bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Two Islands, One Commodity: Cuba, Java, and the Global Sugar Trade (1790-1930)
Authors: Curry-Machado Jonathan , Bosma Ulbe
Published: April 2013

Sugar had become, by the eighteenth century, a global commodity. Originating in East Asia, plantations in the Americas fed the growing taste for its use in Europe, with its consumption increasingly popularised. The 1791 Revolution in Saint Domingue (Haiti) and the 1807 British abolition of the slave trade prompted shifts in the epicentres of sugar, the most important of these being arguably to Cuba and Java. These two fertile islands saw the burgeoning development of sugar-plantation systems with major inputs of foreign capital and forced labour. In the process the two islands each, respectively, became central to the very much truncated Spanish and Dutch colonial empires left after the Napoleonic wars and the Latin American wars of liberation; and by the mid-nineteenth century in the case of Cuba, and by the late nineteenth century in the case of Java, they had been catapulted to global sugar pre-eminence. There has been an abundance of study on the two islands each in their own right, but none systematically examines their parallel trajectories. Yet the question arises as to how sugar came to dominate the agriculture, industry and trade of these two islands; and how these two islands in particular, in two different colonial systems and parts of the world, should rise to sugar pre-eminence in the way they did and when they did. Are there connections and similarities between the two that help explain this phenomenon? This article analyses the conditions that led Java and Cuba to become the prime cane-sugar exporters of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Initiative for this came from the linkages between their dominant elites and the transnational, transimperial networks of trade and capital. This furthered the stimulation of technological and scientific innovation in both, enabled not only through the introduction of the latest advances in machinery and method, but also the immigration of technical skilled workers from Europe and North America. New sugar frontiers were opened that offered room for expansion at a time of rapidly growing demand for sugar in Europe; but for this to occur, radical changes needed to be made to the system of land ownership and use. At the same solutions were needed for how to mobilise and control sufficient labour without jeopardising the colonial order. This question eventually came to dominate the political system through which social control could be ensured – particularly, because Cuba and Java came to be ever more closely tied to global capital and trade; and both islands become dominated by sugar while at the same time coming to dominate global sugar production.
Local Geographies of Crime and Punishment in a Plantation Colony: Gender and Incarceration in Barbados, 1878-1928
Authors: Green Cecilia A.
Published: April 2013

This article examines gendered profiles of crime and punishment in Barbados between 1878 and 1928. During this period, Barbados stood out from the rest of the Caribbean in levels of imprisonment of women. The context of unusually high levels of female committals to custody – related to (1) women’s prominence in the labor force, (2) entrapment within conditions of near-total plantation monopoly, (3) high levels of male migration and (most importantly) criminalization of so-called “abandoned” dependants – provides the backdrop for an examination of penal regimes in Barbados. Using spatial frames, particularly those generated in studies of “colonial geographies,” the article surveys gender differences in crimes, institutional arrangements, and punishments within prison. It also analyzes penal system changes that occurred over the period, signaling the transition to a new disciplinary regime.
Discovering One’s Own C.L.R. James
Authors: Maingot Anthony P.
Published: April 2013

Review of:C.L.R. James and the Study of Culture. Andrew Smith. Houndsmills, Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. vi + 174 pp. (Cloth US$ 80.00)You Don’t Play With Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of C.L.R. James. David Austin (ed.). Oakland CA: A.K. Press, 2009. viii + 334 pp. (Paper US$ 18.95)
West Indian Sojourners in Guatemala and Honduras
Authors: Harpelle Ronald
Published: April 2013

Review of: Race, Nation, and West Indian Immigration to Honduras, 1890-1940. Glenn A. Chambers. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010. xii +202 pp. (Cloth US$ 35.00)Black Labor Migration in Caribbean Guatemala, 1882-1923. Frederick Douglass Opie. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009. 145 pp. (Cloth US$ 65.00)
The (Im)possibilit y of Time Travel: Haiti ’s Pre- and Post-Earthquake Futures
Authors: Yarrington Landon
Published: April 2013

