African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
273 p, Born of the union between African maroons and the Island Carib on colonial St. Vincent, and later exiled to Honduras, the Garifuna way of life combines elements of African, Island Carib, and colonial European culture. Beginning in the 1940s, this cultural matrix became even more complex as Garifuna began migrating to the United States, forming communities in the cities of New York, New Orleans, and Los Angeles. Moving between a village on the Caribbean coast of Honduras and the New York City neighborhoods of the South Bronx and Harlem, England traces the daily lives, experiences, and grassroots organizing of the Garifuna.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
202 p, "Why do the people of the French Caribbean still continue to be haunted by the memory of their slave past more than one hundred and fifty years after the abolition of slavery? What process led to the divorce of their collective memory of slavery and emancipation from France's portrayal of these historical phenomena? How are Martinicans and Guadeloupeans today transforming the silences of the past into historical and cultural manifestations rooted in the Caribbean? This book answers these questions by relating the 1998 controversy surrounding the 150th anniversary of France's abolition of slavery to the period of the slave regime spanning the late Enligtenment and the French Revolution. By comparing a diversity of documents - including letters by slaves, free people of color, and planters, as well as writings by the philosophes, royal decrees, and court cases - the author untangles the complex forces of the slave regime that have shaped collective memory. The current nationalization of the memory of slavery in France has turned these once peripheral claims into passionate political and cultural debates." --Jacket.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
298 p, "Describes perspectives on indigenous presence, identities, the struggle for rights, relations with the nation-state, and globalization." (Amazon.com)
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Journal Title Details:
1-
Notes:
Semiannual (twice a year), A cross-disciplinary venue for quality research on ethnicity, race relations, and indigenous peoples. It is open to case studies, comparative analysis and theoretical contributions that reflect innovative and critical perspectives, focused on any country or countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, written by authors from anywhere in the world. In a context in which ethnic issues are becoming increasingly important throughout the region, we are seeing the rapid expansion of a considerable corpus of work on their social, political, and cultural implications.
"The problem involved in the description of Caribbean aesthetics is not only due to the heterogeneity of Caribbean culture - given its antecedents - but also the complex cognitive and social orientation of the individual Caribbean artist." (author)
"The first article by Keith Ellis, Caribbean Identity and Integration in The Work of Nicolás Guillén, uses examples of Guillén's works to demonstrate that in his poetry, his essays, as well as in his personal relations, he demonstrated a desire to build throughout the Caribbean the kind of consciousness that would facilitate its meaningful integration." (foreword);
The author examines race, language, and identity in Derek Walcott's poetry, reading Walcott's poetry as an extended meditation on the question of whether it is possible to exist within the English language and an Afro-Caribbean tradition, drawing poetic nourishment from each, or whether the attempt is a betrayal of both. Of mixed racial ancestry, a native speaker of French Creole who was formally educated in British colonial schools, raised Methodist on the Catholic island of St. Lucia, Derek Walcott occupies a peripheral place with respect to both English and Caribbean culture, it is noted. Throughout the course of his poetic career he has been criticized from both perspectives, either for "appropriating the Other" and putting it to use in the service of the dominant culture or for not assimilating that dominant (English) culture fully enough.;
