A Congressional Black Caucus delegation, led by the CBC Chairwoman Carolyn C. KiIpatrick (D-Mich.), traveled to Haiti recently for a one-day visit as part of the group's ongoing effort to bring attention to the plight of starving Haitians.
"Congress has gone on record supporting debt relief for Haiti", the letter stated. "We now call on you, Mr. President, to use your influence to make sure that this struggling nation is no longer held captive to their past and is put on a sustained path to development". In urging [George W. Bush] to grant Haitian immigrants, currently residing in the U.S., TPS, the CBC said this would enable them to contribute to their nation's recovery and stability. Under Congressional rules, TPS may be granted when there is ongoing armed conflict, "posing a serious threat to personal safety". It is requested by a foreign state that "temporarily cannot handle the return of nationals due to environmental disaster" or when "extraordinary and temporary conditions in a foreign state exist which prevent aliens from returning". In February, Haitian President René Préval formally requested TPS for his compatriots living in the U.S. The CBC said while Haiti has made "considerable progress" in its efforts to recover from the physical and political damages of recent years, through its "commendable" rebuilding efforts and its recent democratic elections, its democracy "remains fragile.
Ever since Dr. Daniels founded the Haiti Support Project and recently revived IBW (where he is president), his ingenuity in forging ties between Black America and the island nation have led to a number of magnificent events, including several cruises, tours, relief efforts, charitable donations, and adopting a sister city, Milot in northern Haiti, which provided his patrons an opportunity to visit Sans Souci and the mighty fortress built by King Christophe.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
414 p., Never-before-told story of the first black explorer and adventurer in America, Esteban Dorantes. An African slave, Dorantes led an eight-year journey from Florida to California in the early 16th century -— three hundred years before Lewis and Clark ventured west. Includes "Camino Real: The Royal Road to Mexico City, 1536," "Dorantes and the Archive of the Indies," and "Cuba: 1527-1528."
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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251 p., Chapters: African and Afro-Cuban factors in the structure of Lydia Cabrera's black short stories -- The characters : gods, animals, humans, supernatural beings and objects -- The theme of the waters.
Hauser,Mark W. (Author) and Florida museum of natural history (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2008
Published:
Gainesville: University Press of Florida
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
269 p., In 18th-century Jamaica, an informal, underground economy existed among enslaved laborers. Utilizes both documentary and archaeological evidence to reveal how slaves practiced their own systematic forms of economic production, exchange, and consumption. Hauser compares the findings from a number of previously excavated sites and presents new analyses that reinterpret these collections in the context of island-wide trading networks
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
132 p., Renowned as a spiritual healer, reputed to have prophetic powers and feared as an ‘Obeahman’, the name ‘Pa Neezer’ was whispered up and down the length of Trinidad for over three decades with a mixture of fear, reverence and awe. In 1956, a young graduate research student was granted unprecedented access to Ebenezer Elliot, beginning a unique relationship that was to end only with the latter’s death in 1969.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, Projected Date: 0812
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
364 p., Miller's extensive fieldwork in Cuba and West Africa documents ritual languages and practices that survived the Middle Passage and evolved into a unifying charter for transplanted slaves and their successors. To gain deeper understanding of the material, Miller underwent Ékpè initiation rites in Nigeria after ten years' collaboration with Abakuá initiates in Cuba and the United States. He argues that Cuban music, art, and even politics rely on complexities of these African-inspired codes of conduct and leadership.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
322 p., When a small group of free men of color gathered in 1838 to celebrate the end of apprenticeship in Barbados, they spoke of emancipation as the moment of freedom for all colored people, not just the former slaves. The fact that many of these men had owned slaves themselves gives a hollow ring to their lofty pronouncements. Newton demonstrates that simply dismissing these men as hypocrites ignores the complexity of their relationship to slavery. Exploring the role of free blacks in Barbados from 1790 to 1860, Newton argues that the emancipation process transformed social relations between Afro-Barbadians and slaves and ex-slaves.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
423 p., Focuses on the migrations and metamorphoses of black bodies, practices, and discourses around the Atlantic, particularly with regard to current issues such as questions of identity, political and human rights, cosmopolitics, and mnemo-history. Includes Judith M. Williams' "Néritude as performance practice: Rio de Janeiro's Black experimental theatre," Richard Follett's "The spirit of Brazil: football and the politics of Afro-Brazilian cultural identity," Dorothea Fischer-Hornung's "Transbodied/transcultured : moving spirits in Katherine Dunham's and Maya Deren's Caribbean," Elvira Pulitano's "Re-mapping Caribbean land(sea)scapes: aquatic metaphors and transatlantic homes in Caryl Phillips's The Atlantic sound," and Antoinette Tidjani Alou's "Marine origins and anti-marine tropism in the French Caribbean: André and Simone Schwarz-Bart."