Review of:Travesty in Haiti: A True Account of Christian Missions, Orphanages, Fraud, Food Aid and Drug Trafficking [second edition]. Timothy T. Schwartz. Charleston SC: Booksurge, 2010. xlvii + 262 pp. (Paper US$ 15.99)Haiti in the Balance: Why Foreign Aid Has Failed and What We Can Do About It. Terry Buss . Washington DC: Brookings Institute Press, 2008. xvi + 230 pp. (Paper US$ 28.95)Backpacks Full of Hope: The UN Mission in Haiti. Eduardo Aldunate. Waterloo ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2010. xx + 230 pp. (Paper US$ 34.95)
Landscaping Hispaniola: Moreau De Saint-Méry’s Border Politics
Authors: Fumagalli Maria Cristina
Published: April 2013

This article focuses on Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry's Description Topographique et Politique de la partie espagnole de l'Isle Saint-Domingue (1796) and his Description Topographique, Physique, Civile, Politique et Historique de la partie française de l'Isle Saint-Domingue (1797). The Descriptions were both written before the beginning of the French Revolution and the 1791 slave revolt in Saint Domingue but were published when the colonial frontier had been abolished (at least de jure if not de facto) by the 1795 Peace of Basle. Overall, the article argues that the two Descriptions are ultimately committed to the (re)inscription of the colonial frontier but intriguingly oscillate between its erasure and its reinforcement. It begins by focusing on Saint-Méry's territorial projections and appropriative landscaping of the Spanish colony; it highlights the important role played by the border in the racial politics of Hispaniola and then revisits Saint-Mery's border politics on the island in the light of the author's conviction that France should reannex Louisiana, given to Spain in 1762.
Gordon Rohlehr and the Culture Industry in Trinidad
Authors: Ramcharitar Raymond
Published: April 2013

The terms "culture" and "cultural studies" in Trinidad and Tobago have been narrowly defined to mean Carnival and various other phenomena connected to the nationalist project. There has been little acknowledgement of cyber culture, alternative sexualities, consumerism, media, and in general the "Culture Industry", as theorised by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. One critic, Gordon Rohlehr, has over decades presented a body of work ostensibly focused on Carnival, but which also contains a cogent critique and outline of the Trinidad and Tobago Culture Industry (as contemplated by Adorno). A close reading of Rohlehr's work, and his intellectual antecedents, reveal a compelling critique of the Trinidadian/West Indian notion and practice of culture and cultural studies, and suggests areas for the discipline's expansion to better serve the needs of the region.
Shadows of the Plantation? A Social History of Suriname’s Bauxite Town Moengo
Authors: Koning Anouk de
Published: April 2013

This article explores the social history of Suriname’s first bauxite town, Moengo, founded in the late 1910s. It recounts the rise of a new industry that drew workers away from the plantations and urban artisanal occupations to work in a massive, highly organized and orchestrated organization-cum-social community. Using oral narratives about life in Moengo, as well as census and other statistical data, this contribution asks whether everyday life in the mining enclave echoed features of the plantation.
Intimacy’s Politics: New Directions in Caribbean Sexuality Studies
Authors: Agard-Jones Vanessa
Published: April 2013

