Addresses change and continuity in mortuary practices from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries within enslaved and free populations on the former Danish and current US Virgin Island of St. John. St. John's former residents created diverse burial sites for practical and symbolic reasons related to environment, kinship, socio-cultural politics, and religion. Reveals how people historically transformed identities of selves and communities as they perceived and commemorated the dead through meaningful mortuary sites and practices within dynamic local and regional contexts.
The concept of a unified African-Caribbean community or identity is a modern construction in that it emerged in its present guise during the second half of the twentieth century. Prior to this, the identity politics of the ‘black’ people from this region were largely polarized. They were frequently divided along lines of island identities (Jamaica, Barbados, St Kitts etc.). Focusing on the period between 1970 and 1979, this article sketches out the ways in which the black experience within local-level football also contributed to identity change among a particular group of young sportsmen in Leicester.
A literary criticism is presented on the books "Land of the Living," by John Hearne and "Mr. Potter," by Jamaica Kincaid. Particular focus is given to the portrayal of Jewish Holocaust refugees to the Caribbean Area within the aforementioned Caribbean literature, including the relationship between Jews and black Caribbean people.
The author discusses the use of slavery reparations as a strategy for economic development. Particular focus is given to the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Reparations Commission, which was formed in 2013 in order to address the damages caused to Caribbean nations by slavery and racism. The author argues for the creation of a reparations commission in the U.S. The book "Britain's Black Debt" by Hilary Beckles is also discussed.
Explores the routes followed by ideas and practices related to the body emerging in seventeenth-century Caribbean locales like Cartagena de Indias and Havana. Mobile and interconnected Spanish Caribbean ritual practitioners of African descent, using oral tradition, performance, and material culture, functioned as the most important links for the diffusion of ideas about corporeality in the region.
The contemporary backdrop for this essay emphasizes such contexts for future Caribbean studies and particularly for conceiving of Caribbean visual culture. It considers ways the exploration of Caribbean art practices and research of Caribbean visual culture might require reconsideration as global and interconnected structures requiring a transnational and intercultural approach. Insight of contemporary Caribbean visual culture is inextricably linked to circulation of knowledge and production of global culture and visual representation.
The article critiques several poems by African American poet of the Harlem Renaissance Langston Hughes, including "Ballad of Margie Polite," "Broadcast to the West Indies" and "Good Morning." Hughes' depiction of transnational solidarity between African Americans of Harlem, New York City, New York and blacks of the West Indies, including his use of an imaginary radio broadcast to portray this theme in the poem "Broadcast to the West Indies," is discussed.
The article discusses the transnational aspects of Harlem, New York City, New York, with a particular focus on the borough's cultural relations with the British West Indies during the 1920s and 1930s. An overview of the Caribbean immigrants in Harlem, including working class immigrants, is provided. The role that British Caribbean blacks played in the transatlantic media is discussed.
Suggests that racism was a strategic military liability in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century wars between Britain and France in the Caribbean. The French Revolution provoked slave uprisings on many of the Caribbean islands. Both the British and French underestimated the black rebels' capabilities and routinely executed black prisoners of war rather than ransoming or imprisoning them. These tendencies made Caribbean campaigns longer and bloodier than they might otherwise have been.
The Caribbean island of Carriacou was ceded to the British by the French after the Seven Years’War (1763). Carriacou’s population of Englishmen, Frenchmen, Scots, and free people of color, along with their enslaved workers, comprised a distinctive slaveholding society in comparison to that of the old British colonies.
In Apr 2009, shortly after taking office, Pres Barack Obama signaled that he was open to a new dialogue with Cuba. At remarks delivered at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, the President said that the US seeks a new beginning with Cuba. Earlier that year, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had welcomed an offer for talks from Cuban President Raul Castro, who took over duties from his ailing brother Fidel Castro in 2006 and subsequently was elected president by the Cuban National Assembly in 2008. Castro reportedly said that he was willing "discuss anything" with the US Government. Here, the US-Cuba policy is discussed. Adapted from the source document.