Examines the lifestyles and entrepreneurial skills of Karen Theresa Curtis as a businesswoman managing her own huskers. While the free colored men were protesting their lack of civil rights, the women engaged in commerce were protected by no rights and were experiencing their own problems in defending their property.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
336 p., "The author's West Indian mail boat lay at anchor in a tropical green gulf. At the water's edge, lit by sunset, sprawled the town of Cap Haitien. Among the modern structures were the wrecked mansions of the 16th century French colonials who imported slaves from Africa and made Haiti the richest colony in the western hemisphere. In the ruins was the palace built for Pauline Bonaparte when Napoleon sent his brother-in-law with an imperial army to do battle with slaves who had won their freedom. All this was panoramic as they lay at anchor, but as night fell, it faded to vagueness and disappeared. Only the jungle mountains remained, dark, mysterious; and from their slopes came presently far across the water the steady boom of Voodoo drums." Originally publication: Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 1929.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
64 p., Life story of Bob Marley, the artist who made reggae music a worldwide phenomenon and became the first Jamaican musician to attain stardom in the pop music world.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
225 p., Whitmarsh describes how he followed a team of genetic researchers to Barbados, where he did fieldwork among not only the researchers but also government officials, medical professionals, and the families being tested. Whitmarsh reveals how state officials and medical professionals make the international biomedical research part of state care, bundling together categories of disease populations, biological race, and asthma. He points to state and industry perceptions of mothers as medical caretakers in genetic research that proves to be inextricable from contested practices around nation, race, and family.
Two Florida Democratic congressmen have been pushing the [George W. Bush] administration to permanently cease deportation of Haitians because of the hardship being experienced in the impoverished country. Kendrick Meek and Alcee L. Hastings, strong Haitian cates, have assailed the istration's policy on Haiti, ing that Haitians have, for long, been victimized by Washington's "double standard" immigration policies. Meek, who represents Miami, said Haiti "over-qualifies" for TPS, bestowed when the U.S. government determines eligible nationals are temporarily unable to safely return to their home country because of ongoing conflicts, environmental disasters or other "extraordinary and temporary conditions."
"That's terrific news," she added. "We're hopeful that Haitians wont be sent back until the country has had a chance to recover." [Kendrick Meek], who represents Miami, said Haiti "over-qualifies" for TPS, bestowed when the U.S. government determines eligible nationals are temporarily unable to safely return to their home country because of ongoing conflicts, environmental disasters or other "extraordinary and temporary conditions. [Alcee L. Hastings], who represents the city of Miramar, north of Miami, said, in his letter to [George W. Bush], that Haiti can "hardly sustain the lives of those currently living within its borders. "How can we also expect it to contend with the repatriation of the very people who left Haiti in desperation and who, through remittances, can aid in the nation's recovery efforts?" he asked.
