Discusses the challenges faced by people of African descent during the slave era, who were forced to adapt to their surroudings while, at the same time, attempting to maintain their own cultural integrity. Focuses on the African Diasporic peoples of Brazil, and describes in detail the sisterhood of Nossa Senhora da Boa Morte and the brotherhood of Nossa Senhora do Rosario. Notes that these confraternities show the ingenuity of the Afro-Brazilian people as they maintained their cultural heritage.;
Examines the use of and changes to the Spanish language in Equatorial Guinea. Explores reasons for the non-creolization of Equatorial Guinean Spanish. Discusses the arrival and spread of Pidgin English on Fernando Poo (Bioko). Reviews literature on the Spanish language in Equatorial Guinea.;
Internal, indentured and regional migration were tightly interlinked in post-emancipation Martinique by both contemporary perceptions and migrant actions. Anticipating a flight from the estates, colonial elites were committed before emancipation to constructing a replacement workforce through immigration. Indentureship was therefore a reaction to a crisis of labour relations rather than of labour supply. Such schemes also stimulated regional movements, from marronage by indentured Africans and Asians to recruitment efforts in the British West Indies. Viewed together, the three faces of post-emancipation migration reveal the continuing tension between the colony's search for coerced labour and the migrants' assertions of agency. [abstract];
Discusses the emergence of Afro-Hispanic literature over the past 25 years. Details the many social and political factors that have influenced the literary movement. Argues that the emergence of Afro-Hispanic literature is timely in its challenging of traditional views of what is admissible into the literary canon.;
Discusses the emergence of an Afro-Cuban aesthetic. Notes the major contributions of Cuban writers Félix Tanco, Antonio Zambrana, Nicolás Guillén, Miguel Barnet, and others to the literary movement. Remarks that these authors give us a view of Latin American history from "below the deck of a slave ship" - a view that is very different from the traditional one.;
Discusses the poetry of Afro-Cuban writer Nancy Morejón, focusing on her poetry collection, Paisaje célebre (Fundarte, 1993). Compares the book to her previous work, and discusses the political and social influences that shaped it. Notes that this book marks an important stage in Morejón's poetry, in that it celebrates a new and different country and voice - one of indepedence and freedom.;
"Calypso in its modern incarnation (from roughly the turn of the century onward, that is) has always been commercially-oriented, always creole and cosmopolitan, always "compromised," shaping and re-shaping itself according to bourgeois imperatives and market forces; this is in great measure what made it "modern" (see, esp., Cowley). ... And as for the U.S. market, calypso had been cultivating it since the first luxury-liners put into port in Trinidad in the early 'teens. ... So if, by the end of World War II, calypsonians had figuratively speaking bought the bungalow (as West Indians did quite literally two decades later, when they snapped up not only the row houses of Flatbush and Crown Heights, but also the cottages of western Long Island), then buying into a dodgy proposition like "world music" amounted to just one more mortgage payment." --The Author
