In 2008, a new style in Jamaican dancehall music and dance culture known as "Daggering" emerged. Daggering music and dancing, which included lyrics that graphically referred to sexual activities and a dance which has been described as "dry sex" on the dance floor, took Jamaica by storm. The Broadcasting Commission of Jamaica was forced to crack down on broadcasting and cable stations preventing them from playing any Daggering content. This article focuses on the subsequent clash between the government and the dancehall, and seeks to identify an appropriate method for monitoring and enforcing these new standards.
Discusses the relationship between economic conditions and discourses surrounding partner choice in Cuba. Holds that economic changes caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union have necessitated strategies economic survival which differ from previously-held ideals of romantic partnerships. Suggests that anxieties surrounding changes in gender and kinship relations also reflect broader concerns about Cuba's social and economic hierarchies and the future of socialism.
Explores the way writers address the formation and fate of the contemporary American working class in an age of neoliberal globalization. Specifically, the essay examines Russell Banks's 1985 novel Continental Drift, which interweaves the stories of two characters who pull up stakes and head to Florida in search of a better life: an oil furnace repair man from New Hampshire and a young, single mother from Haiti.
Personal reactions of women to the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Discusses the psychic trauma of living in the Haiti's displacement camps after the earthquake regarding poor access to water, violence against women and instances of forced eviction.
Newly arrived from Cuba, Angelica, Dora, Marina, and Damaris attempted to negotiate new surroundings and immigrant identities, building a sense of home for themselves and their families. Data from qualitative interviews, classroom observations, and focus group conversations revealed hopes that by acquiring English language skills, they would improve their quality of life in their new country. Struggles included personal factors situated in their pasts in Cuba and their new surrounds in the Miami Cuban exile enclave, contexts that were further complicated by uncertain expectations of new lives in Miami and the overwhelming task of learning a new language at a local adult education center.
Centering Women consists of somewhat altered versions of the author's previously published articles, with an introduction and "summation" that argue for a post-nationalist history of gender in the Caribbean
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.
Initiatives in the field of sexology and sex education in prerevolutionary Cuba are barely known, as continuity between those experiences and the work carried out during the years following the 1959 revolution have not been researched. The founding of the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), however, must be considered the product of a long process of political maturity on the part of Cuban women during the first half of the twentieth century, and in the broader context of the FMC, the developments in the fields of sexology and sex education over the past fifty years also must be considered. Drawing on FMC archival holdings, this article sets out a periodization of the four main stages of the revolutionary period of institutionalizing sex education in Cuba, as well as its main challenges.
The African heritage hypothesis posits that the substantial African ancestry of Puerto Ricans explains why this group is less segregated from African-Americans than non-Hispanic whites. This pattern is unlike that of other Hispanic groups, who have been found to be highly segregated from African-Americans but modestly segregated from whites. The research presented here shows that Dominicans, another Hispanic group with substantial African ancestry, are also less segregated from African-Americans than whites. Dominicans, therefore, also appear to be conforming to the African heritage thesis by residing in neighborhoods with greater proximity to African-Americans than whites.
Dwayne is a Grade 6 student who came to Canada from Jamaica at the age of seven. Upon arrival in a new school Dwayne had to adapt to a new culture. In addition, Dwayne was identified as having severe behavioral problems and learning difficulties, and it was recommended within the first month of school that the boy be medicated in order for him to cope. His mother refused. Through interviewing Dwayne's mother and his teacher, a case study details Dwayne's experiences of schooling. The story of Dwayne illustrates how experiences of disablement are interrelated with experiences of migration and racialization.
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.
Unpacks a politics of life at the heart of community-based disaster management to advance a new understanding of resilience politics. Through an institutional ethnography of participatory resilience programming in Kingston, Jamaica, explores how staff in Jamaica's national disaster management agency engaged with a qualitatively distinct form of collective life in Kingston's garrison districts.
Argues that patterns of gender exclusion occur on multiple levels from the transnational to the local, and identifies gender-specific obstacles in the recovery and reconstruction period. In Haiti, these include meeting family survival needs, violence and exploitation, and class and racially based stigmatization.
Preidis,Geoffrey A. (Author), Shapiro,Conor D. (Author), Pierre,Inobert (Author), Dyer,Monica J. (Author), Kozinetz,Claudia A. (Author), and Grimes,Richard M. (Author)
Format:
Journal Article
Publication Date:
May 2010
Published:
Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The HIV/ AIDS pandemic disproportionately afflicts regions of the world that have minimal access to formal schooling and low literacy rates. Health educational interventions are difficult to evaluate efficiently in these settings because standard approaches such as written questionnaires cannot easily be employed. Describes a method of rapidly assessing health interventions among large groups that does not require the ability to read or write. This evaluation tool was tested within the context of a community-based HIV/AIDS drama education program in a low-literate region of rural Haiti.
With stark income inequalities rooted in its dual currency economy, Cuba is taxing down high and unearned incomes, while trying to raise national productivity and official salaries through performance-related pay and labor restructuring. Such measures are portrayed as an abandonment of socialism, but in Cuba are discussed in terms of historic socialist debates about distribution and the balance of moral and material incentives at work, in a society still characterized by common ownership, social protection, and collective debate.