Review of:Pleasures and Perils: Girls’ Sexuality in a Caribbean Consumer Culture. Debra Curtis. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009. xii + 222 pp. (Paper US$ 23.95)Economies of Desire: Sex and Tourism in Cuba and the Dominican Republic. Amalia L. Cabezas. Philadelphia PA : Temple University Press, 2009. xii + 218 pp. (Paper US$ 24.95)Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora. Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. xxvii + 242 pp. (Paper US$ 22.50)[First paragraph]Over the last ten years the field of Caribbean Studies has seen a precipitous expansion of work on sexualities, as recent review essays by Jenny Sharpe and Samantha Pinto (2006) and Kamala Kempadoo (2009) have observed. The three books under review here, all based on dissertation research and all published in 2009, make important contributions to this growing literature. While each one approaches sexual politics from a distinctive disciplinary, geographic, and theoretical vantage point, all three ask readers to take seriously the central place that sexual desires and practices occupy in the lives of Caribbean people, both at home and in the diaspora. Caribbean sexuality studies are still sometimes thought of as belonging to a domain outside of, or auxiliary to “real” politics, but these studies demonstrate without hesitation how sexuality functions as an important prism through which we might understand broader debates about ethics, politics, and economics in the region. Building from the insights of feminist theorists who connect the “private” realm to community, national, and global geopolitics, they show that sex is intimately connected to certain freedoms – be they market, corporeal, or political – as well as to their consequences. Taken together, they consider sexual subjectivity, political economy, and cultural production in unexpected ways and point to exciting new directions for the scholarship on sexuality and sexual politics in the region.
Sidney Mintz and Caribbean Studies
Authors: Baud Michiel
Published: April 2013

Review of:Empirical Futures: Anthropologists and Historians Engage the Work of Sidney W. Mintz. George Baca, A isha Khan & Stephan Palmié (eds.). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. v + 232 pp. (Paper US$ 24.95)Three Ancient Colonies: Caribbean Themes and Variations. Sidney W. Mintz. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. xiv + 257 pp. (Cloth US$ 27.95)[First paragraph]There can be no doubt about the importance of U.S. anthropologist Sidney Mintz in the development of Caribbean Studies. His work has influenced both the historiography and anthropology of Caribbean slavery and the emergence of Caribbean peasant societies. Now two books have been published that interrogate the significance of his work. The first is an anthology that tries to build on Mintz’s ideas – as I will argue below, in a circumspect and not fully convincing way. In the second Mintz describes and compares thesocieties of Jamaica, Haiti, and Puerto Rico, and looks back on his work that started in the 1940s.
Surviving Secularization: Masking the Spirit in the Jankunu (John Canoe) Festivals of the Caribbean
Authors: Bilby Kenneth M.
Published: April 2013

Jankunu (Jonkonnu, Junkanoo), an Afro-Caribbean Yuletide tradition centering on masked dance, is generally characterized as a secular festival. This article presents contemporary ethnographic evidence showing that certain older variants of the tradition remain closely connected with African-derived religious concepts and practices. On the basis of this new evidence, the author argues for a reexamination and reevaluation of the historical significance of this tradition, which even today, despite its ostensible secularity, has vaguely "spiritual" associations for many in the region—including some of those who represent it as "secular." The article interprets this apparent contradiction as the result of a historical process of secularization (in response to the stigmatization of African modes of religiosity) that was only partly successful.
A Transnational Colonial Migration: Puerto Rico’s Farm Labor Program
Authors: Duany Jorge
Published: April 2013

In this article, the author defines Puerto Rico as a nation, an imagined community with its own territory, history, language, and culture. Nevertheless, the Island lacks a sovereign state, an independent government that represents the population of that territory. This unsovereign state has long sponsored population displacements from Puerto Rico to the United States. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, colonial officials embraced migration as a safety valve for the Island’s overpopulation. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Commonwealth government spurred the "Great Migration" to the U.S. mainland. The Farm Labor Program, overseen by the Migration Division of Puerto Rico’s Department of Labor, illustrates the complicated negotiations required by a transnational colonial state.
Convention, Context, and Critical Discourse Analysis “Jim the Boatman” (1846) and the Early Fiction of Trinidad
Authors: Figuera Renée
Published: April 2013

