Proposes to examine the aftermath of the "Goudougoudou," as Haitians now call the earthquake of January 12, 2010, relating it to other events that have taxed Haitian resolve over the course of two centuries.
Examines changing relations of accumulation taking shape in the garment export industry in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Draws upon a framework called "the coloniality of power" to consider the reworking of the social and spatial boundaries between hyper-exploited wage work and the people and places cast out from its relations.
Looks at Abraham Lincoln's pursuit of colonization in the Chiriquí region of Colombia (now Panamá), conventionally known as one of just two places that he seriously considered with respect to his policy of relocating African Americans. Challenging the standard account of the scheme's demise around October 1862 due to vehement Central American protest, this piece questions whether such a development really took the president by surprise.
Francis Humberston Mackenzie of Seaforth (1754-1815) was a Highland proprietor in what has become known as 'The First Phase of Clearance', was governor of Barbados (1801-6) in the sensitive period immediately before the abolition of the British slave trade and was himself a plantation owner in Berbice (Guiana). It is suggested that his concern for his Highland small tenants was paralleled by his ambition in Barbados to make the killing of a slave by a white a capital offence, by his attempts to give free coloureds the right to testify against whites and by his aim to provide good conditions for his own enslaved labourers in Berbice.
Examines the work of Jamaican writer Una Marson for her engagement with the ideas of modernity and her cultural expectations as she traveled from Jamaica to London, England in the 1930s. Topics include colonialism, race and gender, modernism, and the magazine "Cosmopolitan: A Monthly Magazine for Business Youth of Jamaica and the Official Organ of the Stenographer's Association."
