"The rise of the Afro-Cuban musical genre commonly known as son is representative
of Cuban society’s ability to affirm through art its primary cultural influences: Europe and Africa. Despite the successful transculturation within the music, however, the events surrounding the creation and acceptance of son reiterate the struggle between Cuban elites and the masses to define lo cubano. In this essay, I will show how the social and political conditions under which son became a representation of popular culture in Cuba served as a catalyst for the affirmation
of Cuba’s African roots, despite attempts on the part of the elite to exclude Afro-Cubans from establishing any connection to Cuban national identity." --The Author
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 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.
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.
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.
The article focuses on the interactions between anglophone blacks, black Caribbeans, and indigenous southern Mesoamericans during the second half of the 18th century. The author discusses the history of race relations between Europeans, Africans, and Indians within the British and Spanish empires, examines the relationship between Mayas and Spanish colonists, and analyzes the role of religious differences within their encounters.
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 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.
Using theories of performance geography, the author considers how black music and dance, especially the slave ship dance Limbo, create an urban counter-culture that evokes historic transcultural experiences of the Middle Passage, space, and modernity. Social theories of scholars including Michel Foucault, Paul Gilroy, and Catherine Nash are considered. Other topics include cultural geography, the Maroons of Jamaica, and dance customs of Trinidad. Interrelationships between performances at the Dancehall in Kingston, Jamaica, Blues music, and South African Kwaito music are explored.
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 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)
Discusses Ethiopianism and Pan-Africanism as philosophies based on the premise that the alliances of the blacks of Africa and the diaspora are not limited by borders. These philosophies, both grounded in Atlantic crossings, are arguably part of the process of completing emancipation through their creation of a new discursive space for blacks, what Brodber terms "Blackspace." --Kezia Page, Transnational negotiations (2011, p. 68)
Although discussions of race disappeared from Cuban literature after the revolution of 1959, they reappeared as a result of Cuba's difficult economic situation in the 1980's
Provides international comparisons of black seniors in South Africa, Ghana, Jamaica, Bermuda, and the United States, focusing on policy and program issues
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
Fischer reviews the two-volume work Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean: social dynamics and cultural transformations, by Norman E. Whitten Jr. and Arlene Torres>
Discusses the multiple meanings of music for Panamanian Afro-Antillean identity in the Caribbean, by placing musical genres such as calypso, soka, and reggae, in the context of tourism development
The number of black Caribbean immigrants in America is growing with the most prevalent countries of origin being the Bahamas, Haiti, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Trinidad and Tobago.
This article also included in the Papers presented at the Eleventh Conference of Caribbean Historians, held in Curaçao 5-10 April, 1979 (s.l.: Association of Caribbean Historians; 5 vols.)
"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)