"Convention, Context and Critical Discourse Analysis: 'Jim The Boatman' and The Early Fiction of Trinidad" re-evaluates the claim of colored authorship which has been attributed to a short story published anonymously, in the Trinidad Spectator in 1846. This re-evaluation is significant since 'Jim the Boatman" has been cited as part of a collection of writing in the emerging literary tradition of nonwhite authors of nineteenth century Trinidad. A critical discourse approach to identifying the writer, in this essay, proposes an alternative paradigm to traditional "plantation power structures" which have been used for identifying writers of anonymous texts, as they may override the cultural context of literary discourse formation in complex Anglophone Caribbean societies like Trinidad. Critical Discourse Analysis focuses specifically on the ways in which writers’ discursive behavior is the result of external sociopolitical pressures, and the strategies they use for textualizing their worldview, in their cultural contexts. This alternative paradigm is based on the researcher’s critical observation of the social context, discourse conventions, and language use in relation to anonymous texts.
Hegel and Dessalines: Philosophy and the African Diaspora
Authors: Jenson Deborah
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. Susan Buck-Morss. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009. xii + 164 pp. (Paper US$ 16.95)Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment. Nick Nesbitt. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008. x + 261 pp. (Paper US$ 22.50)These two books have relaunched universal history – not without controversy– as a dominant trope in the fields of colonial history and postcolonial theory. They have also highlighted tensions around the application of a Hegelian philosophical genealogy to Haiti, the first self-emancipated black postcolony, the state ghettoized as “the poorest country in the Western hemisphere,” and now the embattled zone of recovery from the catastrophic earthquake of January 2010.
Bookshelf 2009
Authors: Price Richard , Price Sally
Published: April 2013

A selection of books reviewed by Richard and Sally Price
Policing and Transgressing Borders: Soldiers, Slave Rebels, and the Early Modern Atlantic
Authors: Kars Marjoleine
Published: April 2013

In 1763, a regiment of mercenary soldiers stationed on the border of Suriname and Berbice in South America, rebelled. The men had been sent to help subdue a large slave rebellion. Instead, they mutinied and joined the rebelling slaves. This paper reconstructs the mutiny from Dutch records and uses it to look at the role of soldiers as border crosser in the Atlantic world. Colonial historians have usually studied soldiers in their capacity of border enforcers, men who maintained the cultural and legal divisions that supported colonial authority. However, as I show, soldiers with great regularity crossed those same borders, threatening the very foundations of colonialism.
The Diasporic Dimensions of British Caribbean Federation in the Early Twentieth Century
Authors: Duke Eric D.
Published: April 2013

[Second and third pragraph]While much has been written on the significance of British Caribbean activists in various movements associated with black diaspora politics in the twentieth century, particularly their important roles in Pan-African struggles, little has been written on how the various British Caribbean colonies themselves were envisioned among diaspora activists and within the scope of black diaspora politics. Did such Caribbean activists, especially those interested in and connected to diasporic movements beyond the British Caribbean, and their African American and African counterparts forsake the British West Indies as a focus of political engagement for other lands and causes? If not, what was the place of “West Indian liberation” and nation building in the British Caribbean in relation to black diasporic struggles in the early twentieth century?This article address these questions through an examination of how the idea of a united “West Indian nation” (via a federation or closer union) among British Caribbean colonies was envisioned within black diaspora politics from the turn of the twentieth century through the 1920s, and the ways in which racial consciousness and motivations informed conceptualizations of such a nation among black political activists of the British Caribbean and other parts of the diaspora. This study argues that efforts to create a federationin the Anglophone Caribbean were much more than simply imperial or regional nation-building projects. Instead, federation was also a diasporic, black nation-building endeavor intricately connected to notions of racial unity, racial uplift, and black self-determination.
Anton de Kom and the Formative Phase of Surinamese Decolonization
Authors: Meel Peter
Published: April 2013

