African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
223 p., "This collection is wide-ranging, moving from the Caribbean (Jamaica in particular) to Cambridge, England, and from poetry to sex to discrimination." -Library Journal
Portuguese and Spanish slavers supplied the Americas with "los Negros," the Blacks. Only those young and strong, impervious to European disease and able to withstand months of torturous living packed in the cruel quarters of slave shipholds survived the middle passage. Those who arrived, stunned and malnourished, lost in a foreign land, were easy prey to the slavers. Removed from a world that had nourished them, left to the mercy of those whose own lack of humanity prevented the recognition of theirs, they were utterly dependent and at the mercy of their captors. Vestiges of racism threaten to dismantle further progress in South America, as they do here. The prophecies of Willie Lynch, a slave owner who created a divisive plan to keep Blacks separate by fostering dissent among them, are coming true. Lynch outlined the differences in physical characteristics among the slaves-skin shade, hair texture, height, etc. By playing up these differences, Lynch promised, "The Black slave, after receiving this indoctrination, shall carry on and will become self-refueling and self-generating for hundreds of years, maybe thousands." Throughout North and South America, Lynch's plan lives on. Color lines rule, with the predominantly European strains remaining in power, and those of darker skin and crisper hair texture continue to be oppressed. It is a chilling reality that echoes down from the brutal suppression of the native peoples of Chiapas to the continued repression of Mexicans here and in their own country, to the harsh discrimination shown the Blacks of Brazil and America.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
48 p., Examines black history from 1968 until 2008, discussing race relations around the world, apartheid in South Africa, genocide in Rwanda, the assassination of Martin Luther King, affirmative action programs, Hurricane Katrina, artists and important figures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Includes sections on "Black and British" and "Caribbean independence."
"A single highway connects the Caribbean province of Limón to mainstream society in the highlands of Costa Rica. This paper explores the ways in which that highway affects the status hierarchy of mainstream society in Costa Rica, and how the construction of whiteness as an unexamined racial qualifier for total social incorporation constrains the perception of blacks as social liminars and blackness as a state of communitas. The argument elaborates the work of Victor Turner on ritual liminality to suggest the structural ambiguity of Afro-Latin Americans in the context of Costa Rica." (author"
Hume,Yanique (Editor) and Kamugisha,Aaron (Editor)
Format:
Book, Whole
Language:
English; Some texts translated from French and Spanish.
Publication Date:
2013
Published:
Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
623 p., Places classic texts in Caribbean Cultural Thought in dialogue with contemporary interrogations and explorations of regional cultural politics and debates concerning identity and social change; colonialism; diaspora; aesthetics; religion and spirituality; gender and sexuality and nationalisms. The result is a reader that presents a distinctive Caribbean voice that emphasizes the long history of critical writings on culture and its intersection with political work in the Caribbean intellectual tradition from within the academy and beyond.
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.
Reviews Franklin W. Knight's The Caribbean: the Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism, Herbert S. Klein's The Middle Passage: Comparative Studies of the Atlantic Slave Trade, Gad J. Heuman's Between Black and White: Race, Politics and the Free Coloureds in Jamaica,1792-1865, Bridget Brereton, Race Relations in Colonial Trinidad, Ann M. Pescatello's edited book Old Roots in New Lands, Mary Noel Menezes' British Policy towards the Amerindians in British Guiana 1803-1873, Arnaud Marks and Rene Romer's edited book Family and Kinship in Middle America and the Caribbean, Gary Brana-Shute's On the Corner: Male Social Life in a Paramaribo Creole Neighbourhood, and George Beckford and Michael Witter's Small garden-- bitter weed : the political economy of struggle and change in Jamaica.
