Presented at the First International Conference on the History of Urban and Regional Planning, Bedford College, London, September 14-18, 1977. Author's full name: Anthony D. King
Special issue of the journal Daedalus., 205 p., Twelve noted international scholars examine selected significant aspects of the historical and contemporary experience of black peoples in the Americas and Africa.
History has produced a myriad of cultural overlays in the Caribbean and the adjacent region of South America, a legacy of centuries of intrusion by rival European empires and the consequent sporadic exchange between the European invaders of the various local territories and peoples they claimed to control. The result is a mixture of peoples, languages, religions, and all other aspects of human culture, reflected in enrichment of the respective European and African languages involved, as well as in creation of new hybrid languages. It is in this context that one can speak of "Caribbean" literature and art from Suriname and the Netherlands.
"This paper uses the Bissette affair to evaluate the application of 'action theory,' an influential orientation in contemporary political anthropology. ....By applying [Victor W.] Turner's concepts of social drama and political field to the Bissette historical incident and to local-level politics in Morne-Vert, I will demonstrate some inherent strengths but also a decided weakness, given a political economy viewpoint, in Turner's contribution to action theory." (author)
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
339 p., Study of the development of education in the British West Indian colonies during the last half of the nineteenth century. Examines the educational policies and curriculum used in schools following the abolition of slavery. During this period the nature and development of the educational system in the region was profoundly affected by the decline of the sugar industry, the emergence of black and colored middle classes and the threat they posed to the ruling white elite, and the institutionalization of cultural divisions between the black and white populations.
Proposes to examine the aftermath of the "Goudougoudou," as Haitians now call the earthquake of January 12, 2010, relating it to other events that have taxed Haitian resolve over the course of two centuries.
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.
Benjamin,Russell (Editor) and Hall,Gregory Otha (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2010
Published:
Lanham, MD: University Press of America
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
211 p., Argues that the colonialism beginning in the 15th century never ended, but rather developed different forms over time. The scope of their work examines eternal colonialism in both American and international contexts. Includes Brad Bullock and Sabita Manian's "Globalization's gendered consequences for the Caribbean."
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
334 p, pt. I. Colonial and creole societies: Creolization and creole societies : a cultural nationalist view of Caribbean social history -- pt. II. Colonization and slavery: Colonization and slavery in Central America. Slave labour and the shaping of slave culture : the extraction of timber in the slave society of Belize. "Indios bravos" or "gentle savages" : 19th century views of the "Indians" of Belize and the Miskito Coast -- pt. III. From slavery to freedom: "Proto-proletarians"? : slave wages in the Americas : between slave labour and wage labour. Systems of domination after slavery : the control of land and labour in the British West Indies after 1838. The politics of freedom in the British Caribbean -- pt. IV. Class, culture, and politics: "The maze of politics" : the Caribbean Labour Congress and the Cold War, 1945-52. Race, class, and nation : social consciousness and political culture in four West Indian novels, 1949-55. Pluralism and the politicization of ethnicity in Belize and Guyana.;
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
240 P., Examines the socioeconomic development of the British Settlement at Belize in its formative period from the seventeenth century to the establishment of Crown Colony rule in 1871. The connections between the political economy and the social structure of the Settlement are the primary focus of the study.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
194 p, Chronicles how the unprecedented demand for sugar radically transformed Western civilization at every level of society. The book details how technologies of human control developed in the African slave trade combined with missionary Christian theology to lay the foundations for the language, literature and cultural dictates of race we know today.
450 p., Examines how the development of public health, aided by the intervention of the Rockefeller Foundation, intersected with the birth of nationalism in Jamaica between 1918 and 1944. It demonstrates that a modern public health program based in western biomedicine, racial categorization and colonial modes of behavior were vital to claims of fitness for self-rule by Jamaican nationalists. In the late 1930s the demand for greater representation in government was accompanied by the scrutiny of the sexual behaviors and personal hygiene of the Afro-Jamaican masses. The author analyzes how disease and reproduction played a central role in the competing constructions of Afro-Jamaican bodies by colonial elites and ambitious middle class nationalists.
