257 p., Shows how Protestant missionaries in the early modern Atlantic World developed a new vision for slavery that integrated Christianity with human bondage. Quaker, Anglican, and Moravian missionaries arrived in the Caribbean intending to "convert" enslaved Africans to Christianity, but their actions formed only one part of a dialogue that engaged ideas about family, kinship, sex, and language. Enslaved people perceived these newcomers alternately as advocates, enemies, interlopers, and powerful spiritual practitioners, and they sought to utilize their presence for pragmatic, political, and religious reasons.
Kingston Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
A collection of essays on the history of Christianity and the role of the Church in the processes of colonization and decolonization in the Caribbean. The work is a cross-cultural study of the Church and society in the Dutch, Spanish, French and English Caribbean. It looks at the relationships that existed among slavery, colonialism and Catholicism, Christianity and decolonization, and the church and military dictatorships. Contents: The beginnings of the Catholic Church in the Caribbean / Johannes Meier -- Protestantism and slavery in the British Caribbean / Keith Hunte -- Christianity and slavery in the Dutch Caribbean / Armando Lampe -- The Catholic Church and the state in Haiti, 1804-1915 / Laënnec Hurbon -- The Catholic Church and the state in the Dominican Republic, 1930-1960 / William Wipfler -- Protestantism in Cuba, 1868-1968 / Theo Tschuy
Proposes that civilizational analysis has yet to fully address the colonial legacy and, to clarify the stakes at play, compares and contrasts the historical sociology of CLR James with the mytho-poetics of Derek Walcott. Both authors, in different ways, have attempted to endow that quintessentially un-civilizable body -- the New World slave -- with subjecthood.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
202 p, "Why do the people of the French Caribbean still continue to be haunted by the memory of their slave past more than one hundred and fifty years after the abolition of slavery? What process led to the divorce of their collective memory of slavery and emancipation from France's portrayal of these historical phenomena? How are Martinicans and Guadeloupeans today transforming the silences of the past into historical and cultural manifestations rooted in the Caribbean? This book answers these questions by relating the 1998 controversy surrounding the 150th anniversary of France's abolition of slavery to the period of the slave regime spanning the late Enligtenment and the French Revolution. By comparing a diversity of documents - including letters by slaves, free people of color, and planters, as well as writings by the philosophes, royal decrees, and court cases - the author untangles the complex forces of the slave regime that have shaped collective memory. The current nationalization of the memory of slavery in France has turned these once peripheral claims into passionate political and cultural debates." --Jacket.
