Examines the women who became involved in Cuba's slave resistance movements of 1843 and 1844, drawing attention to those who molded that resistance in visible and public ways and those whose involvement has often been obscured or unnoticed. The narratives created around Fermina and Carlota Lucumf, two leading figures in the 1843 insurgencies, both rupture and complicate the masculine discourse around slave-movement leadership that has been central to historiographies of slave rebellion.
Literary criticism of the book "A Description of Millennium Hall" by Sarah Scott. Focuses on the roles of slavery and imperialism in the novel. Details on the charitable transfer of wealth gained and the narrator's identity as a creole planter and slaveowner in Jamaica are also discussed.
On Christmas Day 1521, in the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo, the first recorded slave revolt in the Americas occurred. A group of African, likely Wolof, slaves came together with native Indians led by the Taino cacique Enriquillo to assert their independence. Beyond being the first slave revolt in the Americas, it was also one of the most important moments in Colonial American history because it was the first known instance when Africans and Indians united against their Spanish overlords in the Americas.
Archaeologists are studying changes in slaves' lives in the Caribbean and the United States. Some 57,000 artifacts have been recovered from Papine, ranging from tools to ceramics to glass bottles to beads. A number of ackee trees grow on the site, and oral tradition has it that ackee and other fruit trees are good indicators of historic habitation sites.
In 1996 the city of Bristol celebrated its maritime past by focusing on key explorers while forgetting to mention their involvement in transatlantic conquests, and in particular in the slave trade. This partial amnesia led to a local controversy and, as a result, Black and White liberals together with the local authority organised an exhibition in 1999 on Bristol and the Slave Trade. A year later, the exhibition was transferred from the Bristol Museum to a different site and became a permanent part of the display in the Bristol Industrial Museum. This article analyses the ways in which the period of the transatlantic slave trade was officially represented and perceived by visitors to the Slave Trade Gallery. The paper examines the politics of memory by trying to answer key questions concerning Bristol's commemoration of the past in a context in which multiculturalism was a hotly debated issue.
"C.L..R. James' 1938 seminal text, The Black Jacobins, and Eric Williams' 1944 tour de force, Capitalism and Slavery, constitute much more than foundational works in West Indian nationalist historiography. Both authors, born in colonial Trinidad and writing Caribbean history within its Atlantic context, made significant contributions to development discourse within the traditions of Enlightenment Idealism. As critical realists they considered popular historiography indispensable to any attempt to root philosophical ideals within recognizable terms of everyday living. In The Black Jacobins, James documents the struggles of the enslaved peoples of St. Dominique, the mercantile showpiece of French colonial capitalism in the West Indies for freedom and social justice. In addition, he details the transformation of this successful anti-slavery rebellion into something much more elaborate in terms of Atlantic history--the creation of Haiti, the Caribbean's first nation-state. In Capitalism and Slavery, Williams expands and develops the paradigm of African labor enslavement and European capital liberation, first outlined by James in The Black Jacobins, that became the basis of the revolutionary reorganization of productivity for European economic development." (author)
Proposes that civilizational analysis has yet to fully address the colonial legacy and, to clarify the stakes at play, compares and contrasts the historical sociology of CLR James with the mytho-poetics of Derek Walcott. Both authors, in different ways, have attempted to endow that quintessentially un-civilizable body -- the New World slave -- with subjecthood.
Analyzes the socioeconomic history of the slave system of Minas Gerais in Brazil from 1776 to 1821. Transition from slave-based economy to agricultural and cattle economy; Economic dependence on slave labor; Slave importation; Contributing factors to decline of slave practices.
While 20th-century Caribbean literature in French has generated a substantial body of criticism, earlier writings have largely been neglected. This article begins by contextualizing the Creole novel of the 1830s in cultural and historical terms, then proceeds to analyse two novels published by Martinican authors in 1835: Outre-mer by Louis de Maynard de Queilhe and Les Creoles by Jules Levilloux.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
160 p., Chronicles the history of slavery in Haiti through a recitation of the brutality of the colonisers and the often mundane and trivial ways in which they attempted to dehumanize Haitians. It seeks to illustrate how Haitians' 300-year journey to freedom was illuminated by the African philosophy of Ubuntu, a world view that embodies human solidarity, respect, dignity, justice, liberty, and love. In this philosophy, Africans found an unmatched strength to resist slavery.
Discusses how ephemeral artifacts of daily material culture, such as marquillas -- the colorful lithographed papers that were used to wrap bundles of cigarettes during the second half of the nineteenth century in Cuba -- partook of the symbolization of emergent forms of racialized governability towards the end of slavery on the island.
This article is concerned with 3 generations of one family in Great Britain that wen to the Caribbean to make fortunes that would give them access to positions of privilege and political and social influence.
Draws on two Caribbean texts, Anim-Addo's Imoinda: Or She Who will Lose Her Name and Philip's Zong!. Discusses how these two Caribbean texts counterwrite the history of the slave plantation by staging and embodying the work of an affective memory drawn from the history of the black subject as a history of being and community.
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.
Focuses on the performativity of Black beauty shame as it transforms or intensifies the meanings of parts of the body in Jamaica and its UK diaspora. Uses extracts from interviews with UK Jamaican heritage women. The women’s critique of the shaming event shows that shame is undone through dis-identification as speakers draw on alternative beauty discourses to produce new beauty subjectivities.
