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.
An essay is presented which discusses the religious history and identity of the Caribbean Area and Africa from the Haitian Revolution through the 2010s, with a particular focus on Islam and voodooism. African and Caribbean identities, including the role that cosmopolitanism plays in identity formation, are discussed. An overview of the religious identity of the Muslim Haitian Revolution leader Dutty Boukman is provided.
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.
The article reports on a conference on the history of the Caribbean and Atlantic Ocean regions, held in Berlin, Germany, from July 2-3, 2012. Topics of discussion included creole and African diasporic identities, racism, nationalism, and ethnic relations in Caribbean states such as Cuba, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic, and migration.
Argues that Haitians used music, and particularly religious singing, self-reflexively, in a culturally patterned way, to orient themselves in time and space, and to construct a frame of meaning in which to understand and act in the devastated Haitian capital. Non-Haitian observers noted with astonishment Haitians’ widespread use of song, but could not make sense of the singing.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
68 p, Traditional Caribbean history has been directed by and focused upon the conquerors who came to the region to colonize and seek profitable resources. Native Caribbean peoples and African slaves used to work the land have been silenced by traditional history so that it has become necessary for modern Caribbean thinkers to challenge that history and recreate it. Alejo Carpentier and Michelle Cliff challenge traditional Caribbean history in their texts, The Kingdom of This World and Abeng, respectively. Each of these texts rewrites traditional history to include the perspectives of natives and the slaves of Haiti and Jamaica. Traditional history is challenged by the inclusion of these perspectives, thus providing a rewritten, revised history.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
303 p, A book containing over 500 rare photographs which give a visual picture of a Caribbean society in the process of change in the years after Emancipation.
Benes,Peter (Author), Benes,Jane Montague (Author), Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife (33rd : 2008 : Deerfield, Mass.), and Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife (Author)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2012
Published:
Deerfield, MA: Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
156 p, Contents include: Section I. Extractive and provisioning trades -- Section II. Plantations and business ventures -- Section III. Slavery and piracy -- Section IV. Caribbean immigrants to New England -- Section V. Architecture -- Caribbean--New England bibliography.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
309 p, Using the stories of ordinary people, Block illustrates how engaging with the powerful rhetoric and rituals of Christianity was central to survival. Isobel Criolla was a runaway slave in Cartagena who successfully lobbied the Spanish governor not to return her to an abusive mistress. Nicolas Burundel was a French Calvinist who served as henchman to the Spanish governor of Jamaica before his arrest by the Inquisition for heresy. Henry Whistler was an English sailor sent to the Caribbean under Oliver Cromwell's plan for holy war against Catholic Spain. Yaff and Nell were slaves who served a Quaker plantation owner, Lewis Morris, in Barbados. Seen from their on-the-ground perspective, the development of modern capitalism, race, and Christianity emerges as a story of negotiation, contingency, humanity, and the quest for community.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
710 p, Examines the economic history of the Caribbean in the two hundred years since the Napoleonic Wars and is the first analysis to span the whole region. Its findings challenge many long-standing assumptions about the region, and its in-depth case studies shed new light on the history of three countries in particular, namely Belize, Cuba, and Haiti"
Cullen,Deborah (Author) and Fuentes Rodríguez,Elvis (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2012
Published:
New York; New Haven, Conn.: El Museo del Barrio; In association with Yale University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
"Published in conjunction with the exhibition 'Caribbean: crossroads of the world,' organized by El Museo del Barrio in collaboration with Queens Museum of Art and The Studio Museum in Harlem. The exhibition is presented at El Museo del Barrio from June 12, 2012-January 6, 2013; at Queens Museum of Art from June 17, 2012-January 6, 2013; and at The Studio Museum in Harlem from June 14, 2012-October 21, 2012.", 491 p, An authoritative examination of the modern history of the Caribbean through its artistic culture. Featuring 500 color illustrations of artworks from the late 18th through the 21st century, the book explores modern and contemporary art, ranging from the Haitian revolution to the present. Acknowledging both the individuality of each island, the richness of the coastal regions, and the reach of the Diaspora, Caribbean looks at the vital visual and cultural links that exist among these diverse constituencies.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
368 p, Tracing the islands’ path from slavery to revolution and independence, A Traveller’s History of the Caribbean looks at the history of nations as different as Cuba, Jamaica and Haiti, explaining their diversity and their common experiences. It reveals a region in which a tumultuous past has created a culturally vibrant and intriguing present.