Located in the eastern Brazilian Amazon roughly three hours by boat from the open Atlantic, the port city of Belém do Pará has been an important point of convergence for transnational flows of commodities, people, and culture, including a vast array of up-tempo Caribbean dance genres known locally as lambada. Since the late twentieth century, inhabitants of Belém and surrounding areas have sought to make a virtue of their liminal position between the hegemonic centers of southeastern Brazil and the circum-Caribbean. This article shows how musicians, dancers, listeners, and culture brokers draw on the local history of Caribbean cosmopolitan musicality to articulate an alternative Amazonian regional identity, one characterized by connectedness and proximity to their Caribbean neighbors rather than by isolation and provincialism. In so doing, the article contributes to the remapping of the cultural contours of Brazil, the Caribbean, the Amazon, and Latin America.
In 1995 and 1996, Verena Stolcke (1995) and Aihwa Ong (1996) were embattled over the legitimacy of the concept of citizenship -- a debate that was preceded by those writing about the complexities of Latino/a as well as Caribbean transnational migration (Basch Glick-Schiller, and Blanc 1994; Sutton and Chaney 1987) and the resultant complexities of hybridity and borderlands (Anzaldua 1987). The debate that followed in Current Anthropology in 1995 propelled the discussion further. It clarified what was at stake in reconceptualizing the classification of national belonging and pushed scholars to contend with power through the ways people resignify meaning and produce new forms of socialities outside of and in relation to the stagecraft.
Explores dynamic changes in network size and composition by examining patterns of older adults' social network change over time, that is: types of movements; the reason for the loss of network members; and the relation of movement and composition in concert. This study is a 6-year follow up of changes in the social networks of U.S.-Born Caucasian, African-American, and Caribbean older adults.
Explores the relationship of family and demographic factors to the frequency of receiving emotional support and the frequency of engaging in negative interactions with family members (i.e., criticism, burden, and being taken advantage of). Overall, no significant differences were found between African Americans and Caribbean Blacks in the frequency of emotional support or negative interaction; several significant correlates (e.g., age, family closeness) were found for both groups.
Lucea,Marguerite B. (Author), Stockman,Jamila K. (Author), Mana-Ay,Margarita (Author), Bertrand,Desiree (Author), Callwood,Gloria B. (Author), Coverston,Catherine R. (Author), Campbell,Doris W. (Author), and Campbell,Jacquelyn C. (Author)
Format:
Journal Article
Publication Date:
May 2013
Published:
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Explores the relationship between intimate partner violence (IPV) and resource use, considering sociodemographics and aspects of IPV by presenting results from a study conducted with African American and African Caribbean women in Baltimore, Maryland, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
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.
Discusses perspectives in Africana feminist thought. While, not an exhaustive review of the entire diaspora, three regions are discussed: Africa, North America, and the Caribbean.
Considers how a taxonomy of conjugality-marriage, common-law marriage, and visiting relationships-emerged as a specialized vocabulary to apprehend and govern the postcolonial Caribbean.
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.
Examines the representation of Haiti in the works of Martinican author Édouard Glissant. The relationship between Haiti and Martinique based on Glissant's essay "Le Discours antillais" is tackled. Glissant's focus on the revolution and independence of Haiti and his conception of the island's role in the reorientation of the Caribbean are discussed. Other works by Glissant include poetic collection "Les Indes" and the play "Monsieur Toussaint."
The defeat of the Dutch armies by the French and the founding of the Batavian Republic in 1795 created confusion in the colonies and on overseas naval vessels about who was in power. This article adds the mutinies on board the Ceres and Medea to the interplay between the Curacao slave revolt of 1795 and the rise of the Curacaoan Patriot movement in 1796. The mariners independently partook in the battle for the political direction of the island and debated which side they wished to be on in the fight between the French Revolution and the British Empire.
A critical analysis of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s PBS documentary film series Black in Latin America. The author discusses the conceptualization of blackness in the Dominican Republic.
One of the central goals of archaeology is the definition of regional cultural succession. Since at least the 1960s, archaeology has purported to have moved beyond the strictures of Culture History, and yet the constructs of that paradigm (styles, periods, cultures) continue to be used routinely. This work aims to show that by doing so, one is still implicitly subscribing to that theoretical perspective's assumptions and biases.
