Building on Robin D. G. Kelley's (1998) argument that hip hop constitutes a form of play-labor for working-class black youth, this article argues that the creation of hip hop as a form of racialized play-labor in the 1970s constitutes an Afro-diasporic labor regime and can best be understood as such when located within a specific period of racial capitalism in the United States characterized by a low demand for formal black labor. Accordingly, this paper argues that the emergence of hip hop in the South Bronx can be explained by the way in which several social-political factors dictated by the needs of the world economy converged with the resistance and labor of black people in the United States and the Anglo-Caribbean in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Addresses change and continuity in mortuary practices from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries within enslaved and free populations on the former Danish and current US Virgin Island of St. John. St. John's former residents created diverse burial sites for practical and symbolic reasons related to environment, kinship, socio-cultural politics, and religion. Reveals how people historically transformed identities of selves and communities as they perceived and commemorated the dead through meaningful mortuary sites and practices within dynamic local and regional contexts.
Considers two kinds of connection between Leiris and the French Caribbean: that between his ideas on ethnography and Martinican Édouard Glissant's concept of Relation; and the impact that his encounter with the French Caribbean had on those ideas.
The concept of a unified African-Caribbean community or identity is a modern construction in that it emerged in its present guise during the second half of the twentieth century. Prior to this, the identity politics of the ‘black’ people from this region were largely polarized. They were frequently divided along lines of island identities (Jamaica, Barbados, St Kitts etc.). Focusing on the period between 1970 and 1979, this article sketches out the ways in which the black experience within local-level football also contributed to identity change among a particular group of young sportsmen in Leicester.
A literary criticism is presented on the books "Land of the Living," by John Hearne and "Mr. Potter," by Jamaica Kincaid. Particular focus is given to the portrayal of Jewish Holocaust refugees to the Caribbean Area within the aforementioned Caribbean literature, including the relationship between Jews and black Caribbean people.
Faith Smith's analysis, in Creole Recitations, of the nineteenth-century scholar John Jacob Thomas's often contradictory allegiances offers us a way of reading the counterintuitively parallel career of the poet Eric Roach a century later. Roach is the subject of Laurence Breiner's monograph Black Yeats: Eric Roach and the Politics of Caribbean Poetry (2008). The positions Smith and Breiner ascribe to Thomas and Roach, respectively, articulate an enduring Caribbean contradiction between an aspiration to erudition on the one hand and the urgency of self-representation on the other. This essay argues that by obscuring the full range of Thomas' positions, which Smith's study so fully recuperates, and denigrating those same positions in Roach's work, which Breiner's study resuscitates, nationalist elites obfuscate their own connections to the full range of colonial and nationalist values by which they, too, have been influenced.
This article considers two novels by Andrew Salkey, Escape to an Autumn Pavement and The Adventures of Catullus Kelly. Where recent critical attention endeavours to emphasize the significance of the former novel as an account of black homosexuality, the intention here is to take these novels together to explore wider concerns of sex and sexuality during the 1960s. In so doing, these novels are located not just within the growing genre of West Indian writing with its emphasis upon the aesthetics of identity in this period, but also in its relation to literature associated with the 'Angry Young Men'. The intention is to read Salkey's work not just as expressions of migrant identity, but as illustrations of British identity during a moment of intense social change with regard to global status, sexual politics and incipient multiculturalism.
The article focuses on Caribbean women who traveled to Great Britain after World War II to train as state-registered nurses and then migrated to Canada. The author provides brief biographical information about the interviewees featured in the paper, compares their recollections with the predominant images and ideas of Black women in Great Britain during that time, and discusses the women's reactions to nursing in Canada. She also explores the interviewees' revelations about their occupation, involvement in organisations that represented their interest, and the lessons they wish to pass on to future generations.
