238 p., Focuses on a strand of fiction and performance whose ambitious aesthetic aims both work within radical ethnic movements and exceed the identitarian strictures associated with these movements. Black Arts/Black Power, the American Indian Movement (AIM), and the multiethnic Third World Strike were profoundly transnational and cross-racial in their theory and practice. Shows how writers working within and after these movements developed experimental forms and figures that navigate between particular ethnic identities and a universalizable collective political subject. Drawing on a long-standing body of work that has shown the inseparability of politics and aesthetic form, I place revolutionary nationalist aesthetics in dialogue with a recent theoretical tradition that has reimagined universalist politics. Traces collaborations between Henry Dumas and Sun Ra, whose play with ontological categories does not easily fit Black Arts's strongly racialized context, through the fraught relationship between Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and AIM's political theater, to more recent retrospective accounts of nationalist movements by Karen Tei Yamashita and Jamaican novelist and anthropologist Erna Brodber.
450 p., Examines how the development of public health, aided by the intervention of the Rockefeller Foundation, intersected with the birth of nationalism in Jamaica between 1918 and 1944. It demonstrates that a modern public health program based in western biomedicine, racial categorization and colonial modes of behavior were vital to claims of fitness for self-rule by Jamaican nationalists. In the late 1930s the demand for greater representation in government was accompanied by the scrutiny of the sexual behaviors and personal hygiene of the Afro-Jamaican masses. The author analyzes how disease and reproduction played a central role in the competing constructions of Afro-Jamaican bodies by colonial elites and ambitious middle class nationalists.
112 p., On Wednesday October 11th, 1865, a group of malcontented men and women in Jamaica, a British colony, began a rebellion whose aftershocks echoed well beyond the confines of Morant Bay, the small town where it started. Although the initial rebellion lasted for just a few days, its brutal suppression and the implications that it held for the British Empire sparked a controversy that touched on some of the deepest fissures in British society at that time. At its heart, the rebellion highlighted the contested notions of power within the British imperial system. In Jamaica, disenfranchised local peasants rebelled to challenge a political system that excluded and oppressed them.
216 p., Explores the fashioning of Mary Seacole's public image as seen in Seacole's narrative, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands, and the periodical press in the British mainland and the Jamaican colony. Contextualizes the precise historical moments Seacole details in her narrative as well as those moments during which Seacole achieves her greatest celebrity: the South American Republic of New Granada in the early 1850s; the Crimean War and its aftermath (1853-1860); Seacole's death (1881); the death of Seacole's sister Louisa Grant (1905); and Seacole's modern rise to fame in Jamaica and in the United Kingdom (c1990 to the present day). Through this contextualization the author argues that the fashioning of Seacole's public image reflects notions of race, nation, gender and colonial power throughout British history.
155 p., Explores the interweaving of colonial and post-colonial British and Jamaican Laws and the interpretive legalities of sexuality, compulsory heterosexuality, and queerness. The research project begins by exploring the ways in which the gendered colonial law produces black sexualities as excessive and in need of discipline while also noticing how Caribbean peoples negotiate and subvert these legalities. The work then turns to dancehall and its enmeshment with landscape (which reflects theatre-in-the round and African spiritual ceremonies), psycho scape (which retains African uses of marronage and pageantry as personhood), and musicscape (which deploys homophobia to demand heterosexuality), in order to tease out the complexities of Caribbean sexualities and queer practices.
