erected creative architectural responses to the intense pressures of colonialism. These buildings represent strategies by free blacks to fashion a way of life with limited material availability, shaped by intensive climatic conditions and oppressive racial injustices.
Using theories of performance geography, the author considers how black music and dance, especially the slave ship dance Limbo, create an urban counter-culture that evokes historic transcultural experiences of the Middle Passage, space, and modernity. Social theories of scholars including Michel Foucault, Paul Gilroy, and Catherine Nash are considered. Other topics include cultural geography, the Maroons of Jamaica, and dance customs of Trinidad. Interrelationships between performances at the Dancehall in Kingston, Jamaica, Blues music, and South African Kwaito music are explored.
Apart from the fact that it is one of very few book-length studies of a Caribbean-based British Caribbean black intellectual from the nineteenth century, and one of even fewer written by a literary studies scholar, Faith L. Smith's Creole Recitations stands out because of the light it sheds on the mechanics of anglophone Afro-Caribbean intellectual formation, self-representation, and epistemology posited in newspapers, nonfiction books, and speeches produced in the Caribbean during this period. This article is a reading of a conceptual thread that runs through Smith's book—the ways in which the approaches to transnational engagement embedded within English colonialism are at once accepted, interrogated, or utilized by Caribbean public figures in the nineteenth century. As such, Smith's book provides a way for us to situate modern Caribbean studies within an intellectual genealogy and a model for contextualizing the issues, experiences, and approaches that began to be highlighted with the advent of postcolonial studies.
Faith Smith's Creole Recitations offers a feminist critique and compelling alternative to the dominant narratives of Trinidadian and black nationalism. Smith's analysis of Thomas's participation in the anglophone Caribbean public sphere of the late nineteenth century makes visible that already in the 1870s, Thomas defined creole identity as normative and national in part by contrasting it to Indian and other ethnic identities. Smith illuminates the significant role women and womanhood played in the construction of creole identity and respectable middle-class nationalism. As importantly, Smith offers 'recitation' as a model for understanding social and cultural formation in the Caribbean. In contrast to the long-held view that recitation was necessarily an alienating act of mimicry, Smith reveals that recitation functioned as a creative process used both to resist and to appropriate colonial discourse. Through it, Thomas and other Afro-Caribbean intellectuals shaped the perception and material reality of their individual, ethnic, and national communities.
This essay uses the three interlocutors' reflections to return to Creole Recitations, and to reconsider Thomas's nineteenth century as an arena for thinking about Caribbean male intellectuals' self-fashioning and desire, diaspora and degeneration, the sexual politics of creolization, and what it means to think of the period as merely preceding the anglophone Caribbean's important political and cultural developments.
Reading Heading South as a decolonial romance reveals anxiety about the liminal location of young male citizens in 1970s Haiti caught within the necropower of state terror and US imperialism. Focusing on young men selling 'romance' on the beach within the continuing colonial relations between the United States and Haiti and black and white bodies, the film engages with the limits of transracial, heterosexual romance in sex tourism. The impossibility of romance shows that for Haitian citizens, nationalist redemption lies in politics not in transracial intimacies. However, politics is itself necropolitical, since death is the only passage to narratable citizenship. As a decolonial moment, death speaks about the necropower of daily existence for Haitian citizens caught between state terror and US imperialism; asserts agency in the 'will to death in order to be free'; and highlights the disposability and (un)grievability of poor, young black bodies in Baby Doc Duvalier's Haiti.
'Environmental justice' refers to the human right to a healthy and safe environment, a fair share of natural resources, access to environmental information and participation in environmental decision-making. Some analysts have argued that environmental justice is undermined by the political economy of capitalism. This paper builds on this analysis by evaluating the environmental justice situation in Cuba, a country where there is little capitalist influence. Evidence is based on participant observation and interviews in Cuba, as well as secondary quantitative data. The research findings suggest that Cuba fares relatively well in terms of environmental justice, but still faces a number of challenges regarding the quality of its environment and some aspects of the environmental decision-making process. However, many of its ongoing problems can be attributed to global capitalist pressures.
Newly arrived from Cuba, Angelica, Dora, Marina, and Damaris attempted to negotiate new surroundings and immigrant identities, building a sense of home for themselves and their families. Data from qualitative interviews, classroom observations, and focus group conversations revealed hopes that by acquiring English language skills, they would improve their quality of life in their new country. Struggles included personal factors situated in their pasts in Cuba and their new surrounds in the Miami Cuban exile enclave, contexts that were further complicated by uncertain expectations of new lives in Miami and the overwhelming task of learning a new language at a local adult education center.
In 1795, Father Jose Agustin Caballero presented the first project for the creation of a system of public education for all the inhabitants of the island of Cuba. It was a visionary idea, but impossible to carry out at that time. The island was a colonial possession of the Spanish Crown, and most of the population was subjected to slavery or made up of Mestizos and freed blacks, the victims of segregation and racial discrimination.