255 p., This qualitative study examines the social, spiritual and political role the Black Oneness Churches play in Black communities. It also provides an anti-colonial examination of the Afro-Caribbean Oneness churches to understand how it functioned in the formation and defense of the emerging Black communities for the period 1960-1980. This project is based on qualitative interviews and focus groups conducted with Black Clergy and Black women in the Oneness church of the Greater Toronto area. This study is based on the following four objectives: (1) Understanding the central importance of the Black Oneness Pentecostal Church post 1960 to Black communities. (2) Providing a voice for those of the Black Church that are currently underrepresented in academic scholarship. (3) Examining how the Black Church responds to allegations of its own complicities in colonial practices. (4) Engage spirituality as a legitimate location and space from which to know and resist colonization. The study also introduces an emerging framework entitled: Whiteness as Theology. This framework is a critique of the theological discourse of Whiteness and the enduring relevance of the Black Church in a pluralistic Afro-Christian culture.
"Strange as it may seem today, contemporaries drew no distinction between the mainland and the islands -- and for many, the attractions of the latter at first exceeded those of the former."
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
310 p, A revolt by black slaves in 1802 Dominica, a British island in the West Indies. As he awaits trial, Jack, the novel's hero, reflects on his life as a slave in Africa and the Caribbean
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
210 p, Explores the social context of regimental life, disease problems, civil-military relations, and the eventual disbandment of the West India regiments. (JSTOR)
East Lansing Mich.: Michigan State University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
260 p., “They offer insights into in demographic, diplomatic, economic, medical, military, and political history, containing the latest research and revising ideas about the French presence overseas. Among the subject areas explored are: the French Revolution in Martinique, eighteenth-century medical practice along the Mississippi River, a family plantation on St-Domingue, Anglo-French diplomatic problems over Newfoundland fishery, and French trading posts on the Great Lakes in the eighteenth century.” (Alibris)
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Originally published: London, J. Cape, 1937., 398 p, When the British Parliament in 1833 freed the slaves, it provided for a transitional period of apprenticeship for the liberated negroes. This monograph shows details how this plan was worked out, especially in Jamaica, where Governor and Assembly were on bad terms, the planters were often harsh and the negroes turbulent, and the Special magistrates imported to supervise the scheme were not always equal to their task.
The French called the Island St. Domingue, and began importing thousands of African slaves to clear much of the land and build plantations. By the late 1700s, there were over half a million African slaves in St. Domingue, and dose to 40,000 whites, as well as almost as many "mulattos." (The word "mulatto" derives from the Spanish term meaning a young mule.) They were the "free people of color," the result of white men taking many slave women. [Adam Hochchild] goes on to tell us how very rich France became through its plantocracy on St. Domingue alone: "The colony's eight thousand plantations accounted for more than one third of France's foreign trade, and its own foreign trade equaled that of the newly born United States." White planters and merchants on the island lived a life of luxury unrivaled in "the New World." Hochchild tells us that on that fateful August night "a large group of slaves representing many plantations met under the night sky in a remote spot called Alligator Woods..." and these are the words reportedly shouted to the throng by a revolt leader: '"Throw away the image of the god of the whites who thirsts for our tears, and listen to the voice of liberty which speaks in the hearts of all of us."
First, the two armies all but destroyed the French plantocracy on the island then they defeated a Spanish force and huge English and French armies. In Adam Hochchild's book Bury the Chains, we learn that then-U. S. President George Washington and then-Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, both slave owners, sent "a thousand muskets, other military supplies, and eventually some $400,000" of U. S. aid to quell the revolt now known as "the Haitian Revolution." Randall Robinson reveals more in his book, An Unbroken Agony: "Some . . . had been brought to Haiti [St. Domingue] from other Caribbean slave colonies men like the storied Boukman from Jamaica and the legendary Makandal from Trinidad, and the great general, Henri Christophe, who was born in Grenada." Blacks who escaped plantations in the United States also joined L'Ouverture's armies. Robinson reports that L'Ouverture had been the intellectual, "the African humanist, the military strategist, the administrator and, not insignificantly, the conciliator." Robinson also writes that [Jean-Jacques Dessalines] "had been, first and last, the hard-nosed soldier who believed that an enemy as manifestly unsalvageable as the French had to be, wherever possible, obliterated."
After [Jean-Jacques Dessalines]' death, [Henri Christophe] assumed leadership of Haiti, but the mulatto minority South set up its own republic under Pétion. Christophe committed suicide in 1820 amid an uprising over his forced labor policies. Pétion's successor, JeanPierre Boyer, reformed the two republics into one Haiti. Boyer ruled until his government collapsed in 1843 due to political rivalry. Until 1915, only two of the 21 governments since 1843 were not dismantled by coups d'états or political in-fighting. Except for agreement on the abolition of slavery, the state and nation were headed in opposite or different directions before the L'Ouverture adherents took over in 1804. The literature on Haiti, from Trinidadian C. L. R. James' classic book The Black Jacobins, to TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson's An Unbroken Agony, all tell the awful consequences of the "color curtain" in claustrophobic Haiti.
