bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Still crazy after all these years: U.S.-Cuban relations and the embargo
Authors: Carroll David J.
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]Cuba: Confronting the U.S. Embargo. PETER SCHWAB. New York: St. Martin's, 1999. xiii + 226 pp. (Cloth US$ 29.95)Presidential Decision Making Adrift: The Carter Administration and the Mariel Boatlift. DAVID W. ENGSTROM. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997. x + 239 pp. (Paper US$25.95)Fleeing Castro: Operation Pedro Pan and the Cuban Children's Program. VICTOR ANDRES TRIAY. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998. xiv + 126 pp. (Cloth US$ 49.95, Paper US$ 14.95)Some forty years after it was first imposed in 1960 in the midst of the cold war, the U.S. embargo against Cuba remains the defining feature of U.S.-Cuban relations. Like the Berlin Wall, the embargo is both a symbolic and a physical barrier keeping apart two neighbors destined to move closer. Unlike the Berlin Wall which feil at the end of the cold war, the U.S. embargo against Cuba still stands.
Constitution without constitutionalism : Haiti and the vagaries of democratization
Authors: Fatton Jr. Robert
Published: April 2013

Analysis of the role that constitution and constitutionalism play in the making of polyarchical rule. Author also examines their relationship to class power, political institutions, culture, and leadership. He argues that constitution does not make for an effective form of constitutionalism. Concludes that meaningful democratization in Haiti is difficult if class relations do not change drastically and are equalized.
The Army of Sufferers : peasant democracy in the early Republic of Haiti
Authors: Sheller Mimi
Published: April 2013

Focuses on Haitian debates concerning popular political participation in the context of the Liberal Revolution of 1843 and the Piquet Rebellion of 1844. The liberal challenge to the regime of President Boyer gave room to a peasant movement, the 'Army of Sufferers' or the Piquets, calling for black civil and political rights. Author traces 3 phases of the revolutionary situation of 1843-44 to show how political actors within Haiti debated various institutional and constitutional arrangements.
Modernizing slavery : investigating the legal dimension
Authors: Turner Mary
Published: April 2013

Reviews the laws devised by the imperial government to dismantle the slave labor system in the period 1823-38 in order to locate the moment of articulation between chattel and wage slavery. According to the author, the distinguishing feature of these new laws was that the workers lost the right to labor bargaining. Abolition brought free status and civil rights, but the new labor system was not less rigorous.
Sex, AIDS, migration, and prostitution : human trafficking in the Caribbean
Authors: Benoît Catherine
Published: April 2013

Study of sexual tourism in Saint Martin/Sint Maarten, where prostitution is a widespread reality. Author argues that on this island where rapid economic development is based on the tourist industry and on offshore financial services, sexual relationships are determined by geopolitical and financial (neoliberal) interests that go beyond sexuality per se. She focuses on the precarious situation of the foreign prostitutes who have no working papers.
A recalcitrant plantation colony : Dominica, 1880-1946
Authors: Green Cecilia
Published: April 2013