Initiatives in the field of sexology and sex education in prerevolutionary Cuba are barely known, as continuity between those experiences and the work carried out during the years following the 1959 revolution have not been researched. The founding of the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), however, must be considered the product of a long process of political maturity on the part of Cuban women during the first half of the twentieth century, and in the broader context of the FMC, the developments in the fields of sexology and sex education over the past fifty years also must be considered. Drawing on FMC archival holdings, this article sets out a periodization of the four main stages of the revolutionary period of institutionalizing sex education in Cuba, as well as its main challenges.
Reforms proposed at the Sixth Communist Party Congress represent a new, third phase of social policy in post-revolutionary Cuba. This new stage has the potential to strengthen social equity in Cuba, improve the socio-economic situation of disparate social groups, and overcome the old limitations of social policy. Yet it could also increase inequality, and at least in the short term, its predicted impacts will be contradictory and ambivalent.
To many in the West, the League of Nations was to establish political peace between nations. To the Cuban sugar-producing elite of the 1920s and 1930s, however, the League was an important socioeconomic institution used to augment many of Cuba's first modern state institutions. This article explores how and why Cuban delegates were the principals behind the 1937 International Sugar Agreement.
Don Fitz explains why quality health care does not have to be based on unending expansion of expensive medical technology. Adapted from the source document.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
301 p, The Family as the Agent of Socialization -- "I wouldn't be where I am today." Creating Moral Citizens through Church and School -- The Sky is the Limit: Migration to Britain -- Nurse Training and Education -- 'I've always wanted to work': Black Women and Professionalism -- Combining Work, Family and Community -- Nation Home and Belonging.; "Moving Beyond Borders is the first book-length history of Black health care workers in Canada, delving into the experiences of thirty-five postwar-era nurses who were born in Canada or who immigrated from the Caribbean either through Britain or directly to Canada. Karen Flynn examines the shaping of these women's stories from their childhoods through to their roles as professionals and community activists. Flynn interweaves oral histories with archival sources to show how these women's lives were shaped by their experiences of migration, professional training, and family life. Theoretical analyses from post colonial, gender, and diasporic Black Studies serve to highlight the multiple subjectivities operating within these women's lives. By presenting a collective biography of identity formation, Moving Beyond Borders reveals the extraordinary complexity of Black women's history."--pub. desc.
Demonstrate how the priority of education in Cuban social policy, from its outset after the 1959 revolution, has privileged women. Statistics chart the rapid increase in educational level and attainment over the decades and the high degree of feminization of higher education and thus the skilled labor force; and today Cuba ranks among the countries with the highest indicators in the United Nations' Millennium Goals with respect to education and gender equity.
Campaigning in 2007, Barack Obama promised to end restrictions on remittances and family travel to Cuba, resume "people-to-people" contracts, and engage Cuba on issues of mutual interest. As President, Obama has declared his desire to forge a new "equal partnership" with Latin America. Two months later, the 39th General Assembly of the Organization of American States voted to repeal the 1962 resolution that suspended Cuba fro its ranks.
Lopez-Levy,Arturo (Author) and Lopez,Lilla R. (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2011
Published:
Washington, DC: New American Foundation
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
19 p., Explores the historic reform process currently underway in Cuba. It looks first at the political context in which the VI Cuban Communist Party Congress took place, including the Cuban government's decision to release a significant number of political prisoners as part of a new dialogue with the Cuban Catholic Church. It then analyzes Cuba's nascent processes of economic reform and political liberalization. To conclude, it discusses the challenges and opportunities these processes pose for U.S policy toward Cuba.
Discusses the importance of education for any nation and for Cuba in particular, examining its political, pedagogical and sociological foundations, and portraying its accomplishments over the last 50 years. The principles underlying the educational policy of the Cuban government are explained, as they underpin the mission of the National Education System (NES) to carry forward educational work in the country.
Romeu,Rafael (Author), Perez-Lopez,Jorge F. (Author), Mesa-Lago,Carmelo (Author), and Perales,Jose Raul (Editor)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
July 2011
Published:
Washington, DC: Latin American Program, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
91 p., This publication examines the contemporary state of Cuba's economy at a time of great transformation. Using econometric and other macroeconomic analysis tools, its authors have taken advantage of the recent availability of official economic statistics to offer new insights into longstanding questions about Cuba's economic behavior. Tables, Figures, References.
Examines the political and cultural possibilities and limits of the wide-ranging reggae scene that has emerged along both sides of the U.S./Mexico border since the 1990s. It investigates why and how members of seemingly disparate border communities, including Mexicanas/os, Chicanas/os, and Native Americans, find common social and political ground playing Afro-Caribbean inspired music. It also interrogates how people living in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands have responded to the impact of economic and political globalization by using reggae to fashion multiethnic and post-national political formations and social relationships at the grassroots.
