This essay seeks to cross temporal, scalar, and disciplinary boundaries while revisiting tropes of queer invisibility that mark representations of same-sex desire in the Caribbean. Cycling from the world described in the 1901 erotic novel Une nuit d'orgie à Saint-Pierre, Martinique to field notes taken in 2010 among men who frequent Les Salines, this essay unites, in a provisional way, a scattered archive of same-sex desire on the island, while relating these desires critically to place.
Considers two kinds of connection between Leiris and the French Caribbean: that between his ideas on ethnography and Martinican Édouard Glissant's concept of Relation; and the impact that his encounter with the French Caribbean had on those ideas.
The article focuses on Caribbean women who traveled to Great Britain after World War II to train as state-registered nurses and then migrated to Canada. The author provides brief biographical information about the interviewees featured in the paper, compares their recollections with the predominant images and ideas of Black women in Great Britain during that time, and discusses the women's reactions to nursing in Canada. She also explores the interviewees' revelations about their occupation, involvement in organisations that represented their interest, and the lessons they wish to pass on to future generations.
Curdella Forbes deploys a complex of historically marked territorial metaphors - plot, plantation, squatting, trespass, and transgression - to read two apparently different texts, Maryse Condé's quasi-tragic 1976 novel Heremakhonon, which is set on the African continent, and a hilarious e-mail (which Forbes has titled 'Puncie') circulated on the Internet. Arguing that these diachronous texts exemplify a culture of ideological disobedience that is celebrated as evidence of Caribbean identity yet undercuts Caribbean (and diasporic) modes of imagining identity and relation, Forbes shows how trespass and transgression, and the enduring concepts of plot and plantation, acquire completely different contours and raise different ethical questions depending on location. Thus Africa, as an ostensibly valorized original homeland for black Caribbean people, and the no-man's-land of cyberspace produce sites of ethical discomfort that radically test the celebrations associated with transgression in a postcolonial context.
Examines how a Caribbean thinker, Theophilus Scholes, used the figure of the "white Negro" to expose the linkages between ethnological preoccupation with black bodies and an imperial network of power that held implications for political equality.
In this essay Glenn A. Elmer Griffin adopts a January 2009 parricidal attack in St. Lucia as an instantiation of the escalating problem of fratricidal crime in the postcolonial Eastern Caribbean. Following the work of Kamau Brathwaite, Griffin argues that this violence constitutes the nonarrival of postcoloniality as it is anticipated by Frantz Fanon's periodization of fraternal violence. The familial murder embodies an unbroken period of self-killing that warrants a critical reexamination of the provisions of our postcoloniality and the terms of West Indian identity formation.
Using data on U.S.-born and Caribbean-born black women from the 1980-2000 U.S. Censuses and the 2000-2007 waves of the American Community Survey, documents the impact of cohort of arrival, tenure of U.S. residence, and country/region of birth on the earnings and earnings assimilation of black women born in the English-, French-, and Spanish-speaking Caribbean.
The concept of the ghetto, referring to specifically urban experiences of sociospatial marginalization, has played a prominent role in black popular culture. This article explores the role of the ghetto as a discursive space of immobility and traces its global journey as a mobile imaginary.
An essay is presented which discusses the religious history and identity of the Caribbean Area and Africa from the Haitian Revolution through the 2010s, with a particular focus on Islam and voodooism. African and Caribbean identities, including the role that cosmopolitanism plays in identity formation, are discussed. An overview of the religious identity of the Muslim Haitian Revolution leader Dutty Boukman is provided.
This article examines how Aphra Behn employs the language of spectacle and extreme visuality in Oroonoko (1688) as a strategy for conveying exoticism to the reader's gaze. The novella presents the New World landscape, Native American customs, Oroonoko's black body, and his heroism and victimization with a degree of excessive and hyperbolic intensity. I argue that Behn's novella grasps, in a way no other work of its time does, the transformation of the black body into a commodity at the moment of its insertion into circuits of commercial exchange in the Atlantic basin. By focusing on the female narrator's vicarious response to the spectacle of Oroonoko's public execution, I also suggest that the novella formulates fundamental dilemmas intrinsic to scenes of sympathy, dilemmas that would continue to shape the English citizens' engagement with Caribbean slaves throughout the long eighteenth century.