Study of the class and gender dialectics in Dominica during one of its boom-bust cycles of plantation economy. This cycle encompassed the state sponsorship and rise and decline of the lime industry and planter class; the subsequent coming into prominence on the peasantry in Dominica's political economy and in Colonial Office policy; the masculinist recoding of peasant proprietorship and production forms; and shifting roles and agency of women.
The James versions
Authors: Hoetink H.
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]C.L.R. James: His Intellectual Legacies. SELWYN R. CUDJOE & WILLIAM E. CAIN (eds.). Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. x + 476 pp. (Cloth USS 55.00, Paper US$ 19.95)C.L.R. James on the "Negro Question." SCOTT MCLEMEE (ed.). Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996. xxxvii + 154 pp. (Paper US$ 16.95)C.L.R. James: A Political Biography. KENT WORCESTER. Albany: State University of New York, 1996. xvi + 311 pp. (Paper US$ 19.95)"Why is there no socialism in the United States?," asked the German sociologist Werner Sombart (1906:43) in a famous essay at the beginning of the present century. Immigrants, it is true, had brought socialist notions with them in the middle of the past century, and had caused some anarchistic wavelets in the 1880s; there had been radical protest movements such as the Grangers, and a fledgling third party like the Populists; there were famous social critics and Utopians like Henry George and Edward Bellamy, but - in striking contrast to other parts of the Hemisphere - a socialist movement of any political weight never came off the ground.
East Indians in the Caribbean
Authors: Schnepel Ellen M.
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]Transients to Settlers: The Experience of Indians in Jamaica 1845-J950. VERENE SHEPHERD. Leeds, U.K.: Peepal Tree Books, 1993. 281 pp. (Paper £12.95)Survivors of Another Crossing: A History of East Indians in Trinidad, 1880-1946. MARIANNE D. SOARES RAMESAR. St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago: U.W.I. School of Continuing Education, 1994. xiii + 190 pp. (Paper n.p.)Les Indes Antillaises: Presence et situation des communautes indiennes en milieu caribeen. ROGER TOUMSON (ed.). Paris: L'Harmattan, 1994. 264 pp. (Paper 140.00 FF)Nation and Migration: The Politics of Space in the South Asian Diaspora. PETER VAN DER VEER (ed.). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. vi + 256 pp. (Cloth US$ 39.95, Paper US$ 17.95)In the decade since 1988, Caribbean nations with Indian communities have commemorated the 150th anniversary of the arrival of East Indians to the West Indies. These celebrations are part of local revitalization movements of Indian culture and identity stretching from the French departement of Guadeloupe in the Windward Islands to Trinidad and Guyana in the south. Political changes have mirrored the cultural revival in the region. While the debate so often in the past centered on the legitimacy of East Indian claims to local nationality in these societies where African or Creole cultures dominate, in the 1990s leaders of Indian descent were elected heads of government in the two Caribbean nations with the most populous East Indian communities: Cheddi Jagan as President of Guyana in October 1992 (after a 28-year hiatus) and Basdeo Panday as Prime Minister of Trinidad in November 1995. Both men have long been associated with their respective countries' struggles for economic, political, and social equality. Outside the region during the summer of 1997, fiftieth-anniversary celebrations marking the independence of India and Pakistan from Britain confirmed that Indo chic — or "Indofrenzy" as anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls it (Sengupta 1997:13) - has captured the American imagination with the new popularity of literature, art, and film emanating from India and its diaspora.
Trinidadian capitalism
Authors: Yelvington Kevin A.
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]Capitalism: An Ethnographic Approach. DANIEL MILLER. Oxford: Berg, 1997. x + 357 pp. (Cloth £39.00, Paper £17.99)Women, Labour and Politics in Trinidad and Tobago: A History. RHODA E. REDDOCK. London: Zed, 1994. vi + 346 pp. (Cloth £39.95, Paper £15.95)Despite the underdeveloped state of the scholarship on its admittedly short sugar plantation slavery period, we now have a corpus of studies on various aspects of capitalism in Trinidad - from its historical advent (Sebastien 1978) to its twentieth-century manifestation in the petroleum sector (Seers 1964; Sandoval 1983), and from the ethnic structure of labor markets (Camejo 1971; Harewood 1971) and the role of capitalism in racial/ethnic inequality (Henry 1993; Coppin & Olsen 1998) to the way ethnicity affects business, big (Button 1981; Parris 1985; Centre for Ethnic Studies 1993) and small (Ryan & Barclay 1992; Griffith 1997), and the way ethnicity and gender are used in class recruitment (Yelvington 1995). There are also a number of fine working-class histories (e.g., Rennie 1973; Ramdin 1982; Basdeo 1983) and important works on the labor riots and strikes and the nature of the colonial state during the crises of the 1930s (e.g., Thomas 1987; Singh 1994). The two books under review here complement the works mentioned above, and they complement each other as well: Reddock's deals with the way capitalism up to the mid-century was buttressed by colonial politics, and explores how this formation engendered certain kinds of political responses, while Miller approaches capitalism through the assumption that fundamental changes in the post-Oil Boom period (ca. 1973-80) brought about considerable autonomy between production and consumption that can and should now be read through an analysis of the cultural circulation of images and commodities in the society. These books are both noteworthy because they engage in explicit theorizing on what capitalism was and is, and what it did and does.