Focuses on interrelations between popular music genres in the Spanish Caribbean exemplifying the Dominican Republic. The genre son has been the source of ideological conflicts for the middle and upper classes, particularly for Dominican musicians and intellectuals. The most urgent inquiry is about the local origin of the so considered primary authentic work, the “Son de la Ma’ Teodora'. Analyzing both historiographic and oral sources, the significance and the symbolic value of the musical genre son in the national history and context are discussed., unedited non–English abstract received by RILM] En este artículo se discuten las interrelaciones entre géneros musicales populares en el Caribe Hispánico tal y como aparecen en la República Dominicana. El género son ha sido fuente de conflictos ideológicos entre las clases media y alta dominicana, así como entre músicos e intelectuales. El asunto más polémico en este sentido gira alrededor del origen local de la así considerada primera obra documentada, el “Son de La Ma’ Teodora”. Haciendo uso de diferentes fuentes historiográficas y orales se discute el significado y valor simbólico del género musical son en relación a la historia nacional dominicana.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
The following contributions are cited separately in RILM: Godfrey BALDACCHINO, Yoko ORYU, French Caribbean: Adieu foulard, adieu madras: A sonic study in (post)colonialism (RILM ref]2011-12101/ref]); Sergio BONANZINGA, Sicily: Navigating responses to global cultural patterns (RILM ref]2011-12111/ref]); Kathryn A. BURNETT, Ray BURNETT, Scotland's Hebrides: Song and culture, transmission, and transformation (RILM ref]2011-12104/ref]); Jennifer CATTERMOLE, Fiji Islands: A sustainable future for sigidrigi? (RILM ref]2011-12107/ref]); Ijahnya CHRISTIAN, English Caribbean: When people cannot talk, they sing (RILM ref]2011-12099/ref]); Judith R. COHEN, Ibiza and Formentera: Worlds of singers and songs (RILM ref]2011-12113/ref]); Cristoforo GARIGLIANO, Aeolian Islands: Three singers, their folk songs, and the interpretation of tradition (RILM ref]2011-12112/ref]); Waldo GARRIDO, Philip HAYWARD, Chiloé: An offshore song culture (RILM ref]2011-12109/ref]); Maria HNARAKI, Crete—Souls of soil: Island identity through song (RILM ref]2011-12110/ref]); Henry M. JOHNSON, Jersey: Jèrriais, song, and language revitalization (RILM ref]2011-12105/ref]); Soraya MARCANO, Spanish Caribbean: Liquid identities (RILM ref]2011-12100/ref]); Owe RONSTRÖM, Gotland: Where folk culture and island overlap (RILM ref]2011-12114/ref]); Heather SPARLING, Cape Breton Island: Living in the past? Gaelic language, song, and competition (RILM ref]2011-12102/ref]); Deatra WALSH, Newfoundland: From Ron Hynes to Hey Rosetta! (RILM ref]2011-12103/ref]); Oli WILSON, Papua New Guinea: Popular music and the continuity of tradition—An ethnographic study of the songs by the band Paramana Strangers (RILM ref]2011-12106/ref]).
Belafonte,Harry, (Author) and Shnayerson,Michael, (Collab.)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
01/01; 2011
Published:
New York: Alfred A. Knopf
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
A personal account of an era of enormous cultural and political change, which reveals Harry Belafonte as not only one of America's greatest entertainers, but also one of our most profoundly influential activists. Belafonte spent his childhood in both Harlem and Jamaica, where the toughness of the city and the resilient spirit of the Caribbean lifestyle instilled in him a tenacity to face the hurdles of life head-on and channel his anger into positive, life-affirming actions. He returned to New York City after serving in the Navy in World War II, and found his calling in the theater, before transitioning into a career as a singer and Hollywood leading man. During the 1960s civil rights movement, Belafonte became close friends with Martin Luther King, Jr., and used his celebrity as a platform for his activism in civil rights and countless other political and social causes. This book tells the inspiring story of an original and powerful entertainer who has always engaged fiercely with the issues of his day.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
402 p, Exploration of the musical heritage of Latin America and the Caribbean, arranged by region, focusing on the major countries/regions (Mexico, Brazil, Peru, etc. in Latin America and Jamaica, the Virgin Islands, Haiti, etc. in the Caribbean). In each chapter the author gives a complete history of the region’s music, ranging from classical and classical-influenced styles to folk and traditional music to today’s popular music.
