"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)
Borneman praises Evelyn Blackwood for using ethnographic evidence from Indonesia and the Caribbean to enter into debates on matrifocality and marriage. Borenman is less convinced, however, about the significance or her general advocacy claim about gender
"After an introduction providing biographical details and some historical context for the Caribbean in the period 1811–1830, the article looks in detail at what have been seen to be [MacGregor's] successes and failures in the Caribbean region. It asks to what extent questions of ethnicity or masculinity have affected the way contemporaries and historians viewed MacGregor and his actions." (IngentaConnect Blog)
The aim of this research article is to investigate how pupils from Black Caribbean backgrounds are helped to achieve high standards in British schools and to identify a number of significant common themes for success in raising the achievement
"Focuses on certain calypsos in the decades leading up to Trinidad’s independence in 1962 in which the calypsonian’s sense of his own freedom is manifested in calypsos that focus on the larger struggle for freedom and autonomy for his society. In these calypsos, there is a subversion of the status quo, a move from a respectful deference to colonial rule to a new postcolonial consciousness. These calypsos focus on changing attitudes toward the British Royal Family, a growing allegiance to a homeland other than Mother England and the major events during the Fifties as plans for a West Indian Federation develop and collapse." (author)
"While plotting out the journeys that paved the way for their creative and innovative work in Afro-Cuban and African American ethnography, this study will address their bifocal vision as insider-outsiders within the minority cultures they represent in folktales and within the 'foreign' cultures to which they traveled. Cabrera's and Hurston's roles as 'native ethnographers' will also be considered. In creating alternatives to traditional ethnographies, such as Franz Boas's Bella Bella Tales (1932), their collections can be understood as early examples of experimental and feminist ethnography." (author)
Examines two holidays that many radical abolitionists celebrated every year, the Fourth of July and the First of August, an antislavery holiday commemorating British emancipation in the West Indies
According to Sensbach, this is an important biography because it describes major themes connecting the eighteenth-century black Atlantic world, including the dramatic expansion of the slave trade and the Afro-Atlantic freedom struggle
The work of Haitian author Jacques Stephen Alexis is replete with examples of characters caught in the dilemmas of exile. The author focuses on Alexis's characters who go through a "true" expatriation, a movement out of Haiti and into another country, and considers how the various experiences of expatriation are represented, as well as how the presence of the Haitian exiles impacts the host country. Taking examples from Alexis's novel Compère Général Soleil, Monro argues that the Haitian exiles unwittingly, though inevitably, disrupt the illusion of oneness of national identity and culture and become a subversive force, creolizing culture in the place of exile, the Dominican Republic. This cultural creolization in turn is a threat to the monocultural, totalizing political discourses of the host country, it is argued.;
In her book Louisiana, Erma Brodber reflects on the alliances that should exist between the African American and Afro Caribbean peoples, symbolically repairing the fissures that exist between the two, while addressing an uncommon subject in Caribbean migrant literature. Brodber's literary themes toward the unification of the relationships shared amongst the black diaspora articulate the legal tensions and national differences that can impede these alliances. Although Brodber's novel approaches this by creating a reconnection of the African diaspora in a borderless and nationless transmigration, and sometimes through a spaceless spirit world, Page argues that in reality this reunification is affected by the rules of the state that simply cannot be ignored.;
All literary categories and definitions are imperfect and are often the sunject of the debate and contestation: "West Indies and The Caribbean" are no exception. 'West Indies', the term used in this journal's previous bibliographies to describe the literature of the Caribbean region, accurately defines the literature of the Commonwealth Caribbean, which is Anglophone and which has historical and contemporary political, social and cultural link to Britain. At the same time, literary scholarsship from the region increasingly identifies itself as Caribbean, that is connected geographically, historically and culturally to the Francophone, Hispanic and Ducth-speaking Caribbean and to the Americas; The Caribbean complied and introduced by Suzanne Scafe London .....Debate and contestation: West Indies' and 'The Caribbean' are no exceptions.
