Explores Caribbean oral tradition in youth literature. Amerindian and African influences are discussed alongside representation of oral culture in Jamaican texts. Also explains the connection between African-Amerindian oral tradition in Guyanese stories.
Writer Zora Neale Hurston notes the identity and culture of the Africans in the U.S., in which there is struggle in resisting with violence against the slave societies and racial discrimination to maintain the culture. Mentions the association of black ritual practices on Hurston's writings, "Mules and Men" and "Moses, Man of the Mountain," where slavery is considered as factor of spreading the folk arts.
In characterizing the desperate journeys undertaken by African and Haitian refugees as today's "middle passages," Caryl Phillips's A Distant Shore and Edwidge Danticat's "Children of the Sea" complicate the idea of a single origin to a transatlantic black Diaspora. The term 'middle passage' is more recently used to describe multiple crossings that transform the meaning of Diaspora into a vital and ongoing process.
West African powers in the Caribbean have often been studied as important cultural and religious formations. This article treats them as ontological formations by collapsing the modern opposition between reason/knowledge and power/force. The distinction between the "knowing" West anchored in a unified scientific reason and the "believing" Rest who trust in many cultures is therefore refused. With the above prerequisite in mind, a new approach to creolization, termed "tukontology," is deployed to reveal a Kuhnian type paradigm shift in the war-medicine of blacks on British West Indian plantations between 1645 and emancipation in 1838.
In St. Vincent and the Grenadines universal secondary education, instituted by 2005, was one of the major pillars of the education revolution intended to propel social and economic advancement. A phased model of implementation was adopted. However, policy implementation required extensive support in critical areas such as physical infrastructural development, curriculum review and development, pedagogy, teacher training and the provision of resources. Implementation was fraught with challenges and the impact necessitated alternative interventions. At the same time, the process underscored the need for a holistic approach to unprecedented reform efforts if quality education is the desired goal.