Artists in and out of the Caribbean
Authors: Price Sally , Price Sally
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]Caribbean Art. VEERLE POUPEYE. London: Thames and Hudson, 1998. 224 pp. (Paper US$ 14.95)Transforming the Crown: African, Asian and Caribbean Artists in Britain, 1966-1996. MORA J. BEAUCHAMP-BYRD & M. FRANKLIN SIRMANS (eds.). New York: Caribbean Cultural Center, 1998. 177 pp. (Paper US$ 39.95,£31.95)"Caribbean" (like "Black British") culture is (as a Dutch colleague once said of postmodernism) a bit of a slippery fish. One of the books under review here presents the eclectic artistic productions of professional artists with Caribbean identities of varying sorts - some of them lifelong residents of the region (defined broadly to stretch from Belize and the Bahamas to Curacao and Cayenne), some born in the Caribbean but living elsewhere, and others from far-away parts of the world who have lingered or settled in the Caribbean. The other focuses on artists who trace their cultural heritage variously to Lebanon, France, Malaysia, Spain, China, England, Guyana, India, the Caribbean, the Netherlands, the Philippines, and the whole range of societies in West, East, and Central Africa, all of whom meet under a single ethnic label in galleries in New York and London. Clearly, the principles that vertebrate Caribbean Art and Transforming the Crown are built on the backs of ambiguities, misperceptions, ironies, and ethnocentric logics (not to mention their stronger variants, such as racism). Yet far from invalidating the enterprise, they offer an enlightening inroad to the social, cultural, economic, and political workings of artworlds that reflect globally orchestrated pasts of enormous complexity.
Reading the archipelago
Authors: Bongie Chris
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]A History of Literature in the Caribbean, Volume 3: Cross-Cultural Studies. JAMES A. ARNOLD (ed.). Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1997. xvii + 399 pp. (Cloth US$ 120.00)The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context. J. MICHAEL DASH. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998. xii + 197 pp. (Cloth US$ 42.50, Paper US$ 18.50)In his most recent theoretical work, Traite du Tout-Monde, Edouard Glissant stresses the virtues of what he calls "archipelagic thinking." "The entire world is becoming an archipelago," he asserts (1997:194), and for this reason we need to distance ourselves from both insular and continental ways of thinking if we are to register the complexities of that global creolization process. The archipelago is situated between the solitary confines of the islands that constitute it and the expansive territory of the mainland toward which it points, relating the one to the other while retaining its own indeterminately distinct identity. For Glissant, actual archipelagos such as the Caribbean are exemplary sites for understanding the complex new relations that ambivalently and chaotically join together all the hitherto unconnected parts of the world. As a consequence of this, the need for understanding the Caribbean as an archipelago becomes ever more pressing: the Caribbean must be considered in its archipelagic totality, as a region that can only be adequately understood through comparative, cross-cultural analysis focusing less on its discrete parts than on the way these parts exist in relation with and to one another.
Perspectives on creole language history
Authors: Bickerton Derek
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]Les Creoles: Problemes de genese et de description. GUY HAZAELMASSIEUX. Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l'Universite de Provence, 1996. 374 pp. (Paper 260 FF)The Kiss of a Slave: Papiamentu's West-African Connections. EFRAIM FRANK MARTINUS. Curacao: De Curacaose Courant, 1997. 292 pp. (Paper US$ 57.50)Towards a New Model of Creole Genesis. JOHN H. MCWHORTER. New York: Peter Lang, 1997. 199 pp. (Cloth US$ 44.95)In two of the three books reviewed here (those by Hazael-Massieux and Martinus), theory takes a back seat to description, while in the third (McWhorter's) the roles are reversed. The work by Guy Hazael-Massieux, whose recent and untimely death saddened his many friends, is entitled Les Creoles: Problemes de genese et de description, but the author is more concerned with history and description than with creole genesis. The book is a collection of twenty-one essays, all of which have been previously published. However, since their loci were extremely scattered and in many cases difficult of access, especially for Anglophone readers, his widow, Marie-Christine Hazael-Massieux, has done the field a service by collecting and editing them. Ten of these essays are gathered under the rubric "Genese et histoire des Creoles," and a further seven are described as "Elements pour une morpho-syntaxe des Creoles francaises," leaving only four that concern themselves directly with "Definition et classement des Creoles."
Scrapping Maroon history : Brazil's promise, Suriname's shame
Authors: Price Richard
Published: April 2013

