"How should we make theoretical sense of Haiti's instability in the past two decades? The central hypothesis of this study is that the 29-year Duvalier dicatatorship was stabilized through the paramilitary. In the past two decades, unofficial and illegitimate paramilitaries have continued to be a constant factor in Haitian politics, each of them attempting to secure partisan political power, but none with a monopoly on coercion. Consequently, the type of institution that was most able to stabilize Haiti from 1957-1986, albeit at a horrendous cost, has been the most prominent de-stabilizing force since that time." (introduction);
Examines the impact of the U.S. media on gender relations in the Caribbean area. The U.S. media have created a cultural dependency whereby Caribbean people tend to reject their indigenous culture and favor the American culture. The author asserts that Caribbean men behave in a certain manner and contribute to social problems because they have been improperly socialized by the U.S. media. Moreover, the portrayal of sports celebrities has created a feeling of victimhood among blacks.
Some of the forms that collective identities and nationalism have taken in the Caribbean are analyzed in this paper, which examines two historical figures, one from Jamaica and the other from Puerto Rico: Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) and Pedro Albizu Campos (1891-1965), respectively. Both were black, radical, and politically persecuted.
"In this article, I revisit debates about so-called matrifocal societies as a way to critique the centrality of heteronormative marriage and family in anthropology. Using gender as a tool of analysis, I argue that anthropologists have relied on the trope of the dominant heterosexual man, what I call the "Patriarchal Man," to create and sustain concepts of "marriage" and "family." By examining the discourse on matrifocality in studies of Afro-Caribbean and Minangkabau households, I show how it is the "missing man," the dominant heterosexual man, who is the key to the construction and perpetuation of the matrifocal concept and, by extension, the motor of marriage, family, and kinship. This fixity on the dominant heterosexual man has led anthropologists to misrecognize other forms of relatedness as less than or weaker than heteronormative marriage. I suggest that, rather than positing a foundational model for human sociality, intimacy, or relatedness, researchers look for webs of meaningful relationships in their historical and social specificity." (author)
The way in which the Caribbean person is given emblematic status as the metropolitan migrant is made clear in James Clifford's declaration that ‘We are all Caribbeans now...in our urban archipelagos'. Examines the impact on the critical reception of Caribbean writings that has been made as a result of the fact that metropolitan diasporas are now the privileged places in which to be properly ‘postcolonial’.
