African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
394 p., Covers the period between August 1921 and August 1922. During this particularly tumultuous time, Garvey suffered legal, political, and financial trouble, while the UNIA struggled to grow throughout the Caribbean.
367 p., Examines the lasting consequences of the anticolonial, antislavery discourses of the Haitian Revolution on the way in which postcolonial Haitians understood the narrative structure of their national history from Independence (1804) to the end of the American Occupation of Haiti (1934). In this study Haitian intuitions of historical time are apprehended through an analysis of nineteenth and early twentieth century Haitian literary and historical works. These texts are scrutinized with respect to (a) formal narrative features such as truncation, ellipsis, elision, prolepsis and analepsis which reveal an implicit understanding of the disposition of the metahistorical categories of "past," "present," and "future" and (b) the analysis of the explicit reflections on history provided by narrators or authors. This dissertation argues, primarily, that the event of the "Haitian Revolution" (1791-1804) was fundamental to Haitian understandings of the emplotment of the whole of Haitian history.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
294 p, Discusses key individuals (George Padmore, Eric Williams, C.L.R.James among others) and organizations (particularly Labor and liberation movements)in the Anglophone Caribbean world from the perspective of contemporary political and economic Caribbean realities. Particular attention is paid to the Pan-African Movement and its linking of Black Africa and the diasporic Black world of the British West Indies. Colonial Office policies of the period are discussed along with attempts by local and international economic interests during and after both World Wars to control events and thwart labor and independence movements. African American influence in popular political culture and its political and social effect on organizations in the islands is discussed along with key African American newspapers such as The Crisis, Chicago Defender, The Negro Worker, and the Baltimore Afro-American.
Thanks to the federal Freedom of Information Act, citizens were made aware of a program the FBI - under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover - enacted to "neutralize" Black leadership in America.
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.
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
Faith Smith's analysis, in Creole Recitations, of the nineteenth-century scholar John Jacob Thomas's often contradictory allegiances offers us a way of reading the counterintuitively parallel career of the poet Eric Roach a century later. Roach is the subject of Laurence Breiner's monograph Black Yeats: Eric Roach and the Politics of Caribbean Poetry (2008). The positions Smith and Breiner ascribe to Thomas and Roach, respectively, articulate an enduring Caribbean contradiction between an aspiration to erudition on the one hand and the urgency of self-representation on the other. This essay argues that by obscuring the full range of Thomas' positions, which Smith's study so fully recuperates, and denigrating those same positions in Roach's work, which Breiner's study resuscitates, nationalist elites obfuscate their own connections to the full range of colonial and nationalist values by which they, too, have been influenced.
This essay uses the three interlocutors' reflections to return to Creole Recitations, and to reconsider Thomas's nineteenth century as an arena for thinking about Caribbean male intellectuals' self-fashioning and desire, diaspora and degeneration, the sexual politics of creolization, and what it means to think of the period as merely preceding the anglophone Caribbean's important political and cultural developments.
"This paper examines the tradition of misogynistic picong or satire in calypso songs recorded as artists moved from Trinidad to Britain during the period immediately after World War II. I argue that, while these traditions of anti-woman representation began in conflicts around race and class inequalities within Caribbean culture during the Depression, they came to take on an anti-colonial animus when translated to the mother country. Calypso singers' tales of their exploits with hapless wealthy Englishwomen thus functioned not simply to express superiority over other men from the Caribbean, but to challenge the forms of racial subordination that black male migrants encountered in Britain during the 1940s and 1950s." --The Author
