Argues that free African and African-descended women participated in Spain's colonization of the Caribbean to a degree that has not been fully recognized. Regularly described as vecinas (heads of household) and as spouses to Iberian men in key port cities, free women of color played active roles in the formation and maintenance of Spanish Caribbean society during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, not as peripheral or marginalized figures, but as non-elite insiders who pursued their own best interests and those of their families and associates.
"It is a play about two people who love each other," explains Greta Mendez, the play's Trinidadian-born director. "The external elements of racism have affected their relationship. "As the battle is raging in Trinidad, [Elvira] and [Rohan] are raging. They are having their own coup and trying to work it out." "I call it the battlefield of heart and soul" "The divide-and-rule syndrome is still happening and the play is saying, `Let us look at that'." * Coups and Calypsos runs until February 28 at the Oval House, 52-54 Kennington Oval, London SE11 at 7.45 pm each night. Tickets from £5.50; box office: 0171-5827680.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
182 p., About an ugly divorce in which the main characters bear a striking resemblance to Ms. Kincaid and to her former husband, Allen Shawn. Ms. Kincaid has denied that the book is strongly autobiographical. In this novel, a marriage is revealed in all its joys and agonies. A mother, a father, and their two children, living in a small village in New England move, in their own minds, between the present, the past, and the future, constrained by the world, the characters despairing in their domestic situations.
Considers how a taxonomy of conjugality-marriage, common-law marriage, and visiting relationships-emerged as a specialized vocabulary to apprehend and govern the postcolonial Caribbean.