Falola,Toyin (Editor), Afolabi,Niyi (Editor), and Adesanya,Aderonke A. (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2008
Published:
Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
492 p., Includes Akintunde Akinyemi's "Transnational displacement and cultural continuity : the survival of Yorùbá religious poetry in the Americas," Niyi Afolabi's "Milton Nascimento's Missa dos Quilombos: musical invocation, race, and liberation," Christopher Adejumo's "Migration and slavery as paradigms in the aesthetic transformation of Yoruba art in the Americas," Ann Albuyeh's "'Africa speaks in me': how the diaspora shaped the languages of the Caribbean, then and now," Raphael Chijioke Njoku's "Symbols and meanings of Igbo masquerades and carnivals of the Black diaspora," and Ray A. Kea's "Religion, texts, and conversion in the eighteenth-century Danish West Indies : questions of self-identity and self-determination."
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
209 p., Explores the limits and prospects of Afro-Caribbean Francophone writers in reshaping or producing action-oriented literature. Part One explores the origins of Afro-Caribbean Francophone literature and what the author terms griotism-- a shared heritage of awareness of biological differences, a sense of the black hero as black messiah and black people as chosen, and the promise of a common racial history.
Lovinsky Pierre Antoine, is a Haitian activist and leader of Fondasyon Trant Septanm (September 30 organization), named in commemoration of the coup against democratically elected President Jean Bertrand Aristide in 1991. His organization worked with victims of torture, rape and extrajudicial executions by the Haitian military and paramilitary. I met Lovinsky when I lived in Haiti. I admire his fervent commitment to educate Americans about the negative impacts of US policies towards Haiti. In 2004, under threat by the former military whose human rights abuses he had vehemently denounced, Lovinsky left Haiti for the US. But two years later, after democratic elections, Lovinsky returned to Haiti. Like many of his friends, I was concerned for his safety, but Lovinsky was unwavering. Last August, while working with a human rights delegation, Lovinsky received a telephone call and left his home. His car was found the next morning, but he has not been seen since. He is "disappeared", a term used to describe someone who is kidnapped out of a political motivation.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Winner of the 1978 National Book Critic's Circle Award for fiction., 305 p., The lives of 5 people, black and white, servant and millionaire, are entertwined. The setting is a Caribbean island. A visitor, young Jadine, neice of the butler and his wife and protegee of the Streets, educated at the Sorbonne, comes home for a visit from Paris. Son, black American street man breaks into the house and all lives are changed. Jadine and Son come together and strive to hold and understand each other as backgrounds and cultural circumstances come into play.
At the same time, [Jesse Jackson] lamented what he described as the "disparity" in how the U.S. government treats Cuban and Haitian refugees. Jackson said while the U.S. readily welcomes Cuban refugees, it neglects Haitians. "When Haitian children's parents die at sea they are sent back," he said. "We subsidize Cubans to come to the United States, but we ship Haitians out...We should change our policy and measure human rights by one yardstick." "The Cuban immigrants are called political refugees, and they are welcomed in the United States," he said. "The Haitian immigrants are called economic refugees, and they are sent back...There is a distinction without a difference."
"The purpose of the International Black Summit is to provide an opportunity for participants to bring into being their vision for the black community and the world," Christian said.
The Rastafarian exhibition in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History recounts the history and reveals nuance to a movement that celebrates African liberation, global peace and "one love." A glass case at the Smithsonian exhibit displays such manuscripts as the Holy Piby, a proto-Rastafarian text that was widely circulated across the African Diaspora before being banned in Jamaica during the 1920s.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
241 p., An examination of the importance of international cross-influences between modernist poets in the Americas. Includes "From Harlem to Haiti: Langston Hughes, Jacques Roumain and the avant-gardes," "Signifying modernism in Wilson Harris's Eternity to season" and "Beyond apprenticeship: Derek Walcott's passage to the Americas."
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Journal Title Details:
42 (1): 131-153
Notes:
The passing of the British Abolition Act in 1807 owed much to the activism of women, enslaved and free, who employed diverse strategies to agitate for the ending of what was arguably the greatest crime against humanity. Reflects on women's role in Caribbean development and the struggles they faced in the process.
