"This is just the first step. We need to put Haiti on our agenda," said Fred Logon, a member of Black Voices. "In terms of the policy, we need a movement that will force the Obama administration to take a progressive approach to Haiti. I hope we can increase the importance of Haiti to the world at large. " "Haitians are very conscious for the need of education," [Leon Pamphile, Ph.D.] said. "The country is pretty much divided between city dwellers and countryside. If parents don't have money to pay for their children's school, there is no public school for them." "Americans have looked at Haiti as an example of what happens when Black men lead government," Pamphile said. "Haiti is always under the burden of having foreign loans, but now this is being forgiven."
Oonya Kempadoo has been praised for her debut novel, Buxton Spice, a coming-of-age story set in the Caribbean. The book is a breathtaking glimpse into the inner life of Lula, a lively, highly imaginative girlchild growing up in a racially mixed family in Guyana in the 1970s. Kempadoo's unique and vibrant prose is the camera lens on the lushly exotic world that Lula inhabits. Through her eyes readers are introduced to the colorful denizens of Tamarind Grove. We see the village prostitutes (Sugar Baby, Bullet and Rumshop), the eccentric families, the gentle town spinsters, and Aunt Ruthy, the obeah voodoo lady.
As President of the Institute of the Black World 21st Century (IBW) and Founder of the Haiti Support Project (HSP), I have just returned from leading a team to Haiti to allocate the first contributions from the IBW/HSP Haiti Relief Fund. A total of $56,000 was distributed to nine community-based/grassroots organizations including women's, youth and peasant groups for relief and capacity-building. Deeply concerned about the plight of Haitian children orphaned by the disastrous earthquake, our team also visited orphanages and assessed the progress of the Oasis Institute, an ambitious Initiative which is designed to relocate orphans and extended family members from tent communities to an interim camp with safe/secure environment, post-traumatic stress counseling and a world class education.
78 p., Examines the ways in which the African American identity articulates and constructs itself through dance. Norman Bryson, an art historian, suggests that approaches from art history, film and comparative literature are as well applicable to the field of dance research. Therefore, as his main critical lens and a theoretical foundation, the author adopts the analytical approach developed by Erwin Panofsky, an art historian and a proponent of integrated critical approach, much like the one suggested by Bryson. Demonstrates that Erwin Panofsky's iconology, when applied as a research method, can make valuable contributions to the field of Dance Studies. Uses Katherine Dunham's original recordings of diaspora dances of the Caribbean and her modern dance choreography titled L'Ag'Ya to look for evidence for the paradigm shift from "primitive" to "diaspora" in representation of Black identity in dance also with the aim of detecting the elements that produce cultural difference in dance.
As if her precious life and freedom were a game of poker, the FBI upped the ante or bounty on [Assata Shakur] to $1 million two weeks ago. In a television address last Tuesday, Cuban leader Fidel Castro rejected calls to hand over Shakur, stating that she was not a terrorist but a victim of racial persecution. "They wanted to portray her as a terrorist, something that was an injustice, a brutality, an infamous lie," Castro said in his televised speech, while never mentioning Shakur's name. "They have always been hunting her, searching for her because of the fact that there was an accident in which a policeman died."
"Cuba has represented metaphorically the ability of an oppressed people to challenge imperialism and colonialism," Marable explained. "In the political imagination of Black America, Cuba represents the radical possibility of fundamental social change. One of the key questions now is -- what does Cuba represent for Black America in this period of political transition?"
391 p., Argues for a revisionist periodization of neo-slave literature as well as a reorientation away from a US-based literary history that has been dominated by the mode of realism and toward a more comparative view defined by the geography, history, and aesthetics of the Caribbean. The canon of slave narratives was first dominated by the assumption both of narrative as the major and sometimes only genre of slave writing and of a linear temporality emplotting the journey from slavery to an attenuated freedom. In contrast, most twentieth-century neo-slave narratives rethink the genre from the twin standpoints of temporality and narratology: how both the "neo" and "narrative" descriptors have produced an entrenched and unnecessarily restrictive view of this evolving archive.
Within sectors of North America's African-American community, the colloquial expression "being touched by the brush" describes a multi-ethnic individual that possesses subtle Negroid physical features which are only detectable by close inspection by a "trained eye." Here, Edison discusses the historical factors in Puerto Rico and Panama that make up the foundation upon which Francisco Arrivi's "Los Vejigantes" and Carlos Guillermo Wilson's "Chombo" were constructed.;