Pages: 1-17., Examines the songs of the insular Caribbean as a contribution to the oral literature of the Caribbean region, with particular reference to the songs and singers of Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and to a lesser extent, Barbados. Among the artists discussed are Trinidad's African Queen of Song, Ella Andall, Dominica's Nascio Fontaine, and Carolyn Cooper's perspectives on the Jamaican dancehall and Kittitian legend King Ellie Matt, 'De Hardest Hard', who reigned supreme during the 1970s and 1980s. He influenced the late Daddy Friday, whose songs still receive significant airplay today. Trinidad's chutney soca songs speak to the presence of its East Indian singers while Jamaican sisters Tami Chynn and Tessanne Chin of Chinese, Cherokee, European, and African descent have become known, respectively, as pop and rock reggae singers.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
266 p, This study spans several linguistic areas of the Caribbean and parts of the Atlantic coast of the U.S., Mexico, and South America; it examines historical, national, popular, parading, sacred, and combat dances to reveal both meanings and consequences of performance. Beyond unfolding important physical and cultural significances of each genre, the analyses deepen to understand core motivations for African diaspora performance; the results are transcendence, resilience, and citizenship among dancing and music-making participants. The study repeatedly acknowledges Katherine Dunham, who began teaching the citizenship of Caribbean dance/music practices and reviews the literature since her original trilogy on Caribbean dance practices. Analyses also place local Caribbean dances as viable commodities within crucial Caribbean tourism and both cultural and economic globalization.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Explores the vexed relationship between popular dance and value. In a critique of the Western art canon, it traces the shifting value systems that underpin popular dance scholarship and considers how different dancing communities articulate multiple and often paradoxical expressions of judgment, significance, and worth through their embodied practice. Employing a cultural theory approach, it focuses on the choreographic content of neo-burlesque striptease in London and New York, the dance styles of British punk, metal, and ska fans, and the vernacular dances of a British-Caribbean dancehall to interrogate how value is produced, negotiated, and reimagined. Yet this is not to assume that they are autonomous values untouched by the social frameworks in which they exist. Rather, the corporeal enunciations of value constructed by those engaged in popular dance forms are informed by a complex matrix of aesthetic, economic, political, and social values that are already in circulation
In spaces of violence, scholars and activists have typically addressed music as sites of resistance. In postcolonial Caribbean, the focus of most studies unsurprisingly has thus been placed on the work music has done for the oppressed—or conversely, on the ways the (neo)colonial regimes have used music to increase their control over the masses. Until recently, few publications have addressed the music that has been performed to fortify and gather people together in times of hardship. In this case, what is at stake is not so much a matter of 'us and them' or of resistance, but rather the ways in which the 'us' is mobilized to strengthen senses of belonging and networks of solidarity. Amidst the escalating everyday violence since the mid-1990s, party music in Trinidad continues to thrive. Instead of dismissing such music as merely a source of escapism or hedonism, I want to examine what makes it so compelling and what it does for people. This paper is based on in-depth study of soca music making and mumerous ethnographic interviews with Trinidadian soca artists and fans over the past 15 years.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Jamaican deejay Yellowman is best known for 'slackness': lyrics centered on masculine heterosexual potency, sexist objectification of women, and graphic sexual narratives. Yet a deeper look at Yellowman's life and recorded output suggests that when his slackness is read in the context of Afro-Jamaican culture, reggae history, and his Rastafarian faith, a more complex interpretation of his slackness is needed. The study draws on Carolyn Cooper's (2001) theory that slackness is a 'metaphorical revolt against law and order, an undermining of consensual standards of decency' (p. 141). Whereas the term 'culture' is used in reggae to depict music that is Afrocentric, Rasta-inspired, and socially conscious, and is normally seen as the antithesis of slackness, it is suggested that for Yellowman, the slack/culture dichotomy is eroded when slackness becomes part of the religious repertoire of resistance against mainstream Jamaican society. The dissertation presents: a) an overview of theory and methodology b) an ethnographic case study based on Yellowman's life and career, and c) four analytical chapters that offer itineraries to theorize slackness in Yellowman's music. First, it is argued that through slackness Yellowman subverted embedded Jamaican cultural notions of sexuality, gender, race, nationality, and beauty by promoting the dundus (black albino) as sexually appealing, hyper-masculine, and part of the imagined black nation. Second, it is demonstrated how Yellowman's sexual lyrics are an example of Obika Gray's (2004) thesis that slackness was a conscious political project employed by the Jamaican poor to contest the normative values of dominant society. The pitting of Yellowman and slackness in reggae journalism against Bob Marley and culture is contested. Third, it is refuted that Yellowman employs slackness for the purpose of moral regulation based on conservative Afro-Jamaican sexual mores and his understanding of Rastafarian morality. Finally, Yellowman's perforating of Christian dualistic ideas of carnal/spiritual is situated in the Rastafarian Babylon/Zion binary, demonstrating how Afro-Caribbean religion has redefined Christian dualism using an Afrocentric body-positive ideology.