Argues that all American nations except Suriname now provide legal protection for its indigenous/Maroon populations. Demonstrates that successive Suriname governments have been pursuing an increasingly militant and destructive policy against both Maroons and indigenous communities. Calls for rapid legislation, to bring Suriname's constitution and legal code in line with the various human rights and ecological treaties to which the country is party. Also reviews recent work on remnants of quilombos in Brazil, which often uses research on Caribbean Maroon communities as implicit or explicit models.
Towards a typology of Suriname nationalism
Authors: Meel Peter
Published: April 2013

Study of Suriname nationalism and the mechanisms that foster and hamper its course. Uses Anthony Smith's National identity to determine the place Suriname nationalism occupies in the Smith's typological ranking of nationalisms. In the second section, the author discusses national myths, invented traditions, and monuments in Paramaribo to highlight the (cultural) problems of integration nationalism. Concludes that integration nationalism has been frustrated as a result of the strong forces of ethnicity.
History and the West Indian nation
Authors: Birbalsingh Frank
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]The Art of Kamau Brathwaite. STEWART BROWN (ed.). Bridgend, Wales: Seren/Poetry Wales Press, 1995. 275 pp. (Cloth US$ 50.00, Paper US$ 22.95)Atlantic Passages: History, Community, and Language in the Fiction of Sam Selvon. MARK LOOKER. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. x + 243 pp. (Cloth n.p.)Caliban's Curse: George Lamming and the Revisioning of History. SUPRIYA NAIR. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. viii + 171 pp. (Cloth US$ 34.50)Phyllis Shand Allfrey: A Caribbean Life. LlZABETH PARAVISINI-GEBERT. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996. xii + 335 pp. (Cloth US$ 55.00, Paper US$ 18.95)Of the four books to be considered here, those on Brathwaite, Selvon, and Lamming fit snugly together into a natural category of literature that has to do with the emergence of a Creole or African-centered Caribbean culture, and related issues of race, color, class, history, and nationality. The fourth is a biography of Phyllis Shand Allfrey, a white West Indian, who is of an altogether different race, color, and class than from the other three. Yet the four books are linked together by nationality, for Allfrey and the others are all citizens of one region, the English-speaking West Indies, which, as the Federation of the West Indies between 1958 and 1962, formed a single nation.
Cuba: transition of disintegration?
Authors: Stubbs Jean
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]Toward a New Cuba? Legacies of a Revolution. MIGUEL ANGEL CENTENO & MAURICIO FONT (eds.). Boulder CO: Lynne Rienner, 1997. ix + 245 pp. (Cloth US$ 49.95)Essays on Cuban History: Historiography and Research. Louis A. PEREZ, JR. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. xiv + 306 pp. (Cloth US$ 44.95)Cuba's Second Economy: From Behind the Scenes to Center Stage.JORGE F. PEREZ-LOPEZ. New Brunswick NJ: Transaction, 1995. 221 pp. (Cloth US$ 32.95)Sport in Cuba: The Diamond in the Rough. PAULA J. PETTAVINO & GERALYN PYE. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994. ix + 301 pp. (Cloth US$ 49.94, Paper US$ 19.95)Cuba is clearly at yet another major turning point, and the four books under review here testify, each in its way, to this. Two are single-authored monographs (one on sport, the other on the informal economy) one is a single-authored collection of essays on history and historiography; and one is a multidisciplinary anthology of essays by various authors. In approach, they cover a broad political spectrum, and all are concerned with an understanding of process in Cuba, whether prior to or since the 1959 revolution, pre- or post-1989, or during the 1990s.
Out of balance? ‘Konesans’ and first world knowledges in Caribbean women’s studies
Authors: Maurer Bill
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]We Paid Our Dues: Women Trade Union Leaders of the Caribbean. A. LYNN BOLLES. Washington DC: Howard University Press, 1996. xxxviii + 250 pp. (Paper US$21.95)Gender: A Caribbean Multi-Disciplinary Perspective. ELSA LEO-RHYNIE, BARBARA BAILEY & CHRISTINE BARROW (eds.). Kingston: Ian Randle, 1997. xix + 358 pp. (Paper n.p.)Daughters of Caliban: Caribbean Women in the Twentieth Century. CONSUELO LOPEZ SPRINGFIELD (ed.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. xxi + 316 pp. (Cloth US$ 35.00, Paper US$ 17.95)Two weeks before I began writing this review essay, I had the misfortune to contract food poisoning while visiting New York. I was admitted to St. Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village where I found myself under the capable care of a team of West Indian nurses. At the time, I didn't give this much thought; I was simply happy to be getting good care far from home. The day before I was released, my right arm swelled up from the intravenous drip that had been delivering fluids and antibiotics into my body. It was first noticed by one of the Jamaican nurses, who told me that the IV had "infiltrated" my arm and that, as a result, my "fluids were out of balance," and this was keeping me from getting well. She promptly pointed this out to another nurse, who took out the IV and stuck another one into my left arm.
Studies on French Antillean literature in Germany
Authors: Phaf Ineke
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]Kolonisierung und Krankheit: Der Begriff "alienation" in Texten aus den franzosischen Kleinen Antillen. HELMTRUD RUMPF. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1993. 263 pp. (Paper US$ 46.95)Interkulturalitdt in der frankophonen Literatur der Karibik: Der europdisch-afrikanisch-amerikanische Intertext im Romanwerk von Maryse Conde. UTE FENDLER. Frankfurt am Main: IKO, Verlag flir Interkulturelle Kommunikation, 1994. vi+ 444 pp. (Paper DM 54.00)Der Roman der franzosischen Antillen zwischen 1932 und heute: Eine Literatur aufdem Weg zur Autonomie. DANIELLE DUMONTET. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1995. 336 pp. (Paper US$ 52.95)Riickbesinnung-Selbsterfahrung-Inbesitznahme: Antillanische Identitat im Spannungsfeld von Nigritude, Antillanite und Creolite. MARION PAUSCH. Frankfurt am Main: IKO, Verlag fur Interkulturelle Kommunikation, 1996. 297 pp. (Paper DM 39.80)Research on Caribbean literatures in Europe is by no means limited to former mother countries such as France, England, the Netherlands, and Spain. There is quite a lot of interest at the academic level in Germanspeaking universities in Austria, Switzerland and, especially, Germany. The four studies under review here, published over the last five years, testify to the rapidly increasing interest in novels of the French Antilles. All were formerly presented as Ph.D. dissertations - completed at universities in Berlin, Bayreuth, Mainz, and Frankfurt/M respectively.
Escaping slavery in a Caribbean plantation society : marronage in Barbados, 1650s-1830s
Authors: Handler Jerome S.
Published: April 2013