Some of the forms that collective identities and nationalism have taken in the Caribbean are analyzed in this paper, which examines two historical figures, one from Jamaica and the other from Puerto Rico: Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) and Pedro Albizu Campos (1891-1965), respectively. Both were black, radical, and politically persecuted.
Reviews books on Latin American slavery. Includes Slavery and Abolition in Early Republican Peru, by Peter Blanchard; Slave Women in Caribbean Society, ,1650-1838, by Barbara Bush; Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System, edited by Barbara L. Solow.;
Reviews several books about Cuban history. The Social Transformation of Eighteenth-Century Cuba, by Sherry Johnson; Winds of Change: Hurricanes and the Transformation of Nineteenth-Century Cuba, by Louis A. Pérez Jr; Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition, by Stephan Palmié; Espacios, Silencios Y Los Sentidos De La Libertad: Cuba Entre 1878 Y 1912, edited by Fernando Martínez Heredia, Rebecca J. Scott and Orlando F. García Martínez.;
This paper reports on the first stage of a research project that analyses the changing social composition of Kingston during and after the period of constitutional decolonisation (1938-1962). Here, an overview of the city's development under colonialism is presented, before assessing in greater detail the residential pattern of Kingston during the early 1940s. An index of dissimilarity and an index of social isolation are used to quantify the social and spatial segregation of racial and ethnic groups in the capital city on the eve of adult suffrage, which was achieved in 1944. The conclusion assesses the impact of this segregation on the contemporary urban landscape. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT];
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
360 p, "Traces the ways in which negative attitudes toward blacks became deeply embedded in French culture. Reveals the persistent inequality of French interactions with blacks in Africa, in the slave colonies of the West Indies, and in France." (Powells.com)
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Journal Title Details:
p. 233 P.
Notes:
This diverse and challenging collection of critical appraisals of Caribbean women fiction writers meets the urgent need for detailed critical analysis in this rapidly expanding field of interest. It includes an extensive bibliography both of relevant criticism and of Caribbean women writers and their fiction list by area.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
247 p., The Southern Caribbean was the last frontier in the Atlantic world and the most contested region in the Caribbean during the Age of Revolution. The three British colonies of Grenada, Trinidad and Demerera were characterized by insecurity and personified by the high mobility of people and ideas across empires; it was a part of the Caribbean that, more than any other region, provided an example of the liminal space of contested empires. Because of the multiculturalism inherent in this part of the world, as well as the undeveloped protean nature of the region, this was a place of shifting borderland communities and transient ideas, where women in motion and free people of color played a central role.
Part of the vision depicted in the novels Middle Passage and Mimic Men is that the image local history is the scenery and landscape. Expresses idea that colonization creates nothing. It is obvious in a place, thrives there then disappears.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
373 p, Explores the abolition of African slavery in Spanish Cuba from 1817 to 1886—from the first Anglo-Spanish agreement to abolish the slave trade until the removal from Cuba of the last vestige of black servitude. Making extensive use of heretofore untapped research sources from the Spanish archives, the author has developed new perspectives on nineteenth-century Spanish policy in Cuba.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
323 p., A comprehensive study of the decisive 5-year period between 1962 and 1967 which witnessed the unfolding of an intense decolonization dialogue between Britain and its far-flung Eastern Caribbean possessions at the height of the Cold War.
Jamaican author (of European and African ancestry) H. G. De Lisser's novel the White Witch of Rosehall reflects arrogant European colonizing attitudes toward savage blacks in early 20th-century Jamaica
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
2 vols., Excerpt from Five Years' Residence in the West Indies, Vol. 1:
I Should have dedicated this work to one of the kindest men and best Governors that the West Indies ever had ... but that his Excellency was afraid of my truthful revelations. He had seen, and heard read, parts of my MS., and had observed, "I am sorry to say that what you have written is but too true; yet at home they are not aware of it, though it deserves to be made known to all England; but, there, it will not be believed." Why not believed? - because Policy, not Truth, governs the world; and the West Indies in particular; so we have all but given up these magnificent islands to the barbarian, to lapse once more into a mere lair for the negro - not to the aboriginal inhabitant, but to a savage ten times worse, brought four thousand miles to repress the civilization which otherwise might, by a possibility, have flourished there. "The Ethiop cannot change his skin, nor the white man amalgamate with the black."