The dance-music complexes known as salsa and bhangra have not been subjected to any comparative academic scrutiny, despite clear parallels in their respective histories as cultural processes born out of multiple ruptures and conjunctions, including European colonialism, migrations during the postcolonial period, and transnational cultural and commodity flows. While salsa has resulted from the movement of people, music, and rhythmic cultures across Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, bhangra evinces their movement across the partitioned space of Punjab, the United Kingdom, and the post-Partition nations of India and Pakistan. Both salsa and bhangra have, moreover, moved beyond original regional ambits to become cultural signifiers (albeit often contested as much as claimed) of wider Latino/a and Desi (pan-South Asian) identities respectively. Undoubtedly, it is the academic and cultural embedding of salsa within a Hispanophone postcolonial paradigm, and of bhangra within its Anglophone counterpart, that has prevented serious comparative work between these two musical expressive cultures which are equally but differently exemplary of the complex relationship between music and migration. Yet across the world, from Delhi to San Francisco, the two dance-music complexes increasingly meet each other in the same space, particularly that of the dance floor. Drawing on such evidence as well as on personal experience of dancing both salsa and bhangra, I will advance in this article a theoretical framework for their comparison as transnational musics, suggesting ways in which such a framework can illuminate the circuits of pleasure and politics that traverse each of these dance musics as embodied histories of a traumatic yet life-affirming postcolonial modernity.
Before finding international success and stardom with a string of well-known radio hits, Billy Ocean grinded on the U.K. circuit for well over a decade. The singer-songwriter released a handful of singles and four relatively unknown albums prior to the breakthrough in the mid-1980s, which included a mix of ballads, Caribbean-influenced R&B, club-shaking disco, synth-filled boogie, and even country-inflected Southern soul. The pre-fame arc of Ocean's career is traced record by record.
Examines the transplantation of the vocal romance from France to the Federalist U.S, focusing on romances by Eugène Guilbert (1758–1839) and Jean-Baptiste Renaud de Chateaudun (fl. 1795). The songs are described as both vehicles of nostalgia for the ancien régime and the French colony of Sainte-Domingue, and aspects of the new post-revolutionary reality. Both composers came from the Caribbean region and settled on the East Coast of the U.S.
Caribbean identity is informed by the condition of being islands and also by its sociopolitical conditions of colonialism, (e)migration, and pluralism. The uncertainty of not being grounded to the specificity of place is in conflict with generalized notions of nation and cultural identity. As people migrate, they create shifting identities following the process of addition and flux that has characterized the region. Cultural identity and migration are central issues in songs, which play a key role of lending continuity to culture and reconstructing symbols.
Tambrin music on the Caribbean island of Tobago is traditionally performed to entertain people at weddings and other family celebrations. The genre is also connected with healing ceremonies and the belief in ancestral spirits. It can cause trance and possession. Nevertheless, today’s musicians hardly ever play in these traditional contexts. Opportunities to perform arise from political events, folklore festivals, and concerts for tourists. In consideration of theoretical views concerning cultural contacts, preservation, and staged respectively participatory performances, the article deals with different forms of musical interaction and different ways of playing depending on repertory, individual performers, and performance conditions, based on fieldwork conducted between 1995 and 2009, thus comprising the music of two generations of musicians.
Adieu foulard, adieu madras is a very popular tune from the French Caribbean. It is just as popular today in continental France, where it has been adapted to different musical genres. Yet, for those familiar with the simple melody and its evocative lyrics, which encourages carefree humming, not many may be aware that it is so deeply rooted in the history of French colonialism, island tropes, and ethnic relations. This essay uses Adieu foulard, adieu madras and its multiple sonic meanings as the lens to better understand the dynamics of the (post)colonial relationship of the people of the French Antilles, particularly from the island overseas departments of Martinique and Guadeloupe, many of whom have now migrated permanently to metropolitan France. For these, Adieu has now also become their song of exile.
Considers the characteristic features of Garífuna music, which are intrinsically related to the history of slavery, warfare, miscegenation, and resistance of this people of African and Caribbean ancestry, living today mainly on the Atlantic Coast of Central America and in the U.S. Based on his analysis of the Wanaragua or Yancunú rhythm, performed in Livingston, Guatemala, by dancers wearing shell rattles (illacu) tied to their ankles, and a musical ensemble consisting of two drums (garaón) and gourd rattles (sisira), the author examines the metric ambiguity of its basic “time line” or 'clave' of 3:3:2 as well as the rhythmic flexibility and unpredictability with which the dancers and musicians relate to it, as a musical expression of the social and cultural conditions created by that history, especially by the processes of miscegenation.