Wij slaven van Suriname (We slaves of Suriname) by Anton de Kom (1898-1945) stands out as one of the classics of Surinamese historiography and one of the most debated books among contemporary scholars involved in Surinamese studies. In this article I argue that Wij slaven van Suriname marks a new stage in Surinamese history writing and a novel way of dealing with the Surinamese past. To determine the characteristics of the book and its contribution to Caribbean historiography I juxtapose Wij slaven van Suriname with two other groundbreaking works in Caribbean political thought: Capitalism and Slavery by Eric Williams (1911-81) and The Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James (1901-89). The three works display many similarities, but also important differences. In my opinion De Kom’s hitherto surprisingly weak Caribbean profile is not justified given that his work represents the formative phase of Surinamese decolonization. It therefore deserves a prominent place in twentieth-century Caribbean history writing.
A Tale of Two O's: Odysseus and Oedipus in the Black Atlantic
Authors: Greenwood Emily
Published: April 2013

[First paragraphs]Crossroads in the Black Aegean: Oedipus, Antigone, and Dramas of the African Diaspora. Barbara Goff & Michael Simpson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. xii + 401 pp. (Cloth US$ 150.00)Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey. Robert G. O’Meally. New York: DC Moore Gallery, 2007. 116 pp. (Cloth$ 45.00)Commenting on cultural imperialism under European colonialism, Frantz Fanon (1990:39) remarked that “The settler makes history; his life is an epoch, an Odyssey.” In Fanon’s analysis the settler’s sense of history derived from the history of the “mother country,” rather than the history of the colony that he or she inhabited. But history did not stop here: the reference to the Odyssey reminds us that behind the modern colonial metropolis was a fictional line of descent reaching back to a Greco-Roman cradle, such that theEuropean settler could lay claim to an even more ancient cultural inheritance. The two books examined here make short work of these classical imperial fictions; O’Meally demonstrates how Romare Bearden’s collages of theOdyssey collaborate with Homer, jazz style, to produce an epic that Black America can recognize as its own. If the voyage of Odysseus is sometimes taken to symbolize the migration of ancient Greek civilization toward the West, Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson interject the troubled figure of Oedipus, who plays Poseidon to the settler’s Odyssey, disrupting the voyage and confusing the trajectory (p. 268).Both studies are timely and speak to a wave of recent research on Black Classicism – an examination of the work to which the classical tradition has been put in Africa and the African diaspora, ranging from the hegemonic appropriation of Classics by colonizers and slave-owners to the use ofClassics as an ironic counterdiscourse that writes back to racism and imperialism, or as a source of mythopoiesis in the formation of modern black identity.
Rethinking Atlantic History
Authors: Walvin James
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]Shaping the Stuart World 1603-1714: The Atlantic Connection. Allan I. Macinnes & Arthur H. Williamson (eds.). Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2006. xiv + 389 pp. (Cloth US$ 135.00)Slavery and the British Empire: From Africa to America. Kenneth Morgan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. x + 221 pp. (Paper US$ 32.00)Although an important debate continues about the concept itself, the use of “the Atlantic” has embedded itself in scholarly vernacular. The scholarly output directly spawned by an engagement with the concept continues apace. That ocean, and the peoples who lived and traded along its edges, and who finally moved across it, have provided an important geographical focus for some major reconsiderations of modern history. Prompted by the Macinnes/Williamson volume, I returned to my own undergraduate and graduate notes and essays from courses on Stuart Britain: the Atlantic was totally absent – not even present as a distant speck on our intellectual map. We studied, and debated, the formal histories of migrations to the Americas (i.e. Europeanmigrations) but there was no mention of Africa or Africans. And no sense was conveyed that the European engagement with the Americas (in their totality – as opposed to North America) was a two-way, mutual force: that the European world was influenced, indeed shaped in many critical regards,by the Americas: by the land, the products, the peoples, and by the markets of that hemisphere. At its most obvious in the ebb and flow of peoples, even that eluded the historians I encountered as a student. It was as if we were talking about a different cosmos; few moved beyond the conventions of European migrations westwards and little attention was paid to that most dominant of migrations – the enforced African migrations to the Americas.
By Dynamite, Sabotage, Revolution, and the Pen: Violence in Caribbean Anarchist Fiction, 1890s-1920s
Authors: Shaffer Kirwin
Published: April 2013

