Colonial laws maintained the social and physical security of English settlements in the New World. This essay compares those laws that attempted to define and regulate servants and labour in seventeenth-century Virginia and Jamaica. The laws reveal differences in the social composition of their early populations and in the relationships each colony had with the imperial government. Earlier laws reflect a greater concern with the economic value of labour. In the last two decades, however, the laws defined new social constructs that would dominate slave laws in the next century. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT];
Fox discusses Lydia Cabrera, a novelist and short story writer many consider the mother of Afro-Cuban studies. Examined are her contributions to Cuba's Africanized popular culture, as well as her bridging the cultures of France, Africa and Cuba.;
"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);
Reviews several books about Cuban history. The Social Transformation of Eighteenth-Century Cuba, by Sherry Johnson; Winds of Change: Hurricanes and the Transformation of Nineteenth-Century Cuba, by Louis A. Pérez Jr; Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition, by Stephan Palmié; Espacios, Silencios Y Los Sentidos De La Libertad: Cuba Entre 1878 Y 1912, edited by Fernando Martínez Heredia, Rebecca J. Scott and Orlando F. García Martínez.;
Obeah encompasses a wide variety of beliefs and practices involving the control or channelling of supernatural/spiritual forces, usually for socially beneficial ends such as treating illness, bringing good fortune, protecting against harm, and avenging wrongs. Although obeah was sometimes used to harm others, Europeans during the slave period distorted its positive role in the lives of many enslaved persons. In post-emancipation times, colonial officials, local white elites and their ideological allies exaggerated the antisocial dimensions of obeah, minimizing or ignoring its positive functions. This negative interpretation became so deeply ingrained that many West Indians accept it to varying degrees today, although the positive attributes of obeah are still acknowledged in most parts of the anglophone Caribbean. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT];
Reviews several books on slavery. The Abolition of Slavery in Brazil: The "Liberation" of Africans Through the Emancipation of Capital, by David Baronov; The Virgin, The King and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre: Negotiating Freedom in Colonial Cuba, 1670-1780, by María Elena Díaz; The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas, by David Eltis.;
This article, based on the 2003 Raphael Samuel Memorial Lecture, begins with the issue of memory, but also asks: what are the limitations of studying memory? I suggest that smuggled in to current memory studies are a range of issues which are, in fact, analytically distinct from the problem of memory itself: historical temporality, consciousness of time, and consciousness of history. Underlying all these distinct problems is the overarching question of how we can conceive of ‘the past’ existing in ‘the present’. I explore this in relation to two Caribbean thinkers. I look first at C. L. R. James’s monumental and wonderful history book, The Black Jacobins, which works closely within the Hegelian idea of ‘world-history’. An alternative conceptualization can be found in George Lamming’s more phenomenological approach, manifest most in his novel, In The Castle of My Skin. These two polarities – history on the world-stage, and history in subjective mode – continue to underwrite our understanding of the-past-in-the-present. I close by turning to the work of Raphael Samuel, and suggest that his celebrated volumes, Theatres of Memory, are more concerned with the-past-in-the-present than they are with memory itself. (Author)
