"Alexander Bedward, minister of the revivalist Jamaica Native Baptist Free Church during the period 1889-1921, emerged as one of the island's earliest black nationalists. Under the guise of religion Bedward called on the black majority to rise up and take action against the prevailing system of racial discrimination, socio-economic deprivation, injustice, the tyranny of minority colonial rule, and to establish a government representative of the people. While he was revered by the masses, attracting thousands of followers at home and abroad, he was feared by the upper classes and colonial authorities, who saw him as a threat to political stability. An antagonistic relationship developed between the government and Bedward. Eventually, he was arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to the lunatic asylum, where he later died." (publication abstract);
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.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
208 p., Illustrates the way enslaved Africans lived and helped to shape Jamaican society in the three decades before British abolition of the slave trade. Audra Diptee's in-depth investigations reveal unexpected insights into the demographics of those captured in Africa and legally transported on British slave ships.
Tunapuna, T'dad, W.I.: Research Associates School Times Publication
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
32 p., A biography of the black nationalist leader who worked to improve conditions for black workers in his native country of Jamaica and pledged to free Africa from white colonial rule and establish a black homeland there.
Examines changes in enslaved women's working lives as planters sought to increase birth rates to replenish declining laboring populations. Establishes that enslaved women in Jamaica experienced a considerable shift in their work responsibilities and their subjection to discipline as slaveholders sought to capitalize on their abilities to reproduce. Enslaved women's reproductive capabilities were pivotal for slavery and the plantation economy's survival once legal supplies from Africa were discontinued.
he author criticizes scholarship by Trevor Burnard and attempts to demonstrate the need to systematize a framework that captures the complexity of West Indian social structure and looks beyond the most visceral racial divide on the one hand or the merely local on the other. Burnard, in his recent book on Thomas Thistlewood, the eighteenth-century Jamaican overseer, pen-keeper, and slaveowning diarist, notes the spirit of egalitarianism that existed among Whites in Jamaica and the absence of class conflict among them, despite clear socioeconomic differences. The argument is clearly correct on a number of points, and not without significant merit and insight, Green argues. The fact that race trumped class in the White créole imagination and that recruitment to political office was of necessity inclusive of "lesser Whites" should not in any way provide an excuse for leaving those inequalities unexamined--especially when they formed a key constitutive element in the production of empire, she continues.;