Examines how Connecticut-born reggaetón artist Notch incorporates oratorical, visual, and musical cues in his music video, Qué te pica (What's itching you?), to establish connections between Latino and Caribbean communities in the U.S. These communities have typically been disavowed by hegemonic racial categories that distinguish between them. While Notch’s music disrupts these particular racial hierarchies, he also maintains hetero-normative patriarchal relations in his video. An analytic, Afro-Latino space is proposed to account for the ways that reggaetón as a musical genre, and Notch more specifically, unsettle certain distinctions between blackness and Latinidad, while simultaneously relying on stereotypes of black hypermasculinity.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Examines the role music has played in the formation of the political and national identity of the Bahamas. It analyzes Bahamian musical life as it has been influenced and shaped by the islands’ location between the United States and the rest of the Caribbean; tourism; and Bahamian colonial and postcolonial history. Focusing on popular music in the second half of the twentieth and early 21st c., in particular rake-n-scrape and Junkanoo, the author finds a Bahamian music that has remained culturally rooted in the local even as it has undergone major transformations. Highlighting the ways entertainers have represented themselves to Bahamians and to tourists, he illustrates the shifting terrain that musicians navigated during the rapid growth of tourism and in the aftermath of independence.
Schwartz,Peggy, (Author) and Schwartz,Murray, (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2011
Published:
New Haven: Yale University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
324 p, Pearl Primus (1919–1994) blazed onto the dance scene in 1943 with stunning works that incorporated social and racial protest into their aesthetic. This book offers an intimate perspective on her life and explores her influences on American culture, dance, and education. It traces Primus's path from her childhood in Port of Spain, Trinidad, through her rise as an influential international dancer, an early member of the New Dance Group (whose motto was 'Dance is a weapon'), and a pioneer in dance anthropology. Primus traveled extensively in the U.S., Europe, Israel, the Caribbean, and Africa, and she played an important role in presenting authentic African dance to American audiences. She engendered controversy in both her private and professional lives, marrying a white Jewish man during a time of segregation and challenging black intellectuals who opposed the 'primitive' in her choreography. Her political protests and mixed-race tours in the South triggered an FBI investigation, even as she was celebrated by dance critics and by contemporaries like Langston Hughes.
With Joe Arroyo's passing on 26 July 2011, the world has lost a superstar and true innovator of modern Latin music. His work combined lyrics of protest, romance, and spirituality with a joyful music that was at once fresh and accessible. The sixth album Arroyo put out with La Verdad marked a transition from a less adventurous to a more radical approach, where the diverse mix heard on later records is fully embraced for the first time. With Me le fugué a la candela (I escaped the fire) his players gelled, and the pan-Caribbean sound they became famous for came into its own, especially on side two.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
"Revised and updated from Haiti : the Duvaliers and their legacy ... first published in 1988 by McGraw-Hill", 492 p, The tragic modern history of Haiti from 1957 to the present day, including the 2010 earthquake.
Examines Caribbean representations of race, gender and ethnicity, and how these influenced the labor allocations of female migrant workers in St Maarten's tourism economy. From the late 1970s to the 1990s, thousands of poor women from Haiti and the Dominican Republic worked in the service sector of St Maarten's tourism economy. St Maarten's black population, and especially its male residents, interacted with the migrant women, and created gendered and social-sexual images that privileged the Latina/mulatta women over the black Haitian women. These gendered/racial stereotypes helped to incorporate the Haitian and Dominican women into specific and different labor sectors of the tourism economy.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
227 p, In Women in Caribbean Politics Cynthia Barrow-Giles and her co-contributors profile 20 of the most influential women in modern Caribbean politics who have struggled and excelled, in spite of the obstacles. Divided into four parts, this volume looks at women who led the struggle for freedom; those who agitated for equal rights and justice in the pre-independence period; postcolonial trailblazers; as well as a group which Cynthia Barrow-Giles refers to as ‘Women CEOs.’ The profiles cover women from 12 territories, with varying political, ethnic and socio-economic issues.
Bender,Thomas (Editor), Dubois,Laurent (Editor), and Rabinowitz,Richard (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2011
Published:
London; New York: D Giles Ltd.