"En Martinique, lors des décennies qui précèdent l'abolition de l'esclavage, tous les groupes sociaux redoutent les sorts et les maléfices qui peuvent leur être jetés. Les colons ont peur des nègres empoisonneurs, les esclaves et les affranchis sont terrorisés par les pratiques magiques qui les menacent. Certes la religion catholique prétend protéger, mais lui est souvent préférée l'intervention d'un sorcier désenvouteur." (author)
Dollimore,Jonathan (Editor) and Sinfield,Alan (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
1985
Published:
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
244 p, Includes Paul Brown's "'This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine': The Tempest and the discourse of Colonialism." Three connections within complex colonial discourse, according to Brown, are “class discourse (masterlessness), a race discourse (savagism) and a politically and courtly sexual discourse”
Examines the work of Jamaican writer Una Marson for her engagement with the ideas of modernity and her cultural expectations as she traveled from Jamaica to London, England in the 1930s. Topics include colonialism, race and gender, modernism, and the magazine "Cosmopolitan: A Monthly Magazine for Business Youth of Jamaica and the Official Organ of the Stenographer's Association."
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
302 p, A collection of eleven essays. Among the themes examined are colonialism, slavery, and the involvement of the Christian Church in both colonial rule and enslavement. The essays also analyze the pre-independence and post-independence periods of the twentieth century, with examinations on topics that include prostitution, departmentalization, education, visual art, and the musical form known as Reggae.
On April 1, 1680, Sir Jonathan Atkins, governor of Barbados, sent a box full of statistical data about his island to the Plantation Office at Whitehall. This mass of data, filed away among the Colonial Office papers, constitutes the most comprehensive surviving census of any English colony in the 17th century.
Reviews several books. Not of Pure Blood: The Free People of Color and Racial Prejudice in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico, by Jay Kinsbruner; From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity, by Juan Flores; Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures, by Frances R. Aparicio.;
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
229 p, Incorporating postcolonial theory, West Indian literature, feminist theory, and African American literary criticism, Making Men carves out a particular relationship between the Caribbean canon--as represented by C. L. R. James and V. S. Naipaul, among others--and contemporary Caribbean women writers such as Jean Rhys, and Jamaica Kincaid, Paule Marshall, and Michelle Cliff, who now live in the United States.
Fanon,Frantz (Author) and Charles Lam Markmann (Translator)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
1967
Published:
New York: Grove Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Translation of Peau noire, masques blancs., 232 p, "Fanon, born in Martinique and educated in France, is generally regarded as the leading anti-colonial thinker of the 20th century. His first book is an analysis of the impact of colonial subjugation on the black psyche. It is a very personal account of Fanon's experience being black: as a man, an intellectual, and a party to a French education." (Adapted from wikipedia.org)
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Originally published in Paris, France, as Peau noire, masques blancs, c1952., 188 p, A psychiatric and psychoanalytic analysis of colonial racism's effects on black colonials' identity, self-perception, and mental wellbeing. The psychiatrist Frantz Fanon was born in 1925 and grew up in Martinique, which was a French colony at the time.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
316 p., Martinique-born Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist analyzes the psychology of the colonized and their path to liberation. Bearing singular insight into the rage of colonized peoples and the role of violence in historical change, the book also attacks post-independence disenfranchisement of the masses by the elite on one hand, and inter-tribal and interfaith animosities on the other.
Fanon,Frantz (Author) and Chevalier,Haakon (Translator)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
1967
Published:
New York: Monthly Review Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Translation of Pour la revolution africaine., 197 p., A collection of articles, essays, and letters spanning the period between Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Fanon’s landmark manifesto on the psychology of the colonized and the means of empowerment necessary for their liberation. Section IV, number 20 is entitled "Blood flows in the Antilles under French domination," pp. 167-170.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
149 p., Examines Marshall's use of the trope of travel within and between the United States and the Caribbean to critique ideologies of development, tourism, and globalization as neo-imperial. This examination of travel in Marshall's To Da-Duh, In Memoriam; The Chosen Place, The Timeless People; Praisesong for the Widow; and Daughters exposes the asymmetrical structures of power that exist between the two regions.
