After Soviet aid and trade ended Cuba was forced to reintegrate into the capitalist world economy. Needing hard currency, the government transformed the diaspora into a dollar attaining strategy, by facilitating and tacitly encouraging remittance-sending. Ordinary Cubans themselves wanted remittances to finance a lifestyle they could not otherwise afford. Despite their shared interest in remittances, the government increasingly appropriated remittances at recipients' expense.
Explores ethno-political identity in the English-speaking Caribbean & its Diasporas. Although being black was non-problematic in the early days of decolonization when most of the population was black, immigrants to European & North American cities where whites were the majority often suffered discrimination, a decline in social status, & a life filled with resentment. Following independence, ex-dentured East Indians, Chinese, Syrians, & light-skinned creoles in the Caribbean began to reassess their "blackness" & lighter skinned people were granted privileges not available to darker-skinned citizens. Meanwhile, black leaders who accepted the logic of capitalism ignored class critiques of capitalist structures of exploitation.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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266 p, Provides a sweeping cultural and historical examination of diaspora dance genres. In discussing relationships among African, Caribbean, and other diasporic dances, Daniel investigates social dances brought to the islands by Europeans and Africans, including quadrilles and drum-dances as well as popular dances that followed, such as Carnival parading, Pan-Caribbean danzas, rumba, merengue, mambo, reggae, and zouk.
For women writers of the Caribbean as well as for larger marginalized communities, the relationship between oral traditions and written texts is a part of the defining thread of Caribbean historiography. This article draws on Waugh and Hutcheon to examine the use of such texts by women writers of the Hispanophone Caribbean in order to highlight narrative strategies of historically marginalized groups to contest hegemonic constructions of the nation.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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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.;
Discusses perspectives in Africana feminist thought. While, not an exhaustive review of the entire diaspora, three regions are discussed: Africa, North America, and the Caribbean.
225 p., This dissertation is a cultural history of Barbados since its 1966 independence. As a pivotal point in the Transatlantic Slave Trade of the 17th and 18th centuries, one of Britain's most prized colonies well into the mid 20th century, and, since 1966, one of the most stable postcolonial nation-states in the Western hemisphere, Barbados offers an extremely important and, yet, understudied site of world history. Barbadian identity stands at a crossroads where ideals of British respectability, African cultural retentions, U.S. commodity markets, and global economic flows meet. Focusing on the rise of Barbadian popular music, performance, and visual culture this dissertation demonstrates how the unique history of Barbados has contributed to complex relations of national, gendered, and sexual identities, and how these identities are represented and interpreted on a global stage. This project examines the relation between the global pop culture market, the Barbadian artists within it, and the goals and desires of Barbadian people over the past fifty years, ultimately positing that the popular culture market is a site for postcolonial identity formation.