From the 1890s to the 1920s, anarchist groups and movements emerged in Puerto Rico and Cuba. They promoted the traditional anarchist agenda against governments, militarism, capitalism, and organized religion. While research on anarchists has often focused on their activities in strikes, uprisings, educational experiments, and other counter-cultural activities, this article illustrates how Caribbean-based anarchists used their fiction to promote the anarchist agenda. A central theme in much of the fiction (plays, poetry, novels, and short stories) revolved around violence leveled against society especially by governments. Just as interesting is how this fiction described—even praised—anarchist violence against authority. Thus, even while Caribbean anarchists only rarely resorted to physical violence, anarchist fiction often condemned authoritarian violence while celebrating the violence of revolution, the strike, bombings, and assassination to promote the anarchist cause of universal freedom.
"Dangerously Large": The 1938 Labor Rebellion and the Debate over Birth Control in Jamaica
Authors: Bourbonnais Nicole
Published: April 2013

In the late 1930s, following a massive labor rebellion on the island, a group of middle- and upper-class Jamaicans launched a campaign to spread access to modern birth control technology to the working classes, leading to the establishment of the first birth control clinic in Kingston in March of 1939. This paper analyzes the debate that arose as a result of these activities during this period, focusing on the ways concerns surrounding “over-population” and illegitimacy in Jamaica were intimately linked to class and racial tensions as well as to local and international nationalist, feminist, and eugenics movements.
Bookshelf 2008
Authors: Price Richard , Price Sally
Published: April 2013

A selection of books reviewed by Richard and Sally Price.
A more powerful sorcerer: conversion, capital, and Haitan transnational migration
Authors: Richman Karen E.
Published: April 2013

Focusses on how since the arrival of Haitians in South Florida since 1979 many of these increasingly joined and converted to Haitian evangelical Protestant churches, and came to disavow the combined Catholic and Vodou beliefs they adhered to. Author points out how this echoes trends in Haiti since the 1970s of increased conversions to evangelical Protestantism, with these localized/Haitianized Protestant churches later also moving to Florida. She further examines the motivations behind and meanings of these conversions, and argues that poor Haitian migrants construe conversion as a rhetoric and set of behaviours for mastering a model of individual, social, and economic success in the US. At the same time, she shows how this Protestant evangelical practice offers converts an escape route from familial and other obligations and interdependence connected to traditional, transnational domestic and ritual ties, that are also spiritually and magically enforced. Author however indicates that while the pastors model for their flock an assertive, separatist disposition, central to Protestantism's historical appeal, combined with a modern, ascetic approach, underneath this is often an instrumental logic aimed at instant money and private ambition. As these traditionally were illicit rewards of sorcery and magic, the pastors are seen by some as renewed and successful sorcerers. Author further examines the conversions relating these to the moral dialectic from Vodou, known as Guinea and Magic, mediating the conflicts between individualism and community, and gives examples of often pragmatic motivations for conversion. She thus concludes that Haitians' interpretations of their conversions are unique in that they are filled with their cultural concerns, images, and morality.
Slave trading and slavery in the Dutch colonial empire: A global comparison
Authors: Welie Rik van
Published: April 2013