Drawing on Jessica Benjamin's (1988) work on gender and relationships of domination and submission and on [Franz Fanon]'s work (1963; 1967) on the effect of colonial racism on ego integrity,(f.1) I will trace the racialization of power and domination in one mixed race family and the impact of this on the structure of the self. Turning to the colonial boarding school and drawing on [Michel Foucault]'s work on punishment (1979), I will trace the way that the disciplinary techniques of these boarding schools operate as the specific rituals for producing women who themselves become instruments for the exercise of power. I will also sketch a portrait of the family I studied in the context of Jamaica prior to the landmark 1938 uprising(f.2) and the relationship between the education of different classes and colours of women and the production of subjects who embrace the colonizer's values and culture. The costs borne by colonial subjects in this process will be demonstrated in discussions of the formal and informal educational histories of [Kathleen Fields] and June. Lilly's three surviving children were educated to secondary level in state-subsidized, church-run, colonial high schools intended for the middle classes who could not afford to send their children to school in England. Kathleen won a parish scholarship to one of these schools and was the first child in either Son's or Lilly's families to enter university when she won the only island scholarship for girls to university in Britain. She studied medicine and later specialized in obstetrics and gynaecology, becoming one of a handful of women doctors of colour at the time. She returned to Jamaica where she worked in the Government Health Service, the University College Hospital of the West Indies and built a large and successful private practice. She married twice, first to a white Englishman, a veteran of World War II and the RAF and then to a (brown) Jamaican doctor. Both marriages ended in divorce. She had one daughter by her first marriage. In 1994 she died in Kingston, having retired from medicine in 1990 as a result of poor health. Over three generations, Son, Lilly and their children and grandchildren and some of their nieces and nephews moved up the social pyramid, changing both their racial and class position. Many of the youngest members of the family appear either very light-skinned or white. In the 1920s Marcus Garvey, founder of the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), challenged white racial domination by building a huge movement in the Americas and in the Caribbean. Beginning in the United States, Garvey returned to Jamaica in 1927. Garvey's term "Race first" was an effective way to name a critique of domination which blasted away the contradictions underlying so-called ideals of equality and justice. But even Garvey in his naming of the problem and in his principles and philosophies is limited by the discursive terrain of colonial conservatism. In conceptualizing race and the elements of the values of liberal democracy, his views reinscribe racial essentialism and the familiar disapproval of interracial sex and those who resulted from it. Garvey's vision of women's role was based on the dominant ideology of women as housewives and mothers. For him there was one monolithic "black woman" who he argued needed to be treated like a queen, uplifted, to be given a weapon against the inferiority enforced by white colonial standards of beauty. She was to be chaste, to participate in voluntary service to the race, to be the culture bearer while the black man was to be the head of the household. Such anti-colonial options were highly significant in conceptualizing the importance of Africa as an economic power, and particularly in developing a movement which redressed the old violence of inferiorization, exploitation and marginalization. But they barely ruptured the complexity of the class and gender limitations women experienced in colonialism and, perhaps more important, they underestimated how deeply internalized are colonialism's lessons of culture and education.;
Fradera,Josep Maria (Editor) and Schmidt-Nowara,Christopher (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2013
Published:
New York: Berghahn Books
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
340 p, African slavery was pervasive in Spain's Atlantic empire yet remained in the margins of the imperial economy until the end of the eighteenth century when the plantation revolution in the Caribbean colonies put the slave traffic and the plantation at the center of colonial exploitation and conflict. The international group of scholars brought together in this volume explain Spain's role as a colonial pioneer in the Atlantic world and its latecomer status as a slave-trading, plantation-based empire.
"Focuses on certain calypsos in the decades leading up to Trinidad’s independence in 1962 in which the calypsonian’s sense of his own freedom is manifested in calypsos that focus on the larger struggle for freedom and autonomy for his society. In these calypsos, there is a subversion of the status quo, a move from a respectful deference to colonial rule to a new postcolonial consciousness. These calypsos focus on changing attitudes toward the British Royal Family, a growing allegiance to a homeland other than Mother England and the major events during the Fifties as plans for a West Indian Federation develop and collapse." (author)
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
361 p., Examines how the crisis of World War I impacted imperial policy and popular claims-making in the British Caribbean. Between 1915 and 1918, tens of thousands of men from the British Caribbean volunteered to fight in World War I and nearly 16,000 men, hailing from every British colony in the region, served in the newly formed British West Indies Regiment (BWIR). In Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, the two colonies that contributed over seventy-five percent of the British Caribbean troops, discussions about the meaning of the war for black, colored, white, East Indian, and Chinese residents sparked heated debates about the relationship among race, gender, and imperial loyalty. To explore these debates, this dissertation foregrounds the social, cultural, and political practices of BWIR soldiers, tracing their engagements with colonial authorities, military officials, and Caribbean civilians throughout the war years.