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.