Curdella Forbes deploys a complex of historically marked territorial metaphors - plot, plantation, squatting, trespass, and transgression - to read two apparently different texts, Maryse Condé's quasi-tragic 1976 novel Heremakhonon, which is set on the African continent, and a hilarious e-mail (which Forbes has titled 'Puncie') circulated on the Internet. Arguing that these diachronous texts exemplify a culture of ideological disobedience that is celebrated as evidence of Caribbean identity yet undercuts Caribbean (and diasporic) modes of imagining identity and relation, Forbes shows how trespass and transgression, and the enduring concepts of plot and plantation, acquire completely different contours and raise different ethical questions depending on location. Thus Africa, as an ostensibly valorized original homeland for black Caribbean people, and the no-man's-land of cyberspace produce sites of ethical discomfort that radically test the celebrations associated with transgression in a postcolonial context.
Examines how a Caribbean thinker, Theophilus Scholes, used the figure of the "white Negro" to expose the linkages between ethnological preoccupation with black bodies and an imperial network of power that held implications for political equality.
The author discusses the use of slavery reparations as a strategy for economic development. Particular focus is given to the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Reparations Commission, which was formed in 2013 in order to address the damages caused to Caribbean nations by slavery and racism. The author argues for the creation of a reparations commission in the U.S. The book "Britain's Black Debt" by Hilary Beckles is also discussed.
This essay reflects on Haitian radicalism by looking at the life and the works of novelist Marie Vieux Chauvet (1916–73). Though increasingly a subject of interest for scholars of Haitian women's literature and of Haitian feminism, Chauvet's work is only rarely considered alongside that of more politically visible figures such as Jacques Roumain, Jacques-Stephen Alexis, and René Depestre. Chauvet's exceptionalized status has much to do with her nonparticipation in the gender-bound political culture of her time. This essay seeks to tease out how this pointedly nonaligned woman writer fits into the picture and historiography of Haitian radicalism.
These introductory remarks frame the special section 'Translating the Caribbean' and discuss the impetus behind the project as well as its future iterations. Each of the five essays in the special section is outlined in its broad strokes, and specific reference is made to Edouard Glissant's Caribbean Discourse, Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, and Lawrence Venuti's Rethinking Translation and The Translator's Invisibility.
Explores the routes followed by ideas and practices related to the body emerging in seventeenth-century Caribbean locales like Cartagena de Indias and Havana. Mobile and interconnected Spanish Caribbean ritual practitioners of African descent, using oral tradition, performance, and material culture, functioned as the most important links for the diffusion of ideas about corporeality in the region.
In this essay Glenn A. Elmer Griffin adopts a January 2009 parricidal attack in St. Lucia as an instantiation of the escalating problem of fratricidal crime in the postcolonial Eastern Caribbean. Following the work of Kamau Brathwaite, Griffin argues that this violence constitutes the nonarrival of postcoloniality as it is anticipated by Frantz Fanon's periodization of fraternal violence. The familial murder embodies an unbroken period of self-killing that warrants a critical reexamination of the provisions of our postcoloniality and the terms of West Indian identity formation.
Although André Schwarz-Bart's first novel, Le dernier des justes, was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1959, the novel and author remained in the margins of 'canonized' Shoah literature. Numerous readers and anthologies exclude the francophone Polish Jewish author who turned to the African diaspora as a parallel universe to write about the haunting specter of the concentration-camp universe and Auschwitz. In this article, I will demonstrate how two of the most prolific and talented young African-American novelists and critics have 'borrowed' from this tour de force (without openly admitting it). John Edgar Wideman and Caryl Phillips write back, in various ways, to this neglected masterpiece. Both have recognized in this pioneering cross-racial approach the 'multidimensional' memory connecting black and Jewish diasporas. Indeed, André Schwarz-Bart intertwined all of his (auto-) fictional writing with the traumas suffered by black (Caribbean) people. It is, therefore, all the more problematic that this writer in the margins has been doubly excluded: almost absent in 'Holocaust Studies,' he remains 'silenced' in the francophone Caribbean realm by novelists and critics of the post-Négritude movement (Chamoiseau and Confiant, Glissant). This deception left the author shattered and hollow, like his main protagonists, Ernie Lévy from The Last of the Just, Mariotte in Un plat de porc (1967), or Solitude from La mulâtresse Solitude (1972), as he confesses in his posthumous 'circumfession/testament' L'Etoile du matin (Morning Star, 2009).