Disputes the idea that Barbados was too small for slaves to run away. Author describes how slaves in Barbados escaped the plantations despite the constraints of a relatively numerous white population, an organized militia, repressive laws, and deforestation. Concludes that slave flight was an enduring element of Barbadian slave society from the 17th c. to emancipation.
The masking of history : popular images of the nation on a Dominican sugar plantation
Authors: Martínez Samuel
Published: April 2013

Examines how popular, oppositional historical consciousness is formed and expressed among poor and marginalized rural proletarians of Haitian descent living in the Dominican Republic. Author addresses the incomplete and contested nature of hegemony in the Caribbean and raises questions about the relationship between 'vernacular' and 'official' knowledge about the past, whether they always oppose each other or whether there is overlap.
The ‘Cimarrón’ in the archives: a re-reading of Miguel Barnet’s biography of Esteban Montejo
Authors: Zeuske Michael
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]"Aunque por supuesto nuestro trabajo no es historico (Miguel Barnet)" Apart from Manuel Moreno Fraginals's El ingenio, there is hardly any other book in Cuban historiography that has met with such wide circulation as Biografia de un cimarron by Miguel Barnet.1 It is, in spite of a series of contradictions, the classic in testimonio literature for contemporary studies on slavery as well as for the genre of historical slave narratives extending far beyond Cuba. In particular the various new editions and translations, such as the English versions that have been published under the titles Autobiography of a Runaway Slave (Barnet 1968), Autobiography of a Runaway Slave (Esteban Montejo & Miguel Barnet 1993) or Biography of a Runaway Slave (Barnet 1994) and the discussion that Barnet's book stimulated bear witness to this position.2
The untouchable ‘Cimarrón’
Authors: Barnet Miguel
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]Biografia de un cimarron has attracted many articles, criticisms and even essays, all aimed at pinpointing neglected aspects of slavery in our country. The book met with a positive reception and has been regarded as a pioneering work in terms of the method followed. It should not be forgotten that the book was published in 1966, before Truman Capote had written In Cold Blood. I was the one who suggested publishing that book in Cuba to Alejo Carpentier. In the end I translated it into Spanish and added a preface. This book aroused a great interest in me. To a certain extent, I found some similarity between it and my Biografia de un cimarron, which had already been published.
Francophone conjunctures
Authors: Bongie Chris
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]Decolonizing the Text: Glissantian Readings in Caribbean and African-American Literatures. DEBRA L. ANDERSON. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. 118 pp. (Cloth US$46.95)L'Eau: Source d'une ecriture dans les litteratures feminines francophones. YOLANDE HELM (ed.). New York: Peter Lang, 1995. x + 295 pp. (Cloth US$ 65.95)Postcolonial Subjects: Francophone Women Writers. MARY JEAN GREEN, KAREN GOULD, MICHELINE RICE-MAXIMIN, KEITH L. WALKER & JACK A. YEAGER (eds.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. xxii + 359 pp. (Paper US$ 19.95)Statue cou coupe. ANNIE LE BRUN. Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1996. 177 pp. (Paper FF 85.00) Although best remembered as a founding father of the Negritude movement along with Aime Cesaire, Leopold Senghor was from the very outset of his career equally committed - as both a poet and a politician - to what he felt were the inseparable concepts of la francophonie and metissage. Senghor's has been an unabashedly paradoxical vision, consistently addressing the unanswerable question of how one can be essentially a "black African" and at the same time (in Homi Bhabha's words) "something else besides" (1994:28). In his "Eloge du metissage," written in 1950, Senghor ably described the contradictions involved in assuming the hybrid identity of a metis (an identity that offers none of the comforting biological and/or cultural certainties - about "rhythm," "intuition," and such like - upon which the project of Negritude was founded): "too assimilated and yet not assimilated enough? Such is exactly our destiny as cultural metis. It's an unattractive role, difficult to take hold of; it's a necessary role if the conjuncture of the 'Union francaise' is to have any meaning. In the face of nationalisms, racisms, academicisms, it's the struggle for the freedom of the Soul - the freedom of Man" (1964:103). At first glance, this definition of the metis appears as dated as the crude essentialism with which Senghor's Negritude is now commonly identified: in linking the fate of the metis to that of the "Union francaise," that imperial federation of states created in the years following upon the end of the Second World War with the intention of putting a "new" face on the old French Empire, Senghor would seem to have doomed the metis and his "role ingrat" to obsolescence. By the end of the decade, the decolonization of French Africa had deprived the "Union franchise" of whatever "meaning" it might once have had. The uncompromisingly manichean rhetoric of opposition that flourished in the decolonization years (and that was most famously manipulated by Fanon in his 1961 Wretched of the Earth) had rendered especially unpalatable the complicities to which Senghor's (un)assimilated metis was subject and to which he also subjected himself in the name of a "humanism" that was around this same time itself becoming the object of an all-out assault in France at the hands of intellectuals like Foucault.
Slavery, religion, and abolition in Suriname
Authors: Postma Johannes
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]"Om werk van jullie te hebben": Plantageleven in Suriname, 1730-1750. RUDI OTTO BEELDSNIJDER. Utrecht: Vakgroep Culturele Antropologie - Bronnen voor de Studie van Afro-Surinaamse Samenlevingen, 1994. xii + 351 pp. (Paper NLG 35.00)Surinaams contrast: Roofbouw en overleven in een Caraibische plantagekolonie 1750-1863. ALEX VAN STIPRIAAN. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1995. xiii + 494 pp. (Paper NLG 60.00)Strijders voor het Lam: Leven en werk van Herrnhutter broeders en zusters in Suriname, 1735-1900. MARIA LENDERS. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1996. xii + 451 pp. (Paper NLG 65.00)Fifty Years Later: Antislavery, Capitalism and Modernity in the Dutch Orbit. GERT OOSTINDIE (ed.). Leiden: KITLV Press, 1995; Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996. viii + 272 pp. (Paper NLG 45.00, US$ 22.50, Cloth US$ 45.00)The publication of the books under review is evidence of a growing scholarly interest in the history of Dutch activities in the Atlantic. Three of them are doctoral dissertations on Suriname history; the fourth contains the published proceedings of a conference held in 1993 that focused on the abolition of slavery in the Dutch colonies. Three were published by the Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology (KITLV), which exhibits an increasing interest in publishing scholarly books about Dutch overseas history.
Cooks’ day off
Authors: Price Sally , Price Richard
Published: April 2013

[First paragraphs]After dishing out consecutive meals of pepper-pot, callaloo, rundown, migan, sancocho, and coo-coo, the NWIG bookcooks are weary and beg a respite. All else is here as usual; the only thing that's missing is the culinary metaphor.Once again it is our sad duty to publish the year's Caribbeanist Hall of Shame. As always, we list those books that (as of press time, January 1997) have not been reviewed because the scholars who agreed to the task have - despite reminder letters - neither provided a text nor relinquished the books so that they could be assigned to someone else. (Rather than listingdelinquent reviewers by initials alone as in the past, we indicate both initial and final letters here, in an attempt to forestall false accusations and protect the reputations of the innocent.) As in past years, these paragraphs may serve as a kind of backlist "books received."
The continuity-creativity debate : the case of Revival
Authors: Chevannes Barry , Besson Jean
Published: April 2013

Argues that the attempts to polarize the debate around Caribbean culture into an African continuity versus a creole creativity position is misplaced. The authors use Revivalism as an example of both continuity in African-derived Myalim and an on-going process of re-creation.
Conflict and collaboration : tradition and modernizing Indo-Trinidadian elites (1917-56)
Authors: Singh Kelvin
Published: April 2013

History of the competition in the Indo-'Trinidadian community between the modern-'izing élite and the traditional élite. The first aspired to adapt the Indians to the political and cultural environment of a predominantly creole/Western society. The second wanted to preserve the existing culture and religion. Since the mid-1950s the traditional élite has achieved ascendancy at the mass level of Indo-Trinidadian community organization.
The white minority and the emancipation process in Montserrat, 1807-32
Authors: Berleant-Schiller Riva
Published: April 2013