Examines the extent to which publicly-listed Caribbean companies provide social and environmental disclosures, and the factors related to their disclosure practices. It is motivated by the dearth of studies of social and environmental disclosures among publicly listed Caribbean firms.
Constructs a monetary policy indicator from monetary policy documents and the actions of the Bank of Jamaica and Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning, and uses it to estimate four variants of an analytical narrative-vector error correction model.
Through a genealogy of Jamaican disaster management, shows how participatory and mitigation techniques were deterritorialized from marginalized experiences of disaster and reterritorialized into mitigation policies through the confluence of local disaster events and the global emergence of sustainable development and resilience theory.
A letter to the editor is presented in response to the book "Sexual Revolutions in Cuba," reviewed by Margaret Randall, which appeared in the March/April 2013 issue of the periodical.
Documents strategies that can be used to enhance Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) awareness in academic libraries. A case study approach was used to provide insights from the author's fellowship experience and personal reflections from working as a science librarian in academic and special library settings.
Examines opinions concerning goals and outcomes in regards to the Jamaican Ministry of Tourism's Ten-Year Master Plan to enhance tourism and increase shared governance. In addition to secondary sources of information, researchers use primary data obtained through an email survey sent to 540 Jamaican managers and executives.
In an era of increasing worldwide violence against tourists, safety, security, and risk abatement are becoming principal components in travelers' decision-making processes. This work examines the issue of perceived risk and safety and what impact these perceptions have on shopping behavior. The research takes place in Jamaica, a country with a reputation for aggressive vendors. Findings indicate that those visitors who traveled with others spent more time shopping and purchased more. Additionally, it was found that first time visitors express higher levels of discomfort with their surroundings than did repeat visitors, thus inhibiting purchase behavior. Finally, it was found that levels of perceived risk and security did have an impact on a traveler's intention to return to Jamaica.
Examines the use of road network data as a proxy for interpreting population density, which is of use in regional-scale qualitative risk assessment for natural hazards. Compares the Caribbean island nation of Saint Lucia to Ontario and Quebec. Analysis of available high-resolution topographic data for Saint Lucia suggests similar trends, with expected population density in Saint Lucia roughly half that of Canada for the same road density.
Examines four case studies of renewable energy advancements being made by public utility companies and independent energy companies in the Caribbean. Attempts to locate renewable energy advances in a broader historical framework of energy sector development, indicating a few policy lessons.
The ongoing review of defamation laws by the Jamaican government has sharpened the focus on the need to identify appropriate standards for public officials in libel actions in light of the growing recognition of a need for transparency. This article explores how British, Caribbean and U.S. jurisdictions have sought to manage the paradigm shift between the right to reputation and the need to ensure responsible and accountable governance. The aim is to identify a path of reform for Caribbean defamation law that ensures greater public official accountability and better incorporates twenty-first century notions of democracy.
Discusses the relationship between economic conditions and discourses surrounding partner choice in Cuba. Holds that economic changes caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union have necessitated strategies economic survival which differ from previously-held ideals of romantic partnerships. Suggests that anxieties surrounding changes in gender and kinship relations also reflect broader concerns about Cuba's social and economic hierarchies and the future of socialism.
Attempts to develop ideas concerning the gendering of creolisation and a historicising of affects within it. Addressing affects as 'physiological things' contextualized in the history of the Caribbean slave plantation,seeks to delineate a trajectory and development of a specific Creole history in relation to affects.
Discusses various reports including an analysis of the writings of African-Caribbean writer Anne Hart Gilbert, the plantation as a crucial source of difficult affective memory, and sexuality in fiction by Caribbean authors Opal Palmer Adisa and Erna Brodber.
Condé and Schwarz-Bart searched to explore the themes of alienation as Martinicans living in a European French society and the search for an identity that typifies the quintessential Caribbean patriarchal culture. The evolution in consciousness of the female and how she sees herself as part of the diasporic dilemma confronting Caribbean society is marked by the almost limited early works by women authors. As women found their voices and led the way for other women, a natural empowerment ensued with new loyalties as generations transcended the effects of colonialism, indentureship, and slavery.
Discusses the stories of six girls to illuminate three broad types of gender performances that were observed: ‘beauties’, ‘geeks’ and ‘men-john’. Using Francis' concepts of gender ‘monoglossia’ and ‘heteroglossia’, the extent to which these girls were able to resist the normative gender–sexual order and the consequences of conformity/non-conformity are examined.
