The findings of a questionnaire survey distributed to 153 female university students in Barbados and Jamaica in 2008 reveal the attitudes to diverse female sexualities in the Caribbean. The participants in the survey discussed changing beliefs about sexuality in Caribbean society. The findings show that slowly, as a consequence of globalization and the mass media, people are increasingly open-minded about sex. Women are confidently expressing and increasingly asserting themselves as equal partners. There is greater debate in Caribbean society about female same-sex relationships, and deeper awareness of sexual harassment is evident. Nevertheless, for some respondents, the same degrading notions of women as sex objects and promiscuous beings continue to exist.
Reviews Sybille Fischer's Modernity Disavowed; Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (2004); Patricia D. Fox's Being and Blackness in Latin America; Uprootedness and Improvisation (2006); Eleuterio Santiago-Dîaz's Escritura of ropuertorriqueòa y modernidad (2007); and Lucîa M. Suârez's The Tears of Hispaniola; Haitian and Dominican Diaspora Memory (2006).
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.
Findings indicated the common denominators for African, African American, and Caribbean women regarding breast cancer are that (1) they present at younger ages, (2) they present having advanced-stage tumors, (3) they are often from lower socioeconomic levels, and (4) they lack knowledge regarding causes and treatment of breast cancer.
The author explores themes of Black masculinity using both historic and contemporary examples. He discusses "neoliberal" expectations regarding sexual orientation, family life, and self-fulfillment. He explores alternate definitions of gender as exhibited in the self-portraits by Abdi Osman and Syrus Ware.
Discusses the impact of general strikes held in the French Caribbean territories as of April 2009. Notes that the strikes in the French islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique is an indication of the weakening hold of France on its territories. Cites that the success of the strikes resulted in pay increases and benefits for poor laborers, while other island communities like La Reunion have begun mass actions calling for the same demands and self-determination for black people.
"This essay addresses the horrific struggles of enslaved Africans during the "Middle Passage" and argues that the "Black Atlantic" can be considered as a form of existential crucifixion for those whose lives were decimated during the traversing of this oceanic divide between their old world and the new. The author argues that this existential crucifixion represents a kind of collective experiential-historical "Low Saturday" for Diasporan African peoples, in that the failure of full freedom to emerge for "us" suggests that Easter Sunday is an aspirational dream rather than a contextual reality." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
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.
