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 discourses of queer subjectivity, Maroon identity, and their relationship to Caribbean nationalism. A key aspect of the argumentis the idea that both queerness and marronage are marked by complex insider/outsider identity positions that resist and complicate binarist discourses of belonging and unbelonging.
Special journal issue: Papers in Honour of Merrick Posnansky., Archaeological and ethnological evidence from the site of Efutu in Ghana is used to indicate the African cultural background of people imported into the Caribbean for enslavement in historical times.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
509 p., Presents a diverse, richly textured picture of Africans' experiences during the era of the Atlantic slave trade and offers the most comprehensive explanation of how African lives became entangled with the creation of the modern world. Includes Emmanuel Kofi Agorsah's "Scars of brutality : archaeology of the Maroons in the Caribbean."
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
224 p., Marronage - the process of flight by slaves from servitude to establish their own hegemonies in inhospitable or wild territories - had its beginnings in the early 1500s in Hispaniola, the first European settlement in the New World. As fictional personae the maroons continue to weave in and out of oral and literary tales as central and ancient characters of Jamaica's heritage. Identifies the place of Jamaican fiction in the larger regional literature and focuses on its essential themes and strategies of discourse for conveying these themes.
Kingston, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
381 p., About the struggles of enslaved Africans inthe Americas who achieved freedom through flight and the establishment of Maroon communities in the face of overwhelming military odds on the part of the slaveholders. Incontestably, Maroon communities constituted the first independent polities from European colonial rule in the hemisphere, even if the colonial states did not accord them legal recognition.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
319 p., Africans in Jamaica developed and exhibited a multiplicity of cultural identities and a complex set of relationships amongst themselves, reflective of their varied cultural, political, social, and physical origins. In the context of late-18th and early-19th century Buff Bay, Jamaica, most Africans were enslaved by whites to serve as laborers on plantations. However, a smaller group of Africans emerged from enslavement on plantations to form their own autonomous Maroon communities, alongside the plantation context and within the system of slavery. These two groups, enslaved Africans and Maroons, had a very complex set of relationship and identities that were fluid and constantly negotiated within the Jamaican slave society that was in turn hostile to both groups.
