This article focuses on the process of "encolouring" social reality in the Caribbean. This is done by investigating how connections between status and colour were created in the Danish West Indies by using certain strategies and techniques of power. Essential to the regulatory efforts of planters and officials were three variables: time, space and body. By the manipulation of these phenomena colonial masters managed to make skin colour represent something other than itself. It came to be associated with a web of ideas concerning the constitution of society and its subjects--their status, condition and opportunities in life. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT];
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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334 p., How did some of the most savage and desolate islands in the world, scattered across the Pacific and Caribbean, become U.S. territories? The Great Guano Rush describes the little-known history of this earliest example of American overseas expansion. 'Guano' (bird droppings) was the 19th century's most important fertilizer and in 1856 Congress, believing that American farmers were being gouged on guano sales by foreign monopolists, authorized U.S. citizens to claim and exploit unowned guano-rich islands around the world. The legacy of these annexations range from Haiti to the central Pacific, from the notorious near-slavery of guano-miners on Navassa Island to the contemporary issue of the Johnston Atoll chemical weapon destruction plant.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
306 p., Uncovers the long-forgotten story of the Hankey, a small British ship that circled the Atlantic in 1792 and 1793. From its altruistic beginnings to its disastrous end, describes the ship's fateful impact upon people from West Africa to Philadelphia, Haiti to London. It began with a group of high-minded British colonists who planned to establish a colony free of slavery in West Africa. With the colony failing, the ship set sail for the Caribbean and then North America, carrying, as it turned out, mosquitoes infected with yellow fever. The resulting pandemic as the Hankey traveled from one port to the next was catastrophic.
274 p., Argues that colonialism, or its impact, as a relation of power is threaded through the related themes of gender/sexuality, the environment, and global capitalism in Jamaica Kincaid's work. The author is interested in how the intersection of these themes enhance Kincaid's critique of the impact of colonialism on the people of Antigua and the Anglophone African Caribbean.