Using data on U.S.-born and Caribbean-born black women from the 1980-2000 U.S. Censuses and the 2000-2007 waves of the American Community Survey, documents the impact of cohort of arrival, tenure of U.S. residence, and country/region of birth on the earnings and earnings assimilation of black women born in the English-, French-, and Spanish-speaking Caribbean.
This essay examines C. L. R. James's relationship to the heroic and inspiring arc of labour rebellions that swept the colonial British Caribbean during the 1930s. The essay begins by discussing James's 1932 work putting the case for West Indian self-government, The Life of Captain Cipriani, and its generally positive reception in the Caribbean. We then turn to the 'outbreak of democracy' represented by the Trinidad general strike in 1937 and James's attempt to rally solidarity with this and subsequent rebellions elsewhere while in the imperial metropole itself as a leading member of the International African Service Bureau. Finally, this essay stresses how the Caribbean labour rebellions themselves, with their demonstration of the 'modernity' of the mass of working people in the West Indies and apparent vindication of the Marxist theory of permanent revolution, played their part in the shaping of James's majestic The Black Jacobins.
An empirical study of 398 business people in the slums of Jamaica and Guyana. Explains that poor women organize local banks as a form of contestation against the threat of violence, partisan and informal politics. Argues that the banker ladies reorganize money markets for themselves and others. By organizing inclusive financial programs the banker ladies also build social capital through managing locally-based economic resources.
The concept of the ghetto, referring to specifically urban experiences of sociospatial marginalization, has played a prominent role in black popular culture. This article explores the role of the ghetto as a discursive space of immobility and traces its global journey as a mobile imaginary.
The contemporary backdrop for this essay emphasizes such contexts for future Caribbean studies and particularly for conceiving of Caribbean visual culture. It considers ways the exploration of Caribbean art practices and research of Caribbean visual culture might require reconsideration as global and interconnected structures requiring a transnational and intercultural approach. Insight of contemporary Caribbean visual culture is inextricably linked to circulation of knowledge and production of global culture and visual representation.
An essay is presented which discusses the religious history and identity of the Caribbean Area and Africa from the Haitian Revolution through the 2010s, with a particular focus on Islam and voodooism. African and Caribbean identities, including the role that cosmopolitanism plays in identity formation, are discussed. An overview of the religious identity of the Muslim Haitian Revolution leader Dutty Boukman is provided.
The article focuses on the interactions between anglophone blacks, black Caribbeans, and indigenous southern Mesoamericans during the second half of the 18th century. The author discusses the history of race relations between Europeans, Africans, and Indians within the British and Spanish empires, examines the relationship between Mayas and Spanish colonists, and analyzes the role of religious differences within their encounters.
This article examines how Aphra Behn employs the language of spectacle and extreme visuality in Oroonoko (1688) as a strategy for conveying exoticism to the reader's gaze. The novella presents the New World landscape, Native American customs, Oroonoko's black body, and his heroism and victimization with a degree of excessive and hyperbolic intensity. I argue that Behn's novella grasps, in a way no other work of its time does, the transformation of the black body into a commodity at the moment of its insertion into circuits of commercial exchange in the Atlantic basin. By focusing on the female narrator's vicarious response to the spectacle of Oroonoko's public execution, I also suggest that the novella formulates fundamental dilemmas intrinsic to scenes of sympathy, dilemmas that would continue to shape the English citizens' engagement with Caribbean slaves throughout the long eighteenth century.