Fuentes Rodríguez,Elvis (Author), Museo del Barrio (New York, N.Y.), Queens Museum of Art (Queens, NY), and Studio Museum in Harlem (New York, NY)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2012
Published:
New York: El Museo del Barrio; New Haven, CT: in association with Yale University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Published in conjunction with the exhibition "Caribbean: crossroads of the world," organized by El Museo del Barrio in collaboration with Queens Museum of Art and The Studio Museum in Harlem.
The exhibition is presented at El Museo del Barrio from June 12, 2012-January 6, 2013; at Queens Museum of Art from June 17, 2012-January 6, 2013; and at The Studio Museum in Harlem from June 14, 2012-October 21, 2012.", 31 p, Includes essay "Crossroads, crossings, and the cross" by Elvis Fuentes.
Wymondham: Socialist History Society with Bogle L'Overture Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
90 p., Describes the development of labor relations, from slave labor to capitalist free labor through to modern trade unions and political independence.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Caribbean Reasonings Conference (5th : 2006 : Mona, Jamaica)., 302 p, Richard Hart's quest for political autonomy, decolonization and regional unity has earned him a space in the annals of history as one of Jamaica s leading nationalist figures and as a vital contributor to the Caribbean integration movement. As a key proponent of social, political and economic transformations in the region, Hart fought arduously for trade unionism, political sovereignty and mass-based democratic political parties among other important issues which advanced the lives of Caribbean nationals.
Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
352 p., In the first half of the 19th century, the safeguarding of the health of the enslaved workers became a central concern for plantation owners and colonial administrators in the Danish West Indies. This title explores the health conditions of the enslaved workers and the health policies initiated by planters and the colonial government.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
279 p, Offering a rare pan-Caribbean perspective on a region that has moved from the very center of the western world to its periphery, The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism journeys through five centuries of economic and social development, emphasizing such topics as the slave-run plantation economy, the changes in political control over the centuries, the impact of the United States, and the effects of Castro's Cuban revolution on the area.
Lawrence,O'Neil (Author), Archer,Melanie (Editor), and Brown,Mariel (Editor)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2012
Published:
Laventille, Trinidad and Tobago: Robert & Christopher Publishers
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Includes essay by Lawrence O'Neil., 222 p., Examines the ways in which contemporary art photography has evolved within the English-speaking Caribbean, rising beyond depictions of idyllic scenes to tackle more complex social, racial, political and gender issues. Within the past few years, regional artists have provided an increasingly searching image of the Caribbean and the people who inhabit it.
