Black In Latin America, premiering nationally Tuesdays April 19, 26 and May 3, 10, 2011, at 8 p.m. (ET) on PBS (check local listings), examines how Africa and Europe came together to create the rich cultures of Latin America and the Caribbean. Latin America is often associated with music, monuments and sun, but each of the six countries featured in Black in Latin America including Brazil, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico and Peru, has a secret history. On his journey, Professor Gates discovers, behind a shared legacy of colonialism and slavery, vivid stories and people marked by African roots.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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163p, Fourteen-year-old William Bernard, the son of a plantation owner, is kidnapped by the infamous pirate Blackbeard and held for ransom. He meets Major Bonnet's slave Sam, and the two boys plan an escape.
After [Jean-Jacques Dessalines]' death, [Henri Christophe] assumed leadership of Haiti, but the mulatto minority South set up its own republic under Pétion. Christophe committed suicide in 1820 amid an uprising over his forced labor policies. Pétion's successor, JeanPierre Boyer, reformed the two republics into one Haiti. Boyer ruled until his government collapsed in 1843 due to political rivalry. Until 1915, only two of the 21 governments since 1843 were not dismantled by coups d'états or political in-fighting. Except for agreement on the abolition of slavery, the state and nation were headed in opposite or different directions before the L'Ouverture adherents took over in 1804. The literature on Haiti, from Trinidadian C. L. R. James' classic book The Black Jacobins, to TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson's An Unbroken Agony, all tell the awful consequences of the "color curtain" in claustrophobic Haiti.
175 p., Focuses on the lives of enslaved women in the Caribbean and their resistance to bondage. Caribbean enslaved women exhibited their strong character, independence and exceptional self worth through their opposition to the tasks they performed in the fields on plantations. Resistance was expressed in many different rebellious ways including not getting married, refusing to reproduce, and through various other forms as part of their open physical resistance. Identifies the role enslaved women in both the Caribbean and the USA played in major uprisings, revolts, and rebellions during their enslavement period.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
374 p., This volume's transnational mixture, along with its use of creative analytical approaches, challenges existing paradigms and summons new models for studying women, religions, and diasporic shiftings across time and space. Includes "É a senzala: slavery, women, and embodied knowledge in Afro-Brazilian Candomblé" by Rachel Elizabeth Harding, "'I smoothed the way; I opened doors': women in the Yoruba-Orisha tradition of Trinidad' by Tracey E. Hucks, and "Joining the African diaspora: migration and diasporic religious culture among the Garifuna in Honduras and New York" by Paul Christopher Johnson.
