"In this article, I revisit debates about so-called matrifocal societies as a way to critique the centrality of heteronormative marriage and family in anthropology. Using gender as a tool of analysis, I argue that anthropologists have relied on the trope of the dominant heterosexual man, what I call the "Patriarchal Man," to create and sustain concepts of "marriage" and "family." By examining the discourse on matrifocality in studies of Afro-Caribbean and Minangkabau households, I show how it is the "missing man," the dominant heterosexual man, who is the key to the construction and perpetuation of the matrifocal concept and, by extension, the motor of marriage, family, and kinship. This fixity on the dominant heterosexual man has led anthropologists to misrecognize other forms of relatedness as less than or weaker than heteronormative marriage. I suggest that, rather than positing a foundational model for human sociality, intimacy, or relatedness, researchers look for webs of meaningful relationships in their historical and social specificity." (author)
Borneman praises Evelyn Blackwood for using ethnographic evidence from Indonesia and the Caribbean to enter into debates on matrifocality and marriage. Borenman is less convinced, however, about the significance or her general advocacy claim about gender
"After an introduction providing biographical details and some historical context for the Caribbean in the period 1811–1830, the article looks in detail at what have been seen to be [MacGregor's] successes and failures in the Caribbean region. It asks to what extent questions of ethnicity or masculinity have affected the way contemporaries and historians viewed MacGregor and his actions." (IngentaConnect Blog)
The aim of this research article is to investigate how pupils from Black Caribbean backgrounds are helped to achieve high standards in British schools and to identify a number of significant common themes for success in raising the achievement
"Focuses on certain calypsos in the decades leading up to Trinidad’s independence in 1962 in which the calypsonian’s sense of his own freedom is manifested in calypsos that focus on the larger struggle for freedom and autonomy for his society. In these calypsos, there is a subversion of the status quo, a move from a respectful deference to colonial rule to a new postcolonial consciousness. These calypsos focus on changing attitudes toward the British Royal Family, a growing allegiance to a homeland other than Mother England and the major events during the Fifties as plans for a West Indian Federation develop and collapse." (author)
"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)
Examines two holidays that many radical abolitionists celebrated every year, the Fourth of July and the First of August, an antislavery holiday commemorating British emancipation in the West Indies
According to Sensbach, this is an important biography because it describes major themes connecting the eighteenth-century black Atlantic world, including the dramatic expansion of the slave trade and the Afro-Atlantic freedom struggle
The work of Haitian author Jacques Stephen Alexis is replete with examples of characters caught in the dilemmas of exile. The author focuses on Alexis's characters who go through a "true" expatriation, a movement out of Haiti and into another country, and considers how the various experiences of expatriation are represented, as well as how the presence of the Haitian exiles impacts the host country. Taking examples from Alexis's novel Compère Général Soleil, Monro argues that the Haitian exiles unwittingly, though inevitably, disrupt the illusion of oneness of national identity and culture and become a subversive force, creolizing culture in the place of exile, the Dominican Republic. This cultural creolization in turn is a threat to the monocultural, totalizing political discourses of the host country, it is argued.;
In her book Louisiana, Erma Brodber reflects on the alliances that should exist between the African American and Afro Caribbean peoples, symbolically repairing the fissures that exist between the two, while addressing an uncommon subject in Caribbean migrant literature. Brodber's literary themes toward the unification of the relationships shared amongst the black diaspora articulate the legal tensions and national differences that can impede these alliances. Although Brodber's novel approaches this by creating a reconnection of the African diaspora in a borderless and nationless transmigration, and sometimes through a spaceless spirit world, Page argues that in reality this reunification is affected by the rules of the state that simply cannot be ignored.;
All literary categories and definitions are imperfect and are often the sunject of the debate and contestation: "West Indies and The Caribbean" are no exception. 'West Indies', the term used in this journal's previous bibliographies to describe the literature of the Caribbean region, accurately defines the literature of the Commonwealth Caribbean, which is Anglophone and which has historical and contemporary political, social and cultural link to Britain. At the same time, literary scholarsship from the region increasingly identifies itself as Caribbean, that is connected geographically, historically and culturally to the Francophone, Hispanic and Ducth-speaking Caribbean and to the Americas; The Caribbean complied and introduced by Suzanne Scafe London .....Debate and contestation: West Indies' and 'The Caribbean' are no exceptions.
This essay investigates the key tensions that arise within Jamaica's new cultural policy "Toward Jamaica the Cultural Superstate." The argument presented in the paper is that "culture" is a tricky and potentially dangerous site upon which to hinge national development goals, even though the expansion of cultural industries may well represent a viable and potentially lucrative strategy for economic development. This is because invariably, "culture" cannot do the work policy makers would like it to do, and its invocation within policy spheres usually already signals a kind of developmental distress, a perceived need for retooling through a form of social engineering. In other words, "culture" (in the anthropological sense) reflects and shapes, yet cannot in and of itself solve the most pressing challenges facing Jamaica today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR];
The African diaspora's search for both a collective voice and a freedom of identity has led many writers to be liberated only at the expense of being marketed and made part of the publishing machine. Forbes compares this marketplace to the "trading post," referring to the contact points where African slaves were bought and sold. Searching for new targets, many times the African diaspora's voice is cut by sales driven marketing. In illustrating his points, Forbes focuses on five travel narratives in this essay, including books by such authors Mary Seacole, Marlene Nourbese Philip, Jamaica Kincaid, Terry McMillan, and John Edgar Wideman.;
De qué manera puede el desarrollo influir y ser influido por el servicio doméstico? En la primera parte se plantean las posibles relaciones entre estos dos fenómenos y en seguida las tendencias generales en la industria del servicio doméstico. Las características de las trabajadoras domésticas se discuten en la segunda parte. En la tercera parte se detallan los patrones del servicio doméstico, el crecimiento económico, la modernización y la migración en Malasia, Zambia y Canadá, lo que revela dinámicas tanto compartidas como únicas y genera preguntas sobre las relaciones entre las trabajadoras domésticas y el Estado, las relaciones raciales, la (re)construcción del papel de género, clase y nociones de modernidad y los vínculos que guardan estas cuestiones con el desarrollo. Las observaciones en la cuarta parte reiteran las tendencias detectadas en los estudios de caso y delinean las inquietudes que de ahí se derivan.;
n Cuba, race, nation, and popular music were inextricably linked to the earliest formulations of a national identity. This article examines how the racialized discourse of blanqueamiento, or whitening, became part of a nineteenth-century literary narrative in which the casi blanca mulata, nearly white mulatta, was seen as a vehicle for whitening black Cubans. However, as the novels of Cirilo Villaverde and Ramón Meza reveal, the mulata's inability to produce entirely white children established the ultimate unattainability of whiteness by nonwhites. This article analyzes the fluidity of these racial constructs and demonstrates that, while these literary texts advocated the lightening of the nation's complexion over time, they also mapped the progressive "darkening" of Cuban music as popular culture continued to borrow from black music;
