African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
353 p., Interspersing colonial history with her family's experience, Stuart explores the interconnected themes of settlement, sugar and slavery. In examining how these forces shaped her own family--its genealogy, intimate relationships, circumstances of birth, varying hues of skin--she illuminates how her family, among millions of others like it, in turn transformed the society in which they lived, and how that interchange continues to this day.
On April 1, 1680, Sir Jonathan Atkins, governor of Barbados, sent a box full of statistical data about his island to the Plantation Office at Whitehall. This mass of data, filed away among the Colonial Office papers, constitutes the most comprehensive surviving census of any English colony in the 17th century.
377 p., Examines the representation of history in the Caribbean novel during the era of decolonization. Exploring the period from the 1930s to the 1970s, primarily in Trinidad, Barbados and Guyana, the author argues that the predominance of historical thinking in many of the exemplary novels and works of the time was not only a response to the denial by colonialism of the history of Caribbean peoples. Such prevalence was also to be found in new class relations, which began to appear during the inaugural moment of decolonization in the 1930s when, throughout the British Caribbean, popular rebellions effectively meant the end of colonial rule.