Author focuses on the governing élites and argues that salient features of their behaviour and attitudes were responses to the emancipation process. They objected to the abolition of slavery and the divergence of the society they lived in from the ideals they envisioned. Concludes that the élite's harsh responses to change exacerbated rather than strengthened their fragile political and economic status.
Erotic(izing) Cubans
Authors: Domínguez Virginia R.
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]Sugar's Secrets: Race and the Erotics of Cuban Nationalism. VERA M. KUTZINSKI. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993. xvii + 287 pp. (Cloth US$ 40.00, Paper US$ 17.95)Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way. GUSTAVO PÉREZ FlRMAT. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. xii + 217 pp. (Cloth US$ 30.00, Paper US$ 12.95)When a country is subjected to as much external political and ideological scrutiny as Cuba in the post-Batista years, scholarly explorations of something other than its foreign policy, its political economy, and its human rights abuses provide a breath of fresh air. But I am struck by the other things Sugar's Secrets and Life on the Hyphen have in common and how suspicious I am of their commonalities.
Making sense of Santería: three books on Afro-Cuban religion
Authors: Palmié Stephan
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]Santeria from Africa to the New World: The Dead Sell Memories. GEORGE BRANDON. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. x + 206 pp. (Cloth US$31.50) Working the Spirit: Ceremonies of the African Diaspora. JOSEPH M. MURPHY. Boston: Beacon, 1994. xiii + 263 pp. (Cloth US$ 25.00)Walking with the Night: The Afro-Cuban World of Santeria. RAUL CANIZARES. Rochester VT: Destiny Books, 1993. xii + 148 pp. (Paper US$ 12.95)Since 1959, the steady exodus from revolutionary Cuba has led to the gradual emergence of an Afro-Cuban religious diaspora in the United States. While this phenomenon has attracted scholarly attention for some time, the literature has grown particularly rapidly in recent years. It is, perhaps, not entirely fortuitous that a spate of current academic publications on the subject coincided with a scramble by the popular media to exploit its exotic potential in the context of the 1993 U.S. Supreme Court case on animal sacrifice. Clearly, what has come to be called an Afro-Cuban "cultic renaissance" in exile holds promise both for sensationalist journalism and certain kinds of theoretical projects. Partly articulating with older, but politically reinvigorated debates about the relations between African and African-American cultures, partly addressing fundamental questions about conventional models of cultural boundedness and coherence, and, finally, calling into question both popular and academic notions of "modernity" (and its inevitable counterpart "tradition"), the 292 New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids vol. 70 no. 3 &4 (1996)problems posed by the emergence of an Afro-Cuban religious diaspora in the United States present a timely challenge.
Commercial Eldorado?
Authors: Hoefte Rosemarijn
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]De eerste Adam & De rots der struikeling. BOELI VAN LEEUWEN. Amsterdam: Ooievaar, 1996. 237 pp. (Paper NLG 25.00)Gedane zaken: De beste verhalen. HUGO Pos. Amsterdam: Ooievaar, 1996. 230 pp. (Paper NLG 15.00)Maar ik blijf. ASTRID H. ROEMER. Amsterdam: Ooievaar, 1996. 763 pp. (Paper NLG 25.00)De allermooiste romans van de Antillen en Suriname. Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1996. 605 pp. (Paper NLG 39.90)Zingende eilanden. WIM RUTGERS (ed.). Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1996. 317 pp. (Paper NLG 25.00)De eeuwige belofte van Eldorado: Verhalen over Latijns-Amerika en het Caribisch gebied. Nieuwegein: Aspekt, 1996. 188 pp. (Paper NLG 34.50)Echo van eldorado. ROSEMARIJN HOEFTE & GERT OOSTINDIE (comps). Leiden: KITLV Uitgeverij, 1996. 150 pp. (Paper NLG 15.00)Achter het eeuwig El Dorado: Fictie en realiteit in Latijnsamerikaanse literatuur. GEERT A. BANCK et al. Amsterdam: Thela, 1996. 140 pp. (Paper NLG 19.90)Eldorado: Werkelijkheid en droom. ROBERT LEMM. Amsterdam: Arbeiderspers, 1996. 160 pp. (Paper NLG 29.90)302 New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids vol. 70 rw. 3 & 4Surinaamse recepten van A tot Z. MURIEL SAM-SIN-HEWITT. Schoorl: Conserve, 1996. 243 pp. (Paper NLG 29.95)De Bonistraat. AMBER NAHAR. Amsterdam: Piramide, 1996. 71 pp. (Cloth NLG 19.90)Beneden en boven de wind: Literatuur van de Nederlandse Antillen en Aruba. WIM RUTGERS. Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1996. 468 pp. (Paper NLG 54.90)Elisabeth Samson: Een vrije, zwarte vrouw in het 18e-eeuwse Suriname. CYNTHIA MC LEOD. Schoorl: Conserve, 1996. 177 pp. (Paper NLG 29.90)De beroepsherinneraar en andere verhalen. ANIL RAMDAS. Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1996. 280 pp. (Paper NLG 34.90)Geef mij maareen Surinamer. RONALD SNIJDERS. Amsterdam: Prometheus, 1996. 88 pp. (Paper NLG 19.90)De vrolijke dood van David Caprino. HENRY MENCKEBERG. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff. 291 pp. (Paper NLG 39.90)Caribische winter. ANNA BRIDIÉ. Amsterdam: Contact, 1996. 222 pp. (Cloth NLG 39.90)Ma Rochelle passée, Welkom El Dorado: Surinaamse historische roman. CYNTHIA MC LEOD. Schoorl: Conserve, 1996. 277 pp. (Paper NLG 39.95)Gewaagd leven. ASTRID H. ROEMER. Amsterdam: Arbeiderspers, 1996. 239 pp. (Paper NLG 29.90)Each year in March an organization with the rather awkward name Collectieve Propaganda voor het Nederlandse Boek (Collective Propaganda for Dutch Books, CPNB) organizes the Dutch national Book Week around a unifying idea. The theme for 1996 was "Eternal Eldorado: Literature from Latin America and the Caribbean." Even though many booksellers expressed their disappointment with this subject, arguing that the Latin American literary boom had long passed, publishers were not deterred. A great number of publications on Latin America and particularly the (Dutch) Caribbean appeared. Some of these books would have been published anyway and now could take advantage of all the accompanying media publicity, others were produced expressly with the Eldorado theme in mind.
'Living in the gun mouth' : race, class, and political violence in Guyana
Authors: Smith Raymond T.
Published: April 2013

