African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
236 p, Concludes that Peruvians of African descent give meaning to blackness without always referencing Africa, slavery, or black cultural forms. This represents a significant counterpoint to diaspora scholarship that points to the importance of slavery in defining blackness in Latin America as well as studies that place cultural and class differences at the center of racial discourses in the region.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
236 p., Addresses what it means to be black in Peru. Based on extensive ethnographic work in the country and informed by more than eighty interviews with Peruvians of African descent, this ground breaking study explains how ideas of race, colour, and mestizaje in Peru differ greatly from those held in other Latin American nations.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
1 videodisc (50 min.), An untold history of the indigenous Caribs on St. Vincent: their near extermination and exile by the British 200 years ago; and return of some in the Diaspora to reconnect with those left behind. A postcolonial story of re-identification. The Black Caribs, on the island of St. Vincent in the Caribbean, is a little known indigenous group of people. Yurumein (Homeland) is a 50-minute documentary that recounts the painful past of these Carib people – their near extermination at the hands of the British, the decimation of their culture on the island, and the exile of survivors to Central America over 200 years ago. The film also captures the powerful moment of homecoming when Caribs from the Diaspora (also known as “Garifuna” in their indigenous language) visit the island for the first time.
This article, based on the 2003 Raphael Samuel Memorial Lecture, begins with the issue of memory, but also asks: what are the limitations of studying memory? I suggest that smuggled in to current memory studies are a range of issues which are, in fact, analytically distinct from the problem of memory itself: historical temporality, consciousness of time, and consciousness of history. Underlying all these distinct problems is the overarching question of how we can conceive of ‘the past’ existing in ‘the present’. I explore this in relation to two Caribbean thinkers. I look first at C. L. R. James’s monumental and wonderful history book, The Black Jacobins, which works closely within the Hegelian idea of ‘world-history’. An alternative conceptualization can be found in George Lamming’s more phenomenological approach, manifest most in his novel, In The Castle of My Skin. These two polarities – history on the world-stage, and history in subjective mode – continue to underwrite our understanding of the-past-in-the-present. I close by turning to the work of Raphael Samuel, and suggest that his celebrated volumes, Theatres of Memory, are more concerned with the-past-in-the-present than they are with memory itself. (Author)
