African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
361 p., Examines how the crisis of World War I impacted imperial policy and popular claims-making in the British Caribbean. Between 1915 and 1918, tens of thousands of men from the British Caribbean volunteered to fight in World War I and nearly 16,000 men, hailing from every British colony in the region, served in the newly formed British West Indies Regiment (BWIR). In Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, the two colonies that contributed over seventy-five percent of the British Caribbean troops, discussions about the meaning of the war for black, colored, white, East Indian, and Chinese residents sparked heated debates about the relationship among race, gender, and imperial loyalty. To explore these debates, this dissertation foregrounds the social, cultural, and political practices of BWIR soldiers, tracing their engagements with colonial authorities, military officials, and Caribbean civilians throughout the war years.
450 p., Examines how the development of public health, aided by the intervention of the Rockefeller Foundation, intersected with the birth of nationalism in Jamaica between 1918 and 1944. It demonstrates that a modern public health program based in western biomedicine, racial categorization and colonial modes of behavior were vital to claims of fitness for self-rule by Jamaican nationalists. In the late 1930s the demand for greater representation in government was accompanied by the scrutiny of the sexual behaviors and personal hygiene of the Afro-Jamaican masses. The author analyzes how disease and reproduction played a central role in the competing constructions of Afro-Jamaican bodies by colonial elites and ambitious middle class nationalists.
Analyzes the prominent role played by first wave feminism and by women writers between 1898-1903 as the Jamaica Times articulated a broad-based, middle class nationalism and launched a campaign to establish a Jamaican national literature. This archival material is significant because it suggests a significant modification of anglophone Caribbean feminist, literary and nationalist historiography: first wave feminism was not introduced to Jamaica exclusively through black nationalist organizations in the late 19th and early 20th century, but emerged in a broader phenomenon of respectable, middle class nationalism encompassing Jamaican nationalism and Pan Africanism.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
257 p., Argues that in Jamaica and Haiti, creolization represented a tremendous creative art by enslaved peoples. Creolization was not a passive mixing of cultures, but an effort to create new hybrid institutions and cultural meanings to replace those that had been demolished by enslavement.
The ongoing review of defamation laws by the Jamaican government has sharpened the focus on the need to identify appropriate standards for public officials in libel actions in light of the growing recognition of a need for transparency. This article explores how British, Caribbean and U.S. jurisdictions have sought to manage the paradigm shift between the right to reputation and the need to ensure responsible and accountable governance. The aim is to identify a path of reform for Caribbean defamation law that ensures greater public official accountability and better incorporates twenty-first century notions of democracy.
Examines the work of Jamaican writer Una Marson for her engagement with the ideas of modernity and her cultural expectations as she traveled from Jamaica to London, England in the 1930s. Topics include colonialism, race and gender, modernism, and the magazine "Cosmopolitan: A Monthly Magazine for Business Youth of Jamaica and the Official Organ of the Stenographer's Association."
