This work describes cleavages of race, class and caste in the colonial Jamaican company. It tackles the question of the relation between race and culture.
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.;
"A single highway connects the Caribbean province of Limón to mainstream society in the highlands of Costa Rica. This paper explores the ways in which that highway affects the status hierarchy of mainstream society in Costa Rica, and how the construction of whiteness as an unexamined racial qualifier for total social incorporation constrains the perception of blacks as social liminars and blackness as a state of communitas. The argument elaborates the work of Victor Turner on ritual liminality to suggest the structural ambiguity of Afro-Latin Americans in the context of Costa Rica." (author"
Reviews Richard S. Dunn's Sugar and slaves; Keith Albert Sandiford's Cultural politics of sugar; Doris Y. Kadish's Slavery in the Caribbean Francophone World; C. L. R. James' The Black Jacobins
"This research paper investigates the effect political institutions have on black racial identity. In particular, I study individual inculcation in contexts where political institutions institutionalize either of two forms of racial social structures - a pigmentocracy (the Dominican Republic), or the rule of hypodescent (the US South), and the effect such inculcation has on black racial identity." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR];
Myriad new peoples emerged in Africa, America, and Europe during the first three centuries following Columbus’s arrival in the New World. By focusing on ethnogenesis as the product of the local as well as the global, we have sought to put the experiences of Africans and Amerindians at the center of Atlantic history.
