African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
230 p, Ideology and Change provides the first comprehensive record and analysis of the experience of leftist political movements, organizations, and trends in the English-speaking Caribbean. Perry Mars views the Left as a dynamic force that has made indelible contributions toward advancing democracy since the 1940s, and he here examines the contributions of leftist organizations at both theoretical and practical levels. He identifies their role in Caribbean political culture and processes, the problems they face, and the strategies they employ toward political change within a hazardous political and social environment.;
The irony of the black man with his top off - such as almost any black music star you care to mention - is that it doesn't say to me: "Look at this wonderful black man with his six-pack." We were never wanted for our minds, which was why it was illegal to teach slaves to read. We were flesh, a commodity, labour. As today's black man shows off his pride and joy, the modern billboard becomes the equivalent of yesteryear's slave stocks. The tragedy with the flesh doesn't end there. Too many of us are impressed by a black fascism which fails to question the oppressive power structures of idealised family structures or the obsession with genes, blood and national pride.
The way in which the Caribbean person is given emblematic status as the metropolitan migrant is made clear in James Clifford's declaration that ‘We are all Caribbeans now...in our urban archipelagos'. Examines the impact on the critical reception of Caribbean writings that has been made as a result of the fact that metropolitan diasporas are now the privileged places in which to be properly ‘postcolonial’.
In characterizing the desperate journeys undertaken by African and Haitian refugees as today's "middle passages," Caryl Phillips's A Distant Shore and Edwidge Danticat's "Children of the Sea" complicate the idea of a single origin to a transatlantic black Diaspora. The term 'middle passage' is more recently used to describe multiple crossings that transform the meaning of Diaspora into a vital and ongoing process.
Can we talk of a collective, diasporic memory? Argues that in the case of the African-Caribbean community, there are distinctive features - such as the need to tell and the need to connect - which suggest that this diasporic memory is framed through identifiable cultural templates, which distinguish it from the memories of migrants.