Argues that whatever racial antipathies exist in Guyana today are not the same of those of the 1960s. The author reviews the 'racial violence' of the 1950s and 1960s. He concludes that the politics of that era was a complex process in which many elements were involved and not simply the outcome of racial antagonism or the reassertion of colonial hegemonic values.
Family narratives and migration dynamics : Barbadians to Britain
Authors: Chamberlain Mary
Published: April 2013

Uses life-story interviews of Barbadian migrant families in both Barbados and the UK to study the family as the tool and the material which creates and shapes historical mentalities and identities. The author shows how the links between family and migration continue to play a role in the motivation of migrants. Also published in Immigrants & Minorities 14(2) 1995, p. 153-169
Scholarship or solidarity? The post-emancipation era in the Caribbean reconsidered
Authors: Emmer Pieter C.
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]From a reading of Michael Craton's (1994) recent contribution to this journal on slave emancipation in the Bahamas, one is struck by two things. First, we have come a long way in the historical study of slavery compared with the analysis of the post-emancipation period. Over the past thirty years we have amassed a mountain of materials covering virtually all aspects of the system of slavery. As a consequence we have been able to reach a large degree of consensus on slavery in the U.S. South, the Caribbean, and Brazil. Of course, certain differences of interpretation remain. For example, we still have not solved all the riddles on issues such as the demographic decline of the slave populations in the tropical regions of the New World or the survival of African norms and values in these parts.
Response to Pieter C. Emmer’s ‘Reconsideration’
Authors: Craton Michael J.
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]Criticisms, however strongly expressed, are valuable where they extend and deepen debates. Pieter Emmer's critique, though, is so ill focused, ill informed, and intemperate, that it is difficult to know how to respond profitably, or even politely.
Consensus in the family land controversy: rejoinder to Michaeline A. Crichlow
Authors: Besson Jean
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]In her contribution to NWIG 68 (1994:77-99), "An Alternative Approach to Family Land Tenure in the Anglophone Caribbean," Michaeline Crichlow posits an "institutional-structural" school comprising Edith Clarke, M.G. Smith and myself, supported by Yvonne Acosta and Jean Casimir, to which she sees Charles V. Carnegie, Lesley McKay and herself as counterposed. M.G. Smith (1965:221), citing Clarke, identifies "two highly distinct systems of land tenure ... found side by side in many British Caribbean societies," and uses these "institutional distinctions" to support his plural society thesis; "similarly Besson (1979), who is primarily interested in the origins of family land tenure and sees it as emanating out of conflicts between planters and peasants, commits a similar error of treating family land as an institution" (p. 79).
Reply to Jean Besson
Authors: Crichlow Michaeline A.
Published: April 2013

[First lines]It is very difficult to operate within the plantation economy paradigm (Best 1968; Beckford 1972; Girvan 1973), and treat history as subject to change. This was the substance of my critique in my article in NWIG 68 (pp. 77-99). lts empirical subject matter dealing with the lived experiences of smallholders (popularly designated Caribbean folk) demonstrated the limitations of the plantation paradigm in exploring the rich lives of Caribbean working peoples. I am one of several analysts who has made my discomfort with the paradigm clear and so there have been numerous critiques (Bernstein & Pitt 1974; Sudama 1979). I will cite only the most salient given the nature of this exercise.
Constructing tropical modernity
Authors: Díaz-Royo Antonio T.
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph in part]The buildings and ruins we discover for ourselves hold a lasting place in our imagination, not to say in our affections. In a society that has neglected the formal treatment of "space," architecturally as well as in political terms, these personal discoveries can promote a subversion of sorts. Thus, the consecutive appearance of two volumes addressing the architecture produced at the turn of the century in Puerto Rico is a notable event. Each results from an architect's passionate concern with the advent of modernity. Thomas Marvel's book concentrates on the life and work of Antonin Nechodoma, an American of Bohemian origin who spent his most productive years in Puerto Rico. It is the result of his decades-long fascination with a "versatile architect, designer, and craftsman working in unusual circumstances" (p. xviii) who left, both in Puerto Rico and in the Dominican Republic, a string of edifices strangely echoing the continental Prairie School.
Caribbean literary theory: modernist and postmodern
Authors: Arnold A. James
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]The Repeating Mand: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. ANTONIO BENITEZ-ROJO. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1992. xi + 303 pp. (Cloth US$ 49.95, Paper US$ 15.95)Myth and History in Caribbean Fiction: Alejo Carpentier, Wilson Harris, and Edouard Glissant. BARBARA J. WEBB. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. x + 185 pp. (Cloth US$ 25.00)Caribbean literature has been overtaken of late by the quarrels that have pitted postmodernists against modernists in Europe and North America for the past twenty years. The modernists, faced with the fragmentation of the region that hard-nosed pragmatists and empiricists could only see as hostile to the emergence of any common culture, had sought in myth and its literary derivatives the collective impulse to transcend the divisions wrought by colonial history. Fifteen years ago I wrote a book that combined in its lead title the terms Modernism and Negritude in an effort to account for the efforts by mid-century Caribbean writers to come to grips with this problem. A decade later I demonstrated that one of the principal Caribbean modernists, Aimé Césaire, late in his career adopted stylistic characteristics that we associate with the postmodern (Arnold 1990). The example of Césaire should not be taken to suggest that we are dealing with some sort of natural evolution of modernism toward the postmodern. In fact the two terms represent competing paradigms that organize concepts and data so differently as to offer quite divergent maps of the literary Caribbean.
Sancocho
Authors: Price Richard , Price Sally
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]In devoting this essay to sancocho, we continue our tradition of annual book round-ups spiced with Caribbean culinary lore. Having already served up pepperpot and rundown from the Anglophone islands, migan from Martinique and Guadeloupe, and callaloo from all of the above, the time seemed ripe to turn to the Hispanic Caribbean. And as our list of books has expanded (from the forty to fifty of previous years to nearly one hundred in this installment), a dish with as many ingredients as sancocho seemed particularly appropriate.
Race/class : Jamaica's discourse of heritable identity
Authors: Austin-Broos Diane J.
Published: April 2013

