Talks about the Antillean waltz and the island where it originated, the Curaçao. Discussion on creolization; Details of music and dance as venues for creolization among Africans aboard a slave ship; Social hierarchy in the island during the eighteenth century.;
409 p., By exploring how colonists and enslaved folk migrated across island boundaries, manipulated imperial tensions, and organized acts of collective dissent, this dissertation attempts to demonstrate the relationship between space, power, and imperial governance in the British Leeward Islands from the time of transnational colonization through their ascendency as black majorities. It examines the ways British empire makers struggled to turn a series of closely interlinked islands stretching from Guadeloupe to the Virgin Islands into a unified colony and how this effort was challenged by the development of a regional black identity that linked slaves across island and imperial boundaries in the early eighteenth century.