Examines how a Caribbean thinker, Theophilus Scholes, used the figure of the "white Negro" to expose the linkages between ethnological preoccupation with black bodies and an imperial network of power that held implications for political equality.
Since its publication in 1976, Ivan van Sertima's book They Came Before Columbus has gone through 21 printings, while receiving widespread--though not unanimous--condemnation from the American archaeological establishment, culminating in a hostile, full-length forum in Current Anthropology. And yet, startlingly, the field of American archaeology has recently found itself in the midst of a major paradigm shift, caused by archaeological evidence that obliterates the Clovis model as a legitimate demarcation of the first presence of human settlement in the New World. Kamugisha proposes to trace the response to They Came Before Columbus, while discussing the issue of diffusionism in van Sertima's work.;
As anonymously as Anton de Kom began his life in 1898 in a small nineteenth-century Surinam village, it would be terminated forty-seven years later by forces beyond his control. His death, however, was not a singular event, but one representative of an entire generation of Surinamese migrants who, desiring to improve their lives, travelled northward to Holland, the "mother country", only to find a deeper sense of pain as unwanted and abused eacute;migrés. De Kom's migration to Holland occurred twice. First, as a youth he was pulled northward to understand better "her greatness". A decade later, he was forcibly pushed and exiled northward by the Dutch colonial authorities. On the second occasion, he became aware of his own illegitimate political birth as a colonial subject, and the psychological trap that awaited him when asked to defend the imperial country against an invading German army. His residence in exile exposed the serious dilemma of "two-ness", described by W.E.B. DuBois, when the colonized becomes psychologically and aesthetically committed to the colonizer's world, as well as that of the colonized. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT];
The revisionings proposed by Sultana Afroz regarding the pervasiveness of the African Islamic presence in plantation Jamaica are contested, on grounds of her falsification of demographic data and of contemporary historical sources, non-differentiation in the treatment of historical processes in West Africa, unsubstantiated or inadequate proof of claims, attribution of causality and relatedness to parallel phenomena, questionable etymological assertions, unfamiliarity with African cultural history, and a general tendency to make exaggerated and dogmatic statements. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT];
Rizzo examines how lawyers represent their clients in the twilight years of the Old Regime France. During this period, lawyers always depict their clients as more metropolitan than their opponent in order to render colonial "others" both more exotic and more accessible to readers and judges.;
Robertson examines how people in St. Lucia percieve emancipation. She argues that the circumstances of St. Lucia's colonial past made ideals of freedom pervasive and emancipation intensely complicated, with consequences that are felt in contemporary St. Lucian identity and in strongly African cultural foundations and continuities.;
"Alexander Bedward, minister of the revivalist Jamaica Native Baptist Free Church during the period 1889-1921, emerged as one of the island's earliest black nationalists. Under the guise of religion Bedward called on the black majority to rise up and take action against the prevailing system of racial discrimination, socio-economic deprivation, injustice, the tyranny of minority colonial rule, and to establish a government representative of the people. While he was revered by the masses, attracting thousands of followers at home and abroad, he was feared by the upper classes and colonial authorities, who saw him as a threat to political stability. An antagonistic relationship developed between the government and Bedward. Eventually, he was arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to the lunatic asylum, where he later died." (publication abstract);