Interviews Justin Podur, associate professor at York University in Toronto, Ontario. When asked about the reason behind writing his book "Haiti's New Dictatorship" he refers to his work as an editor while the military coup happened, which gave him an insight into people's views. Podur believes that the current dictatorship has poor human rights records in Haiti then the Aristide's government. He comments on rescue operations during the earthquake in 2010.
Discusses feminist theorizing of beauty and its intersection with the notion of race in Latin America and the Caribbean including Mexico, Brazil and Colombia.
Focuses on American and European tourist women in a transnational town in Atlantic Costa Rica renown for its intimate "vibe" and independent eco-oriented tourist development, where they grappled with the unexpected monetary aspects of intimate relations with Caribbean-Costa Rican men.
Considers deployments of the term ‘Men who have Sex with Men’ (MSM) through what the author terms a ‘Risk-Rights’ strategy in international development. Examining two Caribbean initiatives – the 2011 documentary film Living in the Shadows and the Guyanese NGO Society Against Sexual Orientation Discrimination (SASOD) – this paper documents and evaluates this strategy. Living in the Shadows demonstrates the dominant characterization of MSM as murderous, while SASOD's engagement is more consciously critical of the strategy's limits.
Examines the sentiment of love among the indigenous Miskitu people along the Honduran and Nicaraguan Caribbean Coast. The Miskitu are a Native American ethnic group in Central America. The people are primarily of African Native American ancestry. Miskitu women historically have held high positions of power in their matrilocal society. Since the lobster-diving industry began in the 1970s, however, gender and power relations have shifted, rendering women more dependent on men who earn wages. Women's loss of power is not only due to the economic changes, but it is also caused by the ideology and discourse of romantic love in Miskitu society.
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.
Discusses the 1978 case of seven Jamaican women who were to be deported from Canada and the questions the case raised about the value of women's labor and discriminatory immigration policies. Elucidates why the women, in their roles as mothers, decided to challenge the orders to leave Canada and illuminates the ways in which racialized women find the means to negotiate in-between spaces that allow them to survive.
A qualitative study was conducted to characterize gay men in Barbados, their HIV risk, and the impact of stigma on their lives. The 2 main groups of gay men (“bougies” and “ghetto”) reflect social class and level of “outness” in broader society. Homophobia, stigma, and buggery (sodomy) laws increase their HIV vulnerability. The need for anti-discrimination legislation and tools for self-development were identified for gay men to realize their strengths, develop their self-worth, and protect themselves from HIV.
Examines the relationship between acculturative stress and depressive symptoms among Haitian immigrant generation women in the United States. Recommendations highlight methods for integrating assessment, therapeutic approach and the client's background when making decisions about treatment as well as other areas of which the therapist may need to be aware when providing culturally appropriate therapy to Haitian women.
Focuses on CLADEM, an organization that has been championing women's rights in Latin America and the Caribbean for over 25 years. With the target date of 2015 fast approaching, attention is turning to what will follow the Millennium Development Goals - the global action plan to reduce extreme poverty across the world. Here, Jessica Woodroffe considers what the future holds, specifically for women's rights.
Midwives for Haiti is an organization that focuses on the education and training of skilled birth attendants in Haiti, a country with a high rate of maternal and infant mortality and where only 26% of births are attended by skilled health workers. Following the 2010 earthquake, Midwives for Haiti received requests to expand services and numerous professional midwives answered the call to volunteer.
Field hospitals were deployed by the Israel Defense Forces as part of the international relief efforts after major seismic events, one in Haiti (2010) and one in Japan (2011). The aim of this commentary is to share the experiences and lessons learned by field hospital obstetrics and gynecology teams after the major earthquakes in Haiti and Japan.
Explores how African, Caribbean and White British women worked to hide psychological partner abuse as they experienced it. They prioritized negotiated competencies as “good partners,” actively setting socially and culturally embedded boundaries to their abuser’s behaviors.
Considers the role of beauty in Costa Rican sex work. While Costa Rica's national mythology has long focused on claims to white origins, sex tourists identify local women's ‘exoticism’ and non-whiteness as particularly appealing. Explores how women experience and manage their sexual attractiveness to foreign tourists in their daily lives and work.