This essay investigates the key tensions that arise within Jamaica's new cultural policy "Toward Jamaica the Cultural Superstate." The argument presented in the paper is that "culture" is a tricky and potentially dangerous site upon which to hinge national development goals, even though the expansion of cultural industries may well represent a viable and potentially lucrative strategy for economic development. This is because invariably, "culture" cannot do the work policy makers would like it to do, and its invocation within policy spheres usually already signals a kind of developmental distress, a perceived need for retooling through a form of social engineering. In other words, "culture" (in the anthropological sense) reflects and shapes, yet cannot in and of itself solve the most pressing challenges facing Jamaica today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR];
The African diaspora's search for both a collective voice and a freedom of identity has led many writers to be liberated only at the expense of being marketed and made part of the publishing machine. Forbes compares this marketplace to the "trading post," referring to the contact points where African slaves were bought and sold. Searching for new targets, many times the African diaspora's voice is cut by sales driven marketing. In illustrating his points, Forbes focuses on five travel narratives in this essay, including books by such authors Mary Seacole, Marlene Nourbese Philip, Jamaica Kincaid, Terry McMillan, and John Edgar Wideman.;
De qué manera puede el desarrollo influir y ser influido por el servicio doméstico? En la primera parte se plantean las posibles relaciones entre estos dos fenómenos y en seguida las tendencias generales en la industria del servicio doméstico. Las características de las trabajadoras domésticas se discuten en la segunda parte. En la tercera parte se detallan los patrones del servicio doméstico, el crecimiento económico, la modernización y la migración en Malasia, Zambia y Canadá, lo que revela dinámicas tanto compartidas como únicas y genera preguntas sobre las relaciones entre las trabajadoras domésticas y el Estado, las relaciones raciales, la (re)construcción del papel de género, clase y nociones de modernidad y los vínculos que guardan estas cuestiones con el desarrollo. Las observaciones en la cuarta parte reiteran las tendencias detectadas en los estudios de caso y delinean las inquietudes que de ahí se derivan.;
n Cuba, race, nation, and popular music were inextricably linked to the earliest formulations of a national identity. This article examines how the racialized discourse of blanqueamiento, or whitening, became part of a nineteenth-century literary narrative in which the casi blanca mulata, nearly white mulatta, was seen as a vehicle for whitening black Cubans. However, as the novels of Cirilo Villaverde and Ramón Meza reveal, the mulata's inability to produce entirely white children established the ultimate unattainability of whiteness by nonwhites. This article analyzes the fluidity of these racial constructs and demonstrates that, while these literary texts advocated the lightening of the nation's complexion over time, they also mapped the progressive "darkening" of Cuban music as popular culture continued to borrow from black music;
The author examines race, language, and identity in Derek Walcott's poetry, reading Walcott's poetry as an extended meditation on the question of whether it is possible to exist within the English language and an Afro-Caribbean tradition, drawing poetic nourishment from each, or whether the attempt is a betrayal of both. Of mixed racial ancestry, a native speaker of French Creole who was formally educated in British colonial schools, raised Methodist on the Catholic island of St. Lucia, Derek Walcott occupies a peripheral place with respect to both English and Caribbean culture, it is noted. Throughout the course of his poetic career he has been criticized from both perspectives, either for "appropriating the Other" and putting it to use in the service of the dominant culture or for not assimilating that dominant (English) culture fully enough.;
Explores the association of altars with religious practice known as Espiritismo or Spiritism in the Caribbean culture, particularly the Indians and Congo. Attributes of Espiritismo; Distinction of an Espiritismo altar from other non-Christian altars assembled in observance of the Caribbean religions; Relation of Espiritismo with the religion Palo Monte Mayombe in Cuba.
Presents information on the authors' association with writer Andre Gunder Frank whom he first met in a meeting of the World Congress of Sociology in Mexico City, Mexico. Though the internationalism of the Black Liberation Movement is certainly linked to Pan Africanism, there is a broader internationalism that had been inspired by Frank and others who had come to intellectual, political, and moral maturity while laboring to understand the world in order to change it in Africa, Asia, and Latin America during the 1950s and 1960s. Frank's stance is that underdevelopment results from the same processes that have produced development, and the development of capitalism itself is also the development of underdevelopment.
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.
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’.