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
287 p, A season of revolutions : the United States, France, and Haiti / Thomas Bender -- Insurgents before independence : the revolution of the American people / T.H. Breen -- A port in the storm : Philadelphia's commerce during the Atlantic revolution era / Cathy Matson -- Atlantic revolutions and the age of abolitionism / David Brion Davis and Peter P. Hinks -- The achievement of the Haitian revolution, 1791-1804 / Robin Blackburn -- An African revolutionary in the Atlantic world / Laurent Dubois and Julius S. Scott -- Liberty in black, white, and color : a trans-Atlantic debate / Jeremy D. Popkin -- A vapor of dread : observations on racial terror and vengeance in the age of revolution / Vincent Brown -- One woman, three revolutions : Rosalie of the Poulard nation / Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard -- The 1804 Haitian revolution / Jean Casimir -- Curating history's silences : the Revolution exhibition / Richard Rabinowitz.; Explores, largely through illustrations, how three globally influential revolutions transformed politics and culture between 1763 and 1816, from the triumph of the British Empire in the Seven Years' War to the end of the Napoleonic Wars.; Time: Geschichte 1763-1815. 1700 - 1804
Argues that the emergence of hip hop in the South Bronx can be explained by the way in which several social-political factors dictated by the needs of the world economy converged with the resistance and labor of black people in the United States and the Anglo-Caribbean in the late 1960s and early 1970
Reports on the researchers' findings 20 years after Lord Gifford's inquiry into race relations in the city after the 1980s Toxteth riots. Gifford reported on the prevalence of racial attitudes, racial abuse, and racial violence directed against the Black citizens of Liverpool. The authors' research focused on education and specifically the low percentage of Black teachers compared to the whole teaching workforce and the percentage Black population in the city.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
1 vol., Interprets contemporary history of the Caribbean that affirms existence of an alter/native tradition and a basis on which to develop a more humanist Caribbean person. This book features essays that range from a critique of Eurocentric analysis of Caribbean writing and thought to a defense of the author's home against the pressure of development.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
1 vol., Interprets contemporary history of the Caribbean that affirms existence of an alter/native tradition and a basis on which to develop a more humanist Caribbean person. This book features essays that range from a critique of Eurocentric analysis of Caribbean writing and thought to a defense of the author's home against the pressure of development.
An accumulation of research evidence suggests that early pubertal timing plays a significant role in girls' behavioral and emotional problems. If early pubertal timing is a problematic event, then early developing Black girls should manifest evidence of this crisis because they tend to be the earliest to develop compared to other girls from different racial and ethnic groups. Given the inconsistent findings among studies using samples of Black girls, the present study examined the independent influence of perceived pubertal timing and age of menarche on externalizing behaviors and depressive symptoms in a nationally representative sample of Black girls (412 African American and 195 Caribbean Black; M = 15 years). Path analysis results indicated that perceived pubertal timing effects on externalizing behaviors were moderated by ethnic subgroup. Caribbean Black girls' who perceived their development to be early engaged in more externalizing behaviors than Caribbean Black girls' who perceived their development to be either on-time or late. Age of menarche did not significantly predict Black girls' externalizing behaviors and depressive symptoms. The onset of menarche does not appear to be an important predictor of Black girls' symptoms of externalizing behavior and depression. These findings suggest ethnic subgroup and perceived pubertal timing are promising factors for better understanding the adverse effects of early perceived pubertal timing among Black girls. Adapted from the source document.
Chivallon,Christine (Author) and Alou,Antoinette Tidjani (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2011
Published:
Kingston Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
231 p, The forced migration of Africans to the Americas through the transatlantic slave trade created primary centres of settlement in the Caribbean, Brazil and the United States - the cornerstones of the New World and the black Americas. However, unlike Brazil and the US, the Caribbean did not (and still does not) have the uniformity of a national framework. Instead, the region presents differing situations and social experiences born of the varying colonial systems from which they were developed.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
266 p, Provides a sweeping cultural and historical examination of diaspora dance genres. In discussing relationships among African, Caribbean, and other diasporic dances, Daniel investigates social dances brought to the islands by Europeans and Africans, including quadrilles and drum-dances as well as popular dances that followed, such as Carnival parading, Pan-Caribbean danzas, rumba, merengue, mambo, reggae, and zouk.
Addresses the socially controversial issue of the public expression of sexuality in dance in the Caribbean. Of particular interest is the phenomenon of 'wining' or 'wukkin' up', dancing involving pelvic gyrations. The focus is on changes taking place in societies in which there is supposedly the continued dominance of a male patriarchal figure. Can these changes be anything more than a new form of male control of female sexuality and public sexual expression?
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
214 p, A highly illustrated reference book providing information about the cultural, social, political, economic, geographic, natural and historic heritage of the Caribbean region. In addition to the English-, French-, Spanish- and Dutch-speaking Caribbean, the book covers the countries with which these islands have close cultural, economic and historic ties: Guyana, Suriname, Belize, the Bahamas, the Turks and Caicos Islands and Bermuda.
Examines differences in disability among eight black subgroups distinguished by place of birth and Hispanic ethnicity. We found that all foreign-born subgroups reported lower levels of physical activity limitations and personal care limitations than native-born blacks. Immigrants from Africa reported lowest levels of disability, followed by non-Hispanic immigrants from the Caribbean.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
158 p, The book is divided into two sections. The first offers a political and historical overview, starting with the British presence in the region and the introduction of slavery and indentured labor, and continuing with the rise of nationalist movements, political leaders’ vision for their respective states, and economic development. The second section explores the region as an entity, including development at state and national levels, the historical background for regional unity from the West Indian Federation to CARICOM, and an evaluation on how well regionalism works today and could work in the future.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
149 p., Examines Marshall's use of the trope of travel within and between the United States and the Caribbean to critique ideologies of development, tourism, and globalization as neo-imperial. This examination of travel in Marshall's To Da-Duh, In Memoriam; The Chosen Place, The Timeless People; Praisesong for the Widow; and Daughters exposes the asymmetrical structures of power that exist between the two regions.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
221 p, Rodney was disturbed by the inability of intellectuals to share common cause with the masses, thus ensuring that they would be unable to contribute to uplifting their talents or participate in the growth of the nation. Guyana and the Caribbean were subject to sugar and slave traffic that constituted cheap labor for the plantations and buttressed the capitalist-industrial system. A significant byproduct of that system was the master-slave relationship; a no-less iniquitous consequence was an active racism. Thus, social inequality became the heritage of Guyanese and Caribbean history.
