Discusses perspectives in Africana feminist thought. While, not an exhaustive review of the entire diaspora, three regions are discussed: Africa, North America, and the Caribbean.
Another established Caribbean tradition runs counter to the claim that racism there is unusual and of recent origin. This is the tendency to account for a person's character by identifying the racial identity of that individual's parents. West Indians, quite spontaneously, account for each other's personality traits with statements such as "Well, after all, his father was white," or "His father was quite dark you know. In Guyana and Trinidad, one hears frequently that East Indians are by nature "cheap". Elsewhere, Syrians and Jews are, reportedly, successful merchants because of their "clannishness". The Caribs of Dominica are described as Creoles as "lazy drunkards", and the Caribs accuse Creoles of being "mean" and "immoral". Throughout the islands, Creoles who are dark are said to be less motivated for success, and those who are lighter are accused of being snobbish and too sober for their own good. Since independence, racial discrimination has been systemically condemned, and with a good deal of success. But racism (at least in the form of the belief that "once we know a person's racial background, we then know much about that persons' abilities and character traits,") is very much ingrained in the thinking of many West Indians. This style of racism has met with no effective challenge comparable to the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's. In the absence of racial segregation or the North American type of racial polarization, and with what scholars call the Caribbean "myth of racial harmony," most leaders throughout the region seldom address this insidious racism.
Suggests that racism was a strategic military liability in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century wars between Britain and France in the Caribbean. The French Revolution provoked slave uprisings on many of the Caribbean islands. Both the British and French underestimated the black rebels' capabilities and routinely executed black prisoners of war rather than ransoming or imprisoning them. These tendencies made Caribbean campaigns longer and bloodier than they might otherwise have been.
"This article explores the changing form of white and black racial categories in North America. It argues that this transformation is being shaped by several, relatively distinct tendencies; including anti-immigrant sentiments, anti-black racism and the identity politics of racialized populations. The discussion focuses on two aspects of this transformation. First, the identity politics of Afro-Caribbean populations is used to illustrate how immigrant experiences contest and complicate the process of black racialization; second, the racialization of Latino populations is used to illustrate how normative definitions of whiteness are being redefined. The conclusion uses these examples to discuss the need for explanations of racial stratification that can account for multiple nodes of inclusion and exclusion." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR];
This article focuses on the process of "encolouring" social reality in the Caribbean. This is done by investigating how connections between status and colour were created in the Danish West Indies by using certain strategies and techniques of power. Essential to the regulatory efforts of planters and officials were three variables: time, space and body. By the manipulation of these phenomena colonial masters managed to make skin colour represent something other than itself. It came to be associated with a web of ideas concerning the constitution of society and its subjects--their status, condition and opportunities in life. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT];
Special issue of the journal Daedalus., 205 p., Twelve noted international scholars examine selected significant aspects of the historical and contemporary experience of black peoples in the Americas and Africa.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
297 p., Begins with an introduction to the Caribbean region and the cultural and historical origins of its peoples. She focuses on the cultural practices that shape the community in Toronto, and the extent to which they facilitate or impede integration in Canadian society. Looks closely at such things as male-female relationships, forms of family organization, and patterns of religious practice, and shows that some cultural patterns have been maintained by members of the community whereas others have changed during the migration process.
Focuses on the performativity of Black beauty shame as it transforms or intensifies the meanings of parts of the body in Jamaica and its UK diaspora. Uses extracts from interviews with UK Jamaican heritage women. The women’s critique of the shaming event shows that shame is undone through dis-identification as speakers draw on alternative beauty discourses to produce new beauty subjectivities.