Presents evidence of the challenges faced by women in management in their interactions with men and other women, contesting the idea that men organizationally oppress women and suggesting instead that both men and women can be organizational oppressors of women. Provides insights into the working lives and challenges of women in a Latin American and Hispanic Caribbean context.
Examines the play The Case of Miss Iris Armstrong and documentary film Sweet Sugar Rage. Looks at the way the sexual division of labor on Jamaica's sugar plantations was based on the following gendered myths: women's labor capacity is lower than their male counterparts; and men are the breadwinners for their families.
Looks at the performance of tomboy identity in Joan Anim-Addo's collection of poetry Janie, Cricketing Lady and Margaret Cezair-Thompson's novel The Pirate's Daughter. Argues that the ongoing affects of colonialism and patriarchy in the islands of Grenada and Jamaica, shape the life narratives. To understand the way in which affect can be expressed through tomboyism in Caribbean societies, it is necessary to look at color and class alongside gender in the context of Caribbean creolization.
Proposes a reading of Donna Hemans' novel River Woman in relation to other contemporary Caribbean women writers and to the early fiction of Toni Morrison. Argues that the complex affects that her representation of 'child-shifting' produces can be articulated in relation to literary texts that re-imagine historical and contemporary practices leaving a child in order to save her and in the context of the plantation.
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.
In 1815, two benevolent organizations commenced operation in Antigua, the Female Refuge Society based in English Harbour and the Distressed Females' Friend Society based in St John's. The organizations were run on principle by women and the executive committees were multi-racial. The annual reports of the Female Refuge Society had a profound impact on the direction "of female anti-slavery activism in Britain.
Caribbean women writers such as Erna Brodber and Opal Palmer Adisa often include men in women's liberatory quests as participants. The close connection between sexuality and emotions in this body of writing can be read through a new model of affective feminist reader theory. Women's sexual healing processes in the novels discussed in this article are not solely gynocentric in the Caribbean context: men are often active participants in these processes, and thus also in gender reconfigurations.
A discussion on empowering women in Haiti after the earthquake. Headed by the International Planned Parenthood Federation/Western Hemisphere Region the Haiti Adolescent Girls Network (HAGN) aims to empower and protect vulnerable young women so that they may break the cycle of poverty. The Association por la Promotion de la Famille Haitienne along with HAGN created safe shelters for the young women.
To strengthen Haiti's primary health care (PHC) system, the country first piloted performance-based financing (PBF) in 1999 and subsequently expanded the approach to most internationally funded non-government organizations. PBF complements support (training and technical assistance). This study evaluates (a) the separate impact of PBF and international support on PHC's service delivery; (b) the combined impact of PBF and technical assistance on PHC's service delivery; and (c) the costs of PBF implementation in Haiti.
Little-reported developments in two Caribbean highlight the current dynamics at play in the complex and often difficult set of relations that exist between the UK and its territories.
Debates over the extent of graphic imagery of death in newspapers often suffer from generalized assertions that are based on inadequate or incomplete empirical evidence. Newspapers are believed to display death in very graphic ways, with particularly the tabloid press assumably leading a race to the bottom. This article reports the results of a study of tabloid and broadsheet images of death from the 2010 Haiti earthquake in eight Western European and North American countries. It shows that, far from omnipresent, graphic images of death are relatively rare.
Examines the sources of domestic political will for intervention, particularly the role of partisanship, ideology, and public opinion on Congressional members' willingness to support US intervention for humanitarian purposes. Analyzes several Congressional votes relevant to four episodes of US humanitarian intervention: Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. Finds that public support for humanitarian intervention increases Congressional support and that other political demands, primarily partisanship and ideological distance from the president, often trump the normative exigencies of intervention.
This paper begins by reviewing briefly at historical changes in the employment of geospatial technologies in major devastating disasters, including the Sichuan and Haiti earthquakes. It goes on to assess changes in the available dataset type and in geospatial disaster responders, as well as the impact of geospatial technological changes on disaster relief effort. Finally, the paper discusses lessons learned from recent responses and offers some thoughts for future development.