The article discusses the history of Santo Domingo (which was renamed the Dominican Republic) under the French General Jean-Louis Ferrand from 1804 through 1809. Particular focus is given to Ferrand's efforts, under the direction of the French Emperor Napoleon I, to re-enslave Santo Domingo and overthrow Haiti's ruler Toussaint Louverture. An overview of the slavery laws in Santo Domingo is provided. Ferrand's use of black Haitian captives as slaves, including the Haitians captured by the French who lived near the border with Santo Domingo, is provided.
The conjure woman has long lived as a popular American cultural icon, so much so that it seemed destined that multimedia conglomerate the Walt Disney Company would eventually adopt and embrace her. The conjure woman's likeness is reflected in the Disney feature films Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007). This essay investigates just what happens to black women and spirit work when placed in the hands of Disney, a corporation with a sordid history of pirating in another context. The work is particularly invested in complicating black female body politics by addressing the additional stigma against female spiritual autonomy. How is an association with African spiritual cosmologies inscribed on the physicality of black women in popular culture? I focus my attention on Tia Dalma, the minor black female character engaged in Vodou in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, applying a close reading of the spiritual iconography and other cinematic coding surrounding her performance of African-based spirituality. I assess Disney's appropriation of black cultural forms in the construction of fantasy and fairytale.
Prior to the twenty-first century, nonfiction picture books in Britain rarely focused on the Black British community. As twenty-first-century Britain struggles to define itself, the education system is one way of institutionalizing and standardizing what it means to be British. By aligning with the National Curriculum standards, publishers of children's nonfiction have found ways to negotiate boundaries and re-envision meaning. Recent texts have used traditional models for British children's nonfiction to focus on areas of citizenship, identity, and history, but by redefining the boundaries between nation/outsider, self/other, and insider/outsider, have created new spaces for British identity and citizenship.
The article discusses the role that the visual arts and museums—through the way their framing and selection choices shape viewers’ perception—play in the construction and deconstruction of post/colonial Caribbean identities. The locus of the analysis is a multimedia installation titled White Skin, Black Kin: A Creole Conversation Piece, which was mounted at the Barbados Museum by Barbadian Canadian visual artist Joscelyn Gardner in 2004. The artist's aim in the installation was to expose the telling gaps, silences, and omissions in regard to black and white kinship and inter-racial relations in artistic productions of the colonial period. One such production was the sub-genre of portraiture known as the conversation piece, which was fashionable among an emerging middle class that included colonial landowners and merchants eager to use that visual medium to simultaneously document the wealth their colonial connections brought them and disavow their use and abuse of black bodies to create that wealth. In challenging the conventions of the conversation piece, Gardner recovers unspoken and suppressed stories from the colonial Caribbean past in order to re-present black and white Creole females identities; and in her use of the installation to ‘intervene’ into items displayed in permanent exhibits, she demonstrates how the Museum can become a site of active contestation of received knowledge.
Examines the voting behavior of Cubans and non-Cuban Hispanics in two Florida counties. The group position thesis holds that status inequalities and perceived discrimination yield out-group hostilities that can influence political behavior. In Miami, where Cubans are dominant, we expect non-Cuban Latinos to report greater pan-Latino competition and that anti-Cuban attitudes will influence non-Cuban Hispanic voting. In Tampa, where non-Cuban Latinos live in communities where Cubans are not dominant, we expect lower levels of perceived competition and Cuban-related attitudes to be inconsequential to the vote. The results confirm that power relations in the local arena constitute an important influence on the political behavior of Latino immigrants.
This article examines the political implications of the changing demographics of the Cuban American community. Over the past decade, pundits have predicted a massive shift in Cuban American voting behavior owing to demographic changes in the community. The authors find evidence that the attitudes of Cuban Americans have undergone significant changes, driven largely by the increased number of post-Mariel (1980) immigrants. The authors also find, however, that these dramatic changes have not yet been reflected at the ballot box, nor are they likely to be soon, owing to the slow process of immigrant political incorporation.
"Explores why certain subjects or disciplines must, apparently, have their content racially signified by prefixes, such as African American art, African diaspora art, and so on, while supposedly more elevated disciplines within art history are allowed to exist in largely racially unfettered contexts, or contexts in which the racial dimension is coded, presumed, and understood. For example, how is it that the study of American art of the nineteenth or twentieth century can be taught with no reference whatsoever to ethnic diversity? Such pathologies presuppose the marginality of black artists. Similarly, must this marginality be attended to only by the provision of separate faculty and separate curricula that have the study of black artists at their core?" --The Author
