'Environmental justice' refers to the human right to a healthy and safe environment, a fair share of natural resources, access to environmental information and participation in environmental decision-making. Some analysts have argued that environmental justice is undermined by the political economy of capitalism. This paper builds on this analysis by evaluating the environmental justice situation in Cuba, a country where there is little capitalist influence. Evidence is based on participant observation and interviews in Cuba, as well as secondary quantitative data. The research findings suggest that Cuba fares relatively well in terms of environmental justice, but still faces a number of challenges regarding the quality of its environment and some aspects of the environmental decision-making process. However, many of its ongoing problems can be attributed to global capitalist pressures.
327 p., "This research is in response to the general academic need to examine how black histories have been conceived and written. Instead of folklore, I look to the Osainistas (healers and herbalists initiated into the secrets of Osain) in Cuba as possible partners in a conversation in collaborative conservation. My study of Lucumí (Yorùbá-derived) religion and Osain (deity of the sacred forests, herbs and healings) reveals an embodied understanding of nature through which the boundaries of subject as well as material and spiritual become collapsed and traversed through specialized communication techniques. Ways of knowing through invocations, praise poetry, music and dance are essential to nearly all Yorùbá ritual in which spiritual forces are actualized-evoking and thus invoking spirit into physical form. Yorùbá employ these embodied techniques to transcend boundaries and open communication among spirit, material, temporal and spatial worlds, particularly to understand and work with natural resources. This embodied knowledge is, as Yvonne Daniel argues in her book Dancing Wisdom , "rich and viable and should be referenced among other kinds of knowledge" (2005:4). This intermittently conducted 2003-06 ethnographic study, relies on what I am calling evocative ethnography, which is organized around ethnography using visual and cognitive techniques along with archival research to explore how Lucumí conceptualize nature and how I can translate these embodied perceptions." --The Author.
DeLoughrey,Elizabeth M. (Author), Gosson,Renee K. (Author), and Handley,George B. (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2005
Published:
Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
303 p, Contents: Sugar and the environment in Cuba / Antonio Benítez-Rojo -- Isla incognita / Derek Walcott -- Shaping the environment : sugar plantation, or life after identured labor / Cyril Dabydeen -- Coffee and colonialism in Julia Alvarez's A cafecito story / Trenton Hickman -- Subjection and resistance in the transformation of Guyana's mytho-colonial landscape / Shona N. Jackson -- A long bilingual conversation concerning paradise lost : landscapes in Haitian art / LeGrace Benson -- "Caribbean genesis" : language, gardens, worlds (Jamaica Kincaid, Derek Walcott, Édouard Glissant) / Jana Evans Braziel -- "The argument of the outboard motor" : an interview with Derek Walcott / George B. Handley -- Cultural and environmental assimilation in Martinique : an interview with Raphaël Confiant / Renée K. Gosson -- Moving the Caribbean landscape : Cereus blooms at night as a re-imagination of the Caribbean environment / Isabel Hoving -- "Rosebud is my mama, stanfaste is my papa" : hybrid landscapes and sexualities in Surinamese oral literature / Natasha Tinsley -- "He of the trees" : nature, environment, and Creole religiosities in Caribbean literature / Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert -- "Man fitting the landscape" : nature, culture, and colonialism / Helen Tiffin -- Flashbacks of an orchid : rhizomatic narration in Patrick Chamoiseau's Biblique des derniers gestes / Heidi Bojsen -- Landscapes, narratives, and tropical nature : Creole modernity in Suriname / Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger -- The uses of landscape : ecocriticism and Martinican cultural theory / Eric Prieto -- From living nature to borderless culture in Wilson Harris's work / Hena Maes-Jelinek -- Epilogue : Theatre of the arts / Wilson Harris