Ojo,Olatunji (Editor), Lovejoy,Paul E. (Editor), and Hunt,Nadine (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2012
Published:
London: I.B. Tauris
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Most of the chapters in this book derive from conference papers presented at the Canadian Association for African Studies (CAAS) Annual Meeting and Conference held at Carleton University, Ottawa in May 2010., 224 p, Based on Jamaican and African archival sources, analysis demonstrates how many Africans coped by adopting a flexible identity in order to negotiate the cultural differences in African, European, and Islamic systems of slavery.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
366 p, Contents: Original peoples -- The coming of Columbus -- The Northern European challenge to Spain -- The Africans : long night of enslavement -- The enslaved and the manumitted : Human strivings in savage surroundings -- The big fight back : Resistance, marronage, proto-states -- The big fight back : Suriname and Jamaica -- The big fight back : from rebellion to Haitian revolution -- Emancipation : help from Europe, final push from the enslaved -- After emancipation : obstacles and progress -- Immigration in the 19th and 20th centuries -- The Caribbean and Africa through the early 20th century -- The United States and the Caribbean to World War II -- Twentieth century to World War II : turbulent times -- World War II to century's end -- Prognosis.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
197 p., Focusing on slave revolts that took place in Barbados in 1816, in Demerara in 1823, and in Jamaica in 1831--32, identifies four key aspects in British abolitionist propaganda regarding Caribbean slavery: the denial that antislavery activism prompted slave revolts, the attempt to understand and recount slave uprisings from the slaves' perspectives, the portrayal of slave rebels as victims of armed suppressors and as agents of the antislavery movement, and the presentation of revolts as a rationale against the continuance of slavery.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
312 p., Analyzes the conflicts between the British government and Caribbean nationalists over regional integration, the Cold War, immigration policy and financial aid in the decades before Jamaica, Trinidad and the other territories of the Anglophone Caribbean became independent.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
224 p., Analyses the written sources which have survived, demonstrating how many Africans coped by adopting a flexible identity in order to negotiate the cultural differences in African, European, and Islamic systems of slavery. An important work based on Jamaican and African archival sources.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
145 p, The Guatemalan government sought to build an extensive railroad system in the 1880s, and actively recruited foreign labor. For poor workers of African descent, immigrating to Guatemala was seen as an opportunity to improve their lives and escape from the racism of the Jim Crow U.S. South and the French and British colonial Caribbean. Using primary and secondary sources as well as ethnographic data, Opie details the struggles of these workers who were ultimately inspired to organize by the ideas of Marcus Garvey. Regularly suffering class- and race-based attacks and persecution, black laborers frequently met such attacks with resistance. Their leverage--being able to shut down the railroad--was crucially important to the revolutionary movements in 1897 and 1920.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Originally presented as the author's thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Exeter., 225 p., Surveys the historical and contemporary context of the Caribbean and defines its struggle against inequality and the distortion of identity. This history of the Caribbean is a history of the resistance by the people of the Caribbean against inequality and notions of their inferiority. Caribbean Theology is founded on this emancipatory imagination of the people and this spirit of resistance.
Boston, Mass; Enfield : Publishers Group UK distributor], Projected Date: Beacon; 201203
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
After peaking at 27 percent of all major leaguers in 1975, African Americans now make up less than one-tenth--a decline unimaginable in other men's pro sports. The number of Latin Americans, by contrast, has exploded to over one-quarter of all major leaguers and roughly half of those playing in the minors. Ruck explains that integration cost black and Caribbean societies control over their own sporting lives, changing the meaning of the sport, but not always for the better. While it channeled black and Latino athletes into major league baseball, integration did little for the communities they left behind.
