African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
288 p, Explores the relevance and nature of identity and belonging in a culturally diverse and rapidly changing world. Draws on cartography, travels, narratives of childhood in the Caribbean, journeys across the Canadian landscape, African ancestry, histories, politics, philosophies and literature. The title, A Map to the Door of No Return, refers to both a place in imagination and a point in history -- the Middle Passage. The quest for identity and place has profound meaning and resonance in an age of heterogenous identities.
Batrell,Ricardo (Author) and Sanders,Mark A. (Translator)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2010
Published:
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
240 p., In 1896, an illiterate, fifteen-year-old Afro-Cuban field hand joined the rebel army fighting for Cuba's independence. Though poor and uneducated, Ricardo Batrell believed in the promise of Cuba Libre, the vision of a democratic and egalitarian nation that inspired the Cuban War of Independence. After the war ended in 1898, Batrell taught himself to read and write and published a memoir of his wartime experiences,
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
141 p, Reprints an 1830s text that was central to the transatlantic campaign to fully abolish slavery in Britain’s colonies. James Williams, an eighteen-year-old Jamaican “apprentice” (former slave), came to Britain in 1837 at the instigation of the abolitionist Joseph Sturge. The Narrative he produced there, one of very few autobiographical texts by Caribbean slaves or former slaves, became one of the most powerful abolitionist tools for effecting the immediate end to the system of apprenticeship that had replaced slavery
