This essay analyzes representations and imaginaries of blackness in contemporary Puerto Rico, by focusing on the debates raised by 'Raices'/(Roots) (2001), the Banco Popular video special about traditional Afro-Puerto Rican rhythms of bomba and plena. These debates divided public opinion in Puerto Rico and included members of academia, musicologists, bomba and plena groups, and the San Anton (Ponce) community residents. They refer to the ways Puerto Ricans 'speak the unspoken,' that is, the ways Puerto Ricans talk about race and its intersectionalities on the island and in the diaspora.
Proposes a reading of Donna Hemans' novel River Woman in relation to other contemporary Caribbean women writers and to the early fiction of Toni Morrison. Argues that the complex affects that her representation of 'child-shifting' produces can be articulated in relation to literary texts that re-imagine historical and contemporary practices leaving a child in order to save her and in the context of the plantation.
Looks at the performance of tomboy identity in Joan Anim-Addo's collection of poetry Janie, Cricketing Lady and Margaret Cezair-Thompson's novel The Pirate's Daughter. Argues that the ongoing affects of colonialism and patriarchy in the islands of Grenada and Jamaica, shape the life narratives. To understand the way in which affect can be expressed through tomboyism in Caribbean societies, it is necessary to look at color and class alongside gender in the context of Caribbean creolization.
Grassroots Haitian movements for social justice have set themselves a formidable task: not only addressing the ongoing humanitarian crisis, but also challenging the reconstruction effort to include their leadership and avoid reproducing the conditions that helped make the earthquake so disastrous.
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?
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.
Focuses on discourses of queer subjectivity, Maroon identity, and their relationship to Caribbean nationalism. A key aspect of the argumentis the idea that both queerness and marronage are marked by complex insider/outsider identity positions that resist and complicate binarist discourses of belonging and unbelonging.
Considers the meaning of feminism in Latin America and the Caribbean. According to the Methodological and Thematic Commission of the 12th Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Meeting, the event presents an opportunity to explore the routes that will enable feminism to move forward. Decribes feminism in the Latin American and Caribbean regions as plural and diverse.
Part of a special journal issue dedicated to strategies for societal renewal in Haiti., Fonkoze, "the bank the poor can call their own," is a bank that provides more than just loans. It also sees access to reasonably priced savings, remittance transfer, and currency conversion as a right of even the poorest. This article tells the story of how -- after the devastation of the 2010 earthquake -- Fonkoze found itself positioned to serve Haiti's rural population before other banks were back on their feet.
