African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
259 p, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. set out on a quest to discover how Latin Americans of African descent live now, and how the countries of their acknowledge—or deny—their African past; how the fact of race and African ancestry play themselves out in the multicultural worlds of the Caribbean and Latin America. Starting with the slave experience and extending to the present, Gates unveils the history of the African presence in six Latin American countries—Brazil, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico, and Peru—through art, music, cuisine, dance, politics, and religion, but also the very palpable presence of anti-black racism.
There are 38.9 million blacks in the United States. According to the 2000 census there are 75.9 million citizens of Brazil who would be classified as African American in the U.S. Since there are only 91.3 million Brazilian whites, who dominate the country, one wonders why so many blacks are living in poverty in favelas (slums).
[By the way [Anthony Morgan], in another University publication you're quoted as saying: "I think the bigger issue is how little we know about the history and historical contributions of Jamaicans." Well, the issue is way bigger than Jamaica; it's a "race" issue, targeting and ridiculing Black people, all of whom are people of African descent, sons and daughters of slaves.] So those students, froshers, "...were just having fun," eh? There was "nò mal-intent?" according to director [Michel Patry]. Surely they could've found another and more interesting and humanly innocuous way to have (even more) fun. The blackface skit is a sad cliché, it's passé, plus it's not funny. Except for [White] people as they seek ways to fulfill their final stage of life: their pursuit of happiness, by any means. It serves us right; it's the 'house divided' maxim. We are fractured from pulling in so many directions. We lack cohesion and the essential elements that hold people together to secure a strong !foundation. We've long cut the ties that bind, so it's very easy for people to have their way with us.
'It is a cause to celebrate, for slavery is the worst abomination that one set of people can, through their power and might, inflict on another," said [Bruce Golding] in his message. "In that celebration, we honour the courage of those leaders who fought the battle against slavery at times when it seemed to be a battle that would never be won, those who sacrificed their lives so that our forefathers could be free and our nation be built."
287 p., With a focus on cultural memory, this dissertation investigates French Caribbean women's plays and their performance at Ubu Repertory Theater, a pioneering French-American theatre in New York. After a theoretical introduction and a historical chapter investigating slavery and its remembrance in the Francophone Caribbean, each chapter is divided into two sections, the first examining the play, and the second its production at Ubu. The author relies on theories of collective memory and cultural trauma to read Ina Césaire's Fire's Daughters, Maryse Condé's The Tropical Breeze Hotel, and Gerty Dambury's Crosscurrents as plays that dramatize a link between the past (the Middle Passage, slavery, and sexual relations between enslaved women and white men) and present-day behaviors, attitudes, and pain. It is argued that these plays work to revise problematic practices of remembrance in France and the Antilles. These practices dissociate slavery from its local context; make the trauma of enslaved women's rape a secret; divide Antilleans of different races, ethnicities, genders, and social classes; and associate resistance almost exclusively with Haiti. In a second section of each chapter, the production and reception of these plays at Ubu are examined.
History shows close to two million enslaved Africans were taken to South America. A great number of them were taken to Bahia, Brazil, to work on the sugar cane plantations. [Dionisio] has hope for the future of Brazilian Blacks. "If America can elect a Black president, I know that our time will one day come when a Black Brazilian will look after the wellbeing of his or her people. But at the way things are in Brazil, it is only through education that we will one day be equal to the whites, if you know what I mean." At this point, it sounded as if Dionisio was engaged in a monologue. "But many children dream of one day being like Pele, our greatest football star," he continued as he gazed in the distance, his eyes resting on the humming bird doing battle with the sweet nectar. The mention of Pele changed the contour of his face and I could see the veins in his face clearly showing. "Most of our people have let us down. Most, like Pele, can be considered Black, but we have a saying here that 'You are a Black person with a white soul. We say that of Black leaders and football celebrities who do not support any Black agenda."
409 p., By exploring how colonists and enslaved folk migrated across island boundaries, manipulated imperial tensions, and organized acts of collective dissent, this dissertation attempts to demonstrate the relationship between space, power, and imperial governance in the British Leeward Islands from the time of transnational colonization through their ascendency as black majorities. It examines the ways British empire makers struggled to turn a series of closely interlinked islands stretching from Guadeloupe to the Virgin Islands into a unified colony and how this effort was challenged by the development of a regional black identity that linked slaves across island and imperial boundaries in the early eighteenth century.
Chivallon,Christine (Author) and Alou,Antoinette Tidjani (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2011
Published:
Kingston Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
231 p, The forced migration of Africans to the Americas through the transatlantic slave trade created primary centres of settlement in the Caribbean, Brazil and the United States - the cornerstones of the New World and the black Americas. However, unlike Brazil and the US, the Caribbean did not (and still does not) have the uniformity of a national framework. Instead, the region presents differing situations and social experiences born of the varying colonial systems from which they were developed.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
477 p., This study is a "deep history" of the British invasion and occupation of Havana and western Cuba (1762-3) at the end of the Seven Years' War. By contextualizing this event within the broader story of intercolonial relations of war, trade, and slavery from 1713 to 1790, it demonstrates that the British occupation was a continuation and expansion of relations that preceded and postdated the invading warships' arrival. These Anglo-Cuban relations were forged through contraband commerce, the British slave trade to Cuba, and the practices of interimperial warfare, all of which undermined Spanish sovereignty in Cuba and linked its populations of both European and African descent to its British colonial neighbors.
