"Any attempt to trace the many resonances that historically have been attached to the creole figure in Caribbean literature and culture will be inflected by the long and pervading presence of colonialism in the region and its attendant corollary of hierarchical social separation and difference based on perceptions of race. Indeed, the ambivalent desire and subjective misrecognition that lay at the heart of historical writing about colonialism and racism have tended to frame the issues of monstrosity and exclusion that produced the creole as part and parcel of wider colonial discourses. Thus, the shifting and increasingly unstable inscription of the creole figure echoes, in a certain sense, certain critical ambiguities of politics and temporality that color the colonial encounter and its aftermath. Specifically, in the contemporary English- and French-speaking Caribbean, the multiplicity, displacement, and creative instability that undergird creole-driven theories of postcolonial performance have supplanted this category's suspect beginnings as colonialism's model for the fearfully unnameable and unplaceable hybrid monstrosity, and now increasingly shape the substance of much of the artistic and creative work emerging from the region." --The Author
The month of March sees thousands of West Indians in the U.S. and abroad in colorful celebration of their Phagwa holiday- the origin of which is almost mythical and its exact time of origination is not known
A research project covering the Mexico-Belize border underpins an exploration of nodal elements of the theocratic identity of Jehovah's Witnesses. Conception & form of behavior are documented in religion, society, & family, generating an image of a scenario where many of the social relations in the religious group are reproduced
"While plotting out the journeys that paved the way for their creative and innovative work in Afro-Cuban and African American ethnography, this study will address their bifocal vision as insider-outsiders within the minority cultures they represent in folktales and within the 'foreign' cultures to which they traveled. Cabrera's and Hurston's roles as 'native ethnographers' will also be considered. In creating alternatives to traditional ethnographies, such as Franz Boas's Bella Bella Tales (1932), their collections can be understood as early examples of experimental and feminist ethnography." (author)
"In this essay I discuss the thwarted cultural translation of modernity across the Atlantic and how this process affected the cultural self-understanding of the Caribbean. I will frame my argument by referring to the Hegelian theme of the Subject insofar as this particular concept condenses and articulates the ideology of modernity as a Eurocentric drive for world domination." (author)