Argues that Jamaican notions of 'race' and 'class' can be rendered as a discourse of heritable biological and environmental identity. There has been a movement in the meaning of colour categories from an emphasis on biology, to a greater emphasis on environment. This transition has been encouraged by the emergence of class as a 20th-c. idiom.
The many voices of Rastafarian women : sexual subordination in the midst of liberation
Authors: Lake Obiagale
Published: April 2013

Author calls it ironic that although Rasta men emphasize freedom, their relationship to Rasta women is characterized by a posture and a rhetoric of dominance. She analyses the religious thought and institutions that reflect differential access to material and cultural resources among Rastafarians. Based on the theory that male physical power and the cultural institutions created by men set the stage for male domination over women.
Transnational popular culture and the global spread of the Jamaican Rastafarian movement
Authors: Savishinsky Neil J.
Published: April 2013

Discusses the spread of the Rastafarian movement in the British Caribbean, North America, Europe, Africa, New Zealand, and the Pacific. In the vast majority of cases it has been reggae music which has functioned as the primary catalyst for spreading the religion and culture of Rastafari beyond Jamaica.
The politics of representing the African diaspora in the Caribbean
Authors: Yelvington Kevin A.
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]Roots of Jamaican Culture. MERVYN C. ALLEYNE. London: Pluto Press, 1988. xii + 186 pp. (Paper US$ 15.95)Guinea's Other Suns: The African Dynamic in Trinidad Culture. MAUREEN WARNER-LEWIS. Foreword by Rex Nettleford. Dover MA: The Majority Press, 1991. xxii + 207 pp. (Paper US$ 9.95)A recent trend in anthropology is defined by the interest in the role of historical and political configurations in the constitution of local cultural practices. Unfortunately, with some notable individual exceptions, this is the same anthropology which has largely ignored the Caribbean and its "Islands of History."1 Of course, this says much, much more about the way in which anthropology constructs its subject than it says about the merits of the Caribbean case and the fundamental essence of these societies, born as they were in the unforgiving and defining moment of pervasive, persuasive, and pernicious European construction of "Otherness." As Trouillot (1992:22) writes, "Whereas anthropology prefers 'pre-contact' situations - or creates 'no-contact' situations - the Caribbean is nothing but contact." If the anthropological fiction of pristine societies, uninfluenced and uncontaminated by "outside" and more powerful structures and cultures cannot be supported for the Caribbean, then many anthropologists do one or both of the two anthropologically next best things: they take us on a journey that finds us exploding the "no-contact" myth over and over (I think it is called "strawpersonism"), suddenly discovering political economy, history, and colonialism, and/or they end up constructing the "pristine" anyway by emphasizing those parts of a diaspora group's pre-Caribbean culture that are thought to remain as cultural "survivals."
Before and after Columbus
Authors: Mason Peter
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]Columbus and the Ends of the Earth: Europe's Prophetic Rhetoric As Conquering Ideology. DJELAL KADIR. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. xiv + 256 pp. (Cloth US$ 30.00)The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus. VALERIE IJ. FLINT. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. xx + 233 pp. (Cloth US$ 30.00)Terra Cognita: The Mental Discovery of America. EVIATAR ZERUBAVEL. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992. xiv + 164 pp. (Cloth US$ 17.00)Imagining the World: Mythical Belief versus Reality in Global Encounters. O.R. DATHORNE. Westport CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1994. x + 241 pp. (Cloth US$ 49.95)Three of the books under review were published in 1992, and each of them approaches the significance of Columbus's landfall 500 years earlier in a different way. What they have in common, as their titles and subtitles indicate, is that they all purport to be about a mental framework - an "imaginative landscape" (Flint), a "mental discovery" (Zerubavel), "Europe's prophetic rhetoric as conquering ideology" (Kadir), or "imagining the world" (Dathorne).The 1992 commemoration led to a flood of books on Columbus and on the discovery of America. Now that the commotion has died down, it becomes easier to separate the wheat from the chaff, to distinguish between occasional publications hastily put together for the occasion, and solid contributions to scholarship which, while never immune to their own times, may be expected to retain a value that is more than temporary.