Compares the contemporary movements for cultural autonomy and social legitimation organized by the indigenous and Afrodescendant populations of Latin America. These movements are challenging the concept of blanqueamiento or whitening embedded in the process of mestizaje in Latin America. Whitening proclaimed the superiority of white European culture over indigenous and black culture, a concept these movements are challenging by proclaiming their own cultural autonomy.
Discusses the struggle for freedom and full citizenship in the Caribbean. Background on the Haitian Revolution which is recognized as the third pillar in the making of modern citizenship and freedom; Factors that affect the effort of Caribbean people to fight for universal citizenship; Manifestations of the differential valuing of white and black bodies in the Caribbean; Lessons being taught by the Caribbean history.
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.
An examination of the characteristics and evolution of both Home Economics (HE) and women in development focuses on pivotal issues at the intersection of these two fields. Data obtained from Denmark, the Caribbean, Africa, and the US show that HE was only for girls and focused on domestic work in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In Africa and the Caribbean HE was aimed at training girls as domestic servants. In the last half of the 20th century HE welcomed, and sometimes even required, males to attend classes and the criteria was broadened to include health and consumer education. In many areas HE has improved standards of living and helped to address such important issues as teenage pregnancy, school dropout, and domestic violence.
The only two electoral victories of multi-racial parties in Trinidad and Tobago and in Guyana are analyzed comparatively to determine the conditions of their success in the sharply racially competitive environments of both countries. The argument of the article is that new class formation in the context of "political openings" precipitated the rise of new class-political agendas that were able to promise developmental benefits to a wide section of the population. The new political classes were compositionally "the working population" in Guyana and the "professional middle class" in Trinidad and Tobago, which explains their extremely different developmental proposals.;
Reviews several books about post-revisionist scholarship on race in Latin America. Diploma of Whiteness: Race and Social Policy in Brazil, 1917-1945, by Jerry Dávila; Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics, by Melissa Nobles; Indian and Nation in Revolutionary Mexico, by Alexander S. Dawson.;
"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);
n this article, the author gives an overview of the central paradigms which organise the studies of black cultures in the New World, particularly from the Caribbean perspective. The field of anthropological and sociological research is described as structured by three dominant interpretations : continuity, creolization and alienation. Though this text is a description of afield of research, it purports to go further and analyze the way in which the traditionnal debate on black American cultures has recently been updated through the notion of "diaspora". Uses of the notion of diaspora, whether classical or postmodern, merely reformulate an established debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR];
"This essay examines four of the most influential examples of this prose genre written during the supposed Golden Age of Cuban music before the upheaval of the 1959 Revolution. Though Eduardo Sánchez de Fuentes, Emilio Grenet, Alejo Carpentier, and Fernando Ortiz were all responding to Cuba's peculiar cultural climate and historical situation, they participated in a long-standing, pan-American intellectual movement to write histories interpreting the connection between racial inheritance, environment, music, and national identity.";
"The first article by Keith Ellis, Caribbean Identity and Integration in The Work of Nicolás Guillén, uses examples of Guillén's works to demonstrate that in his poetry, his essays, as well as in his personal relations, he demonstrated a desire to build throughout the Caribbean the kind of consciousness that would facilitate its meaningful integration." (foreword);
In her study of these Caribbean rewritings of novels by the Bronté' s sisters, Maria Cristina Fumagalli addresses how Condé and Rhys creolize their British models in different ways and for different reasons. Condé pays homage to Emily Bronté and writes Caribbean variations on the theme of Wuthering Heights while Jean Rhys "corrects" Charlotte Bronté's depiction of Antoinette/Bertha and of the Caribbean. Fumagalli interprets both cases as the expression of Caribbean identity always in the making, a process that questions established European categories. (from Journal of Caribbean Literatures);
The increasing diversity of immigrant-receiving countries calls for measures of residential segregation that extend beyond the conventional two-group approach. The authors represent simultaneously the relative social distance occupied by a wide array of ethnic groups. The authors find that African/Caribbean groups and blacks were highly clustered and shared common patterns of segregation with other groups.
"Tells the story of the emigration of African Americans to Haiti and the Dominican Republic in 1824. Today an enclave of descendants live in Samaná in the Dominican Republic."