This article elaborates on some important concepts in the matter of abortion, the issue of revelant legislation, and ends with pertinent recommendations. Adopting a bioethical perspective, the paper addresses the relevant issues and perspectives on abortion and argues for clarity of concepts and understanding of the context in which a woman is pregnant and considers abortion.
The findings of a questionnaire survey distributed to 153 female university students in Barbados and Jamaica in 2008 reveal the attitudes to diverse female sexualities in the Caribbean. The participants in the survey discussed changing beliefs about sexuality in Caribbean society. The findings show that slowly, as a consequence of globalization and the mass media, people are increasingly open-minded about sex. Women are confidently expressing and increasingly asserting themselves as equal partners. There is greater debate in Caribbean society about female same-sex relationships, and deeper awareness of sexual harassment is evident. Nevertheless, for some respondents, the same degrading notions of women as sex objects and promiscuous beings continue to exist.
Reviews the book "Women's Activism in Latin America and the Caribbean: Engendering Social Justice, Democratizing Citizenship," edited by Elizabeth Maier and Nathalie Lebon.
Looks at Barbados's experience of abortion law reform undertaken in the 1980s. The movement was led by then Cabinet Minister and lawyer Billie Miller. Documents the nuances, important moments, key strategies and major players in the reform movement, and highlights the critical role that Miller played in getting the Medical Termination Act passed in 1983. Background information on the situation of Barbadian women and the nature of parliamentary governance at that time is also addressed in order to give context to the politics surrounding the issue.
"A single highway connects the Caribbean province of Limón to mainstream society in the highlands of Costa Rica. This paper explores the ways in which that highway affects the status hierarchy of mainstream society in Costa Rica, and how the construction of whiteness as an unexamined racial qualifier for total social incorporation constrains the perception of blacks as social liminars and blackness as a state of communitas. The argument elaborates the work of Victor Turner on ritual liminality to suggest the structural ambiguity of Afro-Latin Americans in the context of Costa Rica." (author"
The concept of a unified African-Caribbean community or identity is a modern construction in that it emerged in its present guise during the second half of the twentieth century. Prior to this, the identity politics of the ‘black’ people from this region were largely polarized. They were frequently divided along lines of island identities (Jamaica, Barbados, St Kitts etc.). Focusing on the period between 1970 and 1979, this article sketches out the ways in which the black experience within local-level football also contributed to identity change among a particular group of young sportsmen in Leicester.
Reforms proposed at the Sixth Communist Party Congress represent a new, third phase of social policy in post-revolutionary Cuba. This new stage has the potential to strengthen social equity in Cuba, improve the socio-economic situation of disparate social groups, and overcome the old limitations of social policy. Yet it could also increase inequality, and at least in the short term, its predicted impacts will be contradictory and ambivalent.
Considers the association of cohabitation experience with externalizing behavior among children of Latina mothers whose ethnic origin is in Mexico, Puerto Rico, or the Dominican Republic. Children of Mexican-origin mothers had greater externalizing problems in childhood and adolescence when their mothers were born in the United States or had immigrated as minors. For children of Caribbean-origin mothers, being born to a cohabiting or married mother had a statistically equivalent association with externalizing behavior when mothers were born outside the mainland United States (Dominican and island-born Puerto Rican mothers). Children of mainland-born Puerto Rican mothers had more behavior problems when their mothers cohabited at birth.
The erasure and denial of the female body and of female sexuality in the fiction of Erna Brodber and Jamaica Kincaid represent the erasure and denial of the colonized Caribbeans by their European colonizers. The female characters of both Brodber and Kincaid, however, retrieve their bodies through various means, from education to a realization of the power of their sexuality. This retrieval of the female body symbolizes freedom of the Caribbean body from colonization.
Reviews Franklin W. Knight's The Caribbean: the Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism, Herbert S. Klein's The Middle Passage: Comparative Studies of the Atlantic Slave Trade, Gad J. Heuman's Between Black and White: Race, Politics and the Free Coloureds in Jamaica,1792-1865, Bridget Brereton, Race Relations in Colonial Trinidad, Ann M. Pescatello's edited book Old Roots in New Lands, Mary Noel Menezes' British Policy towards the Amerindians in British Guiana 1803-1873, Arnaud Marks and Rene Romer's edited book Family and Kinship in Middle America and the Caribbean, Gary Brana-Shute's On the Corner: Male Social Life in a Paramaribo Creole Neighbourhood, and George Beckford and Michael Witter's Small garden-- bitter weed : the political economy of struggle and change in Jamaica.
Examines changing relations of accumulation taking shape in the garment export industry in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Draws upon a framework called "the coloniality of power" to consider the reworking of the social and spatial boundaries between hyper-exploited wage work and the people and places cast out from its relations.
"This article investigates the efficacy of community organizing by African Caribbean migrants in Toronto, Ontario. The author argues that community organizing was an instinctive initiative of African Caribbean people. Historically, Black community organizational agenda, although owing much to its own resourcefulness and fortitude, was intimately connected to the influence and strength of the larger White population. Racism and social exclusions were the major external factors influencing the majority of African Caribbean institutional building." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR];
Examines opinions concerning goals and outcomes in regards to the Jamaican Ministry of Tourism's Ten-Year Master Plan to enhance tourism and increase shared governance. In addition to secondary sources of information, researchers use primary data obtained through an email survey sent to 540 Jamaican managers and executives.
