Antenor Firmin (1850-1911) is probably the first scholar of African descent to
write a systematic work of anthropology, one that anticipated the eventual scope and breadth of the new science well beyond the narrow, racialist physical anthropology that it critiqued.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
387 p, This text tells of the struggle of the Indo-Caribbean people. From 1838 to 1917 over half a million indentured labourers were shipped from India to the Caribbean and settled in the former British, Dutch, French and Spanish colonies. Like their predecessors, the African slaves, they laboured on the sugar estates. In 1998 in the English-speaking Caribbean alone there are an estimated one million people of Indian descent and they form the majority in Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago. Based on official reports and papers, and unpublished material from British, Indian and Caribbean sources, this text aims to fill a gap in the history of the Caribbean, of India, Britain and other European colonial powers. (I.B. Tauris website);
In April 1999, Dionne Brand, Leslie Sanders, and Rinaldo Walcott sat down to have a conversation about Brand's second novel At The Full and Change of the Moon. The
interview took place over a promised riposte, and was a conversation among friends.
The novel concerns itself with the contemporary lives of the descendents of Marie Ursule a slave who commits a rebellious and horrific act of mass poisoning on a plantation but saves her daughter Bolla.
Randall Robinson, founder and president of TransAfrica will speak at 12:30 p.m. at the Black Business and Professional Association's (BBPA) 4th Annual African American Economic Summit to be held Saturday, May 20 at the Renaissance Long Beach Hotel from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Robinson is a noted activist and author of Defending the Spirit: A Black Life in America. He is best known for his leadership in spearheading the movement to influence United States policies toward Africa and the Caribbean. Robinson played a significant role in the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s and the restoration of Democracy in Haiti.