Alexandria, VA: Crest Books, The Salvation Army National Headquarters
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
262 p., The Salvation Army first arrived in Jamaica in 1887, just 50 years after the abolition of slavery in the Caribbean. Jamaica was struggling economically and socially under the rule of a colonial white elite, which had drawn sharp class and racial boundaries to maintain the balance of power. Resulting tensions were acute. This sweeping history by Allen Satterlee unveils the socio-political as well as physical fault lines facing the Army as it began to break new ground in the region. As pioneer Salvationists united with enterprising Africans, the Army's mission in the Caribbean grew in unique ways and forms of expression.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
361 p., "I wrote Transfer Day as a way to honor the people of the Virgin Islands and to honor the upcoming Centennial celebration in 2017." --The Author
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
353 p., Interspersing colonial history with her family's experience, Stuart explores the interconnected themes of settlement, sugar and slavery. In examining how these forces shaped her own family--its genealogy, intimate relationships, circumstances of birth, varying hues of skin--she illuminates how her family, among millions of others like it, in turn transformed the society in which they lived, and how that interchange continues to this day.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
294 p., Documents the lives and work of black individuals and organizations in the West Indies from 1900 to 1989, centered on the worlds of labor and black journalism. The French Caribbean is not covered here. Focuses on historical information as well as information on relationships between the two main "servant" minorities of the British Empire: Caribbeans originally from Africa and from India/Pakistan.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
274 p., Explores a broad range of power relationships and struggles for authority in the early 19th century British Atlantic, focusing on the Caribbean colony of Berbice. I aim to understand how enslaved people and their enslavers negotiated their relationships and forged their lives within multiple, interconnected networks of power in a notoriously brutal society. Focuses on politics and culture writ large and small, zooming in to see the internal conflicts, practices, and hierarchies that governed individual plantations, communities, and families; and zooming out to explore the various ways that imperial officials, colonial administrators, and metropolitan antislavery activists tried to shape Caribbean area slavery during the era of amelioration-a crucial period of transformation in the Atlantic world. Sources used include travel narratives, trial records, missionary correspondence, and official government documents. Most important are the records of the Berbice fiscals and protectors of slaves, officials charged with hearing enslaved peoples' grievances and enforcing colonial laws.
Tavistock, Devon, U.K; London: Northcote; British Council
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
153 p, Jean Rhys and her critics -- Feminist approaches to Jean Rhys -- The Caribbean question -- Writing in the margins -- Autobiography and ambivalence -- 'The day they burned the books' -- Fort Comme La Mort : the French Connection -- The politics of Good morning, midnight -- The huge machine of law, order and respectability -- Resisting the machine -- The enemy within -- Goodnight, day -- Intemperate and unchaste -- The other side -- The struggle for the sign.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
207 p., Fosters a dialogue across islands and languages between established and lesser-known authors, bringing together archipelagic and diasporic voices from the Francophone and Hispanic Antilles. In this pan-diasporic study, Ferly shows that a comparative analysis of female narratives is often most pertinent across linguistic zones.
282 p., Challenges how critical scholarship on race and racism in Latin America has traditionally understood racial subalterns in Cuba and Puerto Rico as people who are prevented from acting as black political subjects because of the hegemonic power of discourses of nationhood premised on ideas of mestizaje and racial fraternity. By providing an intellectual history of several important yet largely ignored Cuban and Puerto Rican activists intellectuals of color who lived and worked between the Caribbean and the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century, the author shows that instead of being tricked by creole elite national narratives, they attempted to redefine ideas of nationhood to challenge racism, colonialism, and imperialism at local, national, and transnational levels.
Examines in the transnational conversation on the place of Afro-descendants in the republican nation-state that occurred in New-World historical literature during the 19th century. Tracing the evolution of republican thought in the Americas from the classical liberalism of the independence period to the more democratic forms of government that took hold in the late 1800s, the pages that follow will chart the circulation of ideas regarding race and republican citizenship in the Atlantic World during the long nineteenth century, the changes that those ideas undergo as they circulate, and the racialized tensions that surface as they move between and among Europe and various locations throughout the Americas. Focusing on a diverse group of writers--including the anonymous Cuban author of Jicoténcal; the North Americans Thomas Jefferson, James Fenimore Cooper, and Mary Mann; the Argentines Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and Eduarda Mansilla de García; the Dominican Manuel de Jesús Galván; the Haitian Émile Nau; and the Brazilian Euclides da Cunha.
237 p., Free people of color held an ambiguous place in Caribbean slave societies. On the one hand they were nominally free, but the reality of their daily lives was often something less than free. This work examines how free people of color, or libres de color , in nineteenth-century Cuba attempted to carve out lives for themselves in the face of social, economic, and political constraints imposed on them by white Cubans and Spaniards living in the island. It focuses on how through different Afro-Cuban associations some libres de color used public music and dance performances to self-fashion identities on their own terms.
Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
296 p., The formal evolution of colonial prose narrative, Ianinni argues, was contingent upon the emergence of natural history writing, which itself emerged necessarily from within the context of Atlantic slavery and the production of tropical commodities. As he reestablishes the history of cultural exchange between the Caribbean and North America, Ianinni recovers the importance of the West Indies in the formation of American literary and intellectual culture as well as its place in assessing the moral implications of colonial slavery.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
387 p., Focuses on the origins of the Caribbean creole language Papiamentu. Argues that Papiamentu is genetically related to the Portuguese-based creoles of the Cape Verde Islands, Guinea-Bissau, and Casamance (Senegal). Following the trans-Atlantic transfer of native speakers to Curaçao in the latter half of the 17th century, the Portuguese-based proto-variety underwent a far-reaching process of relexification towards Spanish, affecting the basic vocabulary while leaving intact the original phonology, morphology, and syntax.
480 p., This dissertation examines the role of the Haitian Revolution and Haiti's national history in the construction of Black Internationalism and Black Atlantic intellectual culture in the first half of the twentieth century. The author argues for the centrality of Haiti in the genesis of Black internationalism, contending that revolutionary Haiti played a major place in Black Atlantic thought and culture in the time covered. Suggests viewing the dynamics between the Harlem Renaissance, Haitian Indigenism, and Negrtude and key writers and intellectuals in terms of interpenetration, interindepedence, and mutual reciprocity and collaboration.
280 p., Examines how Cubans mobilized the memory of their wars of independence as the symbolic and narrative foundations of their nationhood. Argues that the creation of a set of heroes, icons, and parables was crucial to consolidation of the Cuban republic and to the establishment of political and racial norms that sustained it. Cuban independence was threatened from its outset by the prospect of U.S. intervention. In this context, securing political stability and social unity became matters of national survival. The sanctification of national heroes enabled Cubans to demonstrate the historical legitimacy of their fragile republic, and Cubans circulated narratives emphasizing the cooperation of black and white Cubans in the anti-colonial struggle to deny and forestall conflicts over racial inequality.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
196 p., Argues that cultural and literary expressions of illness, suffering, and subjectivity in the postcolonial context are always in dialogue with seemingly external discourses and practices of health. Thus, through sustained analyses of historical, biomedical and sociocultural currents in the context of eight Francophone novels from 1968 to 2003, the book advances a new theory of critical conditions. These critical conditions represent the conjunction of bodily, psychic, and textual states that defy conventional definitions of health and well-being.
370 p., Examines three general geographical areas in which people who originated in Africa were dispersed to the West during the Transatlantic Trade in Captured Africans. In Africa there was a process of inculcating cultural values while harnessing skills in an authentic education system called retreat schools. These schools were the original African lodges or secret societies that supported the communal system since they made people indigenous. Everyone in a village had an obligation to become initiated in order to learn the secrets of their society. Those individuals who were not indoctrinated were ostracized because they did not experience transformation and pledged an oath of loyalty. The purpose of this study is to investigate the elaborate infrastructure that was historically an integral part of early African institutional character, and aspects of its presentation among New World Africans.
230 p., Carlos A. Cooks (1913-1966) was a pan-African leader, street speaker and is remembered as perhaps the most militant advocate of the racial-pride philosophies and self-help programs of Marcus Garvey (1887-1940). Cooks was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in a household where his father was a Garveyite. Cooks arrived in New York City in 1929, joined the ranks of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and later formed his own organization, the African Nationalist Pioneer Movement (ANPM), after Garvey died in 1940. For the following two decades, Cooks struggled to materialize the original objectives of the UNIA, exhibiting the commitment that earned him distinction among Harlem personalities. By the 1960s, Cooks had kept the legacy of Garvey going, worked with leaders fighting for freedom in Africa and the diaspora, and organized cultural and economic activities that became part of the Black Power Movement. T