Compares slave trading and slavery in the Dutch colonial empire, specifically between the former trading and territorial domains of the West India Company (WIC), the Americas and West Africa, and of the East India Company (VOC), South East Asia, the Indian Ocean region, and South and East Africa. Author presents the latest quantitative assessments concerning the Dutch transatlantic as well as Indian Ocean World slave trade, placing the volume, direction, and characteristics of the forced migration in a historical context. He describes how overall the Dutch were a second-rate player in Atlantic slavery, though in certain periods more important, with according to recent estimates a total of about 554.300 slaves being transported by the Dutch to the Americas. He indicates that while transatlantic slave trade and slavery received much scholarly attention resulting in detailed knowledge, the slave trade and slavery in the Indian Ocean World by the Dutch is comparatively underresearched. Based on demand-side estimates throughout Dutch colonies of the Indonesian archipelago and elsewhere, he deduces that probably close to 500.000 slaves were transported by the Dutch in the Indian Ocean World. In addition, the author points at important differences between the nature and contexts of slavery, as in the VOC domains slavery was mostly of an urban and domestic character, contrary to its production base in the Americas. Slavery further did in the VOC areas not have a rigid racial identification like in WIC areas, with continuing, postslavery effects, and allowed for more flexibility, while unlike the plantation colonies in the Caribbean, as Suriname, not imported slaves but indigenous peoples formed the majority. He also points at relative exceptions, e.g. imported slaves for production use in some VOC territories, as the Banda islands and the Cape colony, and a certain domestic and urban focus of slavery in Curaçao.
Graham Greene and Cuba: Our man in Havana?
Authors: Hulme Peter
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]Graham Greene’s novel Our Man in Havana was published on October 6, 1958. Seven days later Greene arrived in Havana with Carol Reed to arrange for the filming of the script of the novel, on which they had both been working. Meanwhile, after his defeat of the summer offensive mounted by the Cuban dictator, Fulgencio Batista, in the mountains of eastern Cuba, just south of Bayamo, Fidel Castro had recently taken the military initiative: the day after Greene and Reed’s arrival on the island, Che Guevara reached Las Villas, moving westwards towards Havana. Six weeks later, on January 1, 1959, after Batista had fled the island, Castro and his Cuban Revolution took power. In April 1959 Greene and Reed were back in Havana with a film crew to film Our Man in Havana. The film was released in January 1960. A note at the beginning of the film says that it is “set before the recent revolution.” In terms of timing, Our Man in Havana could therefore hardly be more closely associated with the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. But is that association merely accidental, or does it involve any deeper implications? On the fiftieth anniversary of novel, film, and Revolution, that seems a question worth investigating, not with a view to turning Our Man in Havana into a serious political novel, but rather to exploring the complexities of the genre of comedy thriller and to bringing back into view some of the local contexts which might be less visible now than they were when the novel was published and the film released.
Saint Martin’s Change of Political Status: Inscribing Borders and Immigration Laws onto Geographical Space
Authors: Benoît Catherine
Published: April 2013

Anthropologists often analyze globalization as the circulation of goods, people, and ideas that triggers the decrease in nation-state prerogatives and the opening of nation states’ borders. In such an analysis, migrations are transnational: people move back and forth between their home country and the host country. Economic and demographic change in St. Martin seems to be a model for the usual scholarly approach to study globalization.
“Soi-Disant Columbuses”: The Discovery of Dominica’s Boiling Lake and the Commodification of Knowledge in Colonial Societies
Authors: Paravisini-Gebert Lizabeth
Published: April 2013

It may indeed be “a truth universally acknowledged” that “no man is an island, entire of itself.” Nonetheless, the entirety upon itself that Donne assumes as a given in connection to islands may be true only as far as geography and geometry are concerned – or perhaps, in the case of the poet, as far as the pure idea, the literary conceit, goes. The truth is that given the pernicious history of European colonization around the world, no island has retained its entirety of itself for very long after being “discovered” by Europeans. One may thus wonder if Donne himself was quite unaware of the irony implicit in his verses. In 1596, more than a quarter century before he penned his famous lines, he had had his own brush with conquest and colonization. In that year, he had enlisted in the Earl of Essex’s unsuccessful privateering expedition against Cadiz, and in 1597 he had sailed with Essex and Sir Walter Ralegh in the near-disastrous Islands Expedition, which had sought to intercept Spanish ships bringing gold and silver from South America as they sailed past the Azores.
Book shelf 2005/2006
Authors: Price