The month's activities organized include a Global Reggae Conference hosted at the University of the West Indies' Mona Campus, featuring musician Gilberto Gil, now Brazil's minister of culture, and a Reggae Film Festival hosted by Jamaica's Ministry of Information and Culture.
Landslides pose a serious physical and environmental threat to vulnerable communities living in areas of unplanned housing on steep slopes in the Caribbean. Some of these communities have, in the past, had to be relocated, at costs of millions of dollars, because of major slides triggered by tropical storm rainfall. Even so, evidence shows that: (1) risk reduction is a marginal activity; (2) there has been minimal uptake of hazard maps and vulnerability assessments and (3) there is little on-the-ground delivery of construction for risk reduction. This article directly addresses these issues by developing a low-cost approach to the identification of the potential pore pressure changes that trigger such slides.
1 online resource (20 pages), The small economies of the Caribbean have entered a period of extraordinary economic uncertainty driven by the impact of new trade rules on the region's agricultural sector; dramatic advances in technology that have lowered barriers to entry; and fierce global competition from large, low-wage countries in Asia. Furthermore, the Caribbean nations' ability to sustain a high level of social well-being is suffering due to the effects of broader economic change that has left the region in a reactive position. Against this backdrop, the services sector in the Caribbean may serve as an important source of economic growth, but only if the region begins to move beyond tourism to take advantage of emerging opportunities in the areas of banking and financial services, call centres and information and communication technology, off-shore education and health services, and transportation. This essay assesses the future prospects for the Caribbean to create a thriving service-based economy and offers ideas to help the region to both build on and transcend its reliance on tourism to carve a more profitable and sustainable niche in the global economy. Tables, Figures, References.
The countries of the Wider Caribbean Region (WCR) are linked economically by their trans-boundary living marine resources. The region is facing a continued decline of these resources. Science is improving our understanding of the human contributions to this decline, but national policies and programmes have not kept pace with this understanding. The Caribbean Regional Seas Programme and its Cartagena Convention and Protocols provide the regional legal framework for protection and sustainable management of the WCR's living marine and coastal resources. This article focuses on the Cartagena Convention's Protocol for biodiversity conservation, the Protocol Concerning Specially Protected Areas and Wildlife, arguing that governments and organizations need to significantly increase participation in this regional treaty regime to effectively address transboundary environmental challenges.
Olsen,Dale A. (Editor) and Sheehy,Daniel E. (Editor)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2008
Published:
New York: Routledge
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Articles originally published in: The Garland encyclopedia of world music. Vol. 2, South America, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. 1998., 567 p + 2 sound discs, A collection of articles on the musics of Latin America, covering such regions and cultures as Warao, Q'ero, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Venezuela, Mexico, Guatemala, Panama, Cuba, Dominican republic and many others.
Over the last two decades, scholars have investigated the two-way relationship between gender inequality on the one hand, and economic development and growth on the other. Research in this area offers new ways to address the economic stagnation and crisis developing countries have experienced over the last two decades. , and in important ways, constrains economic development and growth in the Caribbean region. It further explores the endogeneity of gender inequality to the macroeconomic policy environment. The article concludes with a discussion of economic policies that can promote a win-win outcome-greater gender equality and economic development and growth.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
1 microfiche, A selection from Charles' previous collections and a book’s worth of new poems. In the new poems from ‘Children of the Morning’ there is both a focus on the lives of the young, and a Blakean concern with the quality and integrity of childhood experience that clearly grows from his work as a storyteller with children. These are both songs of innocence and experience, of what ought to be, and, as in ‘Stephen’s Song’, of a young life snuffed out by racism."
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
239 p., From 1791 to 1804, revolution on the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue sent thousands of free and enslaved people of African descent to the United States. Historians have largely viewed this migration as contributing to black community formation in cities like Philadelphia, and as evidence of revolutionary connections in an Atlantic World. This dissertation examines the experiences of these migrants as an example of competing identities among people of African descent, and argues that the emergence of an ethnic identity among black Saint-Dominguans, shaped by Roman Catholicism and French language, impeded assimilation into African-American communities.