Uses data on both region and country of birth for black immigrants in the United States and methodology that allows for the identification of arrival cohorts to test whether there are sending country differences in the health of black adults in the United States. Results show that African immigrants maintain their health advantage over U.S.-born black adults after more than 20 years in the United States. In contrast, black immigrants from the Caribbean who have been in the United States for more than 20 years appear to experience some downward health assimilation.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
357 p, Presents a general history of the Caribbean islands from the beginning of human settlement about seven thousand years ago to the present. It narrates processes of early human migration, the disastrous consequences of European colonization, the development of slavery and the slave trade, the extraordinary profits earned by the plantation economy, the great revolution in Haiti, movements toward political independence, the Cuban Revolution, and the diaspora of Caribbean people.
Hill,Robert A. (Author) and Garvey,Marcus (Author)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2011
Published:
Durham, NC: Duke University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
845 p., "Though not an exhaustive compilation of documents from the period, the historical commentaries, chronologies, and primary documents in this volume serve as a thorough introduction to this important period in history and successfully integrates the history of Garvey and his impact on the global African diaspora into world history." -- Glenn A. Chambers, Journal of World History
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
644 p., Covers the period from the end of slavery to the twentieth century. Its major themes are dependent labor groups, especially emigrants from Asia, the development and diversification of local economies, and the emergence throughout the region of varying degrees of national consciousness as well as forms of government.
Izquierdo,Alejandro (Author) and Talvi,Ernesto (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2011
Published:
Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
57 p., Conveys three key messages: first, in this new global economic environment, key structural characteristics of Latin American and Caribbean countries are defining two quite different regional clusters in terms of opportunities and challenges ahead. Second, substantial changes in trade and capital flow patterns, as well as in the international financial architecture, are already taking place and will impact the regional clusters in different ways. Third, economic policy design will have to accommodate these differences in order to ensure widespread and stable growth.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
161 p., An anthology of short stories focusing on people of the Caribbean. The characters face problems of freedom, history, race, class, violence, entrapment, and morality.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
306 p., Weather-induced environmental crises and slow responses from imperial authorities, Johnson argues, played an inextricable and, until now, largely unacknowledged role in the rise of revolutionary sentiments in the 18th century Caribbean.
Kelly,Kenneth G. (Author) and Hardy,Meredith D. (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2011
Published:
Gainesville: University Press of Florida
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
250 p, Introduction /Kenneth G. Kelly and Meredith D. Hardy -- -- French Protestants in South Carolina: the archaeology of a European ethnic minority /Ellen Shlasko -- -- French refugees and slave abuse in Frederick County, Maryland: Jean Payen de Boisneuf and the Vincendière Family at L'Hermitage Plantation /Sara Rivers-Cofield -- -- Commoditization of persons, places, and things during Biloxi's second tenure as capital of French colonial Louisiana /Barbara Thedy Hester -- -- The Moran site (22HR511): an early-eighteenth-century French colonial cemetery in Nouveau Biloxi, Mississippi /Marie Elaine Danforth -- -- The greatest gathering: the second French-Chickasaw War in the Mississippi Valley and the potential for archaeology /Ann M. Early -- -- Colonial and Creole diets in eighteenth-century New Orleans /Elizabeth M. ScottShannon Lee Dawdy -- -- Colonoware in Western colonial Louisiana: makers and meaning /David W. MorganKevin C. MacDonald -- -- Living on the edge : foodways and early expressions of Creole culture on the French colonial Gulf Coast frontier /Meredith D. Hardy -- -- La Vie Quotidienne : historical archaeological approaches to the plantation era in Guadeloupe, French West Indies /Kenneth G. Kelly -- -- Archaeological research at Habitation Loyola, French Guiana /Allison BainRéginald AugerYannick Le Roux -- -- Commentary /John de Bry.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
316 p., Demonstrates how the lambada —a genre of electric guitar-based dance music consolidated in the port city of Belém, Pará in the 1970s— makes audible a history of mobile, cosmopolitan connections that transcend and transgress the boundaries of the Amazon region proper. These submerged "translaterai" links with the circum-Caribbean and the Brazilian Northeast challenge hegemonic constructions of Belém as a provincial outpost or pocket of exclusion "at land's end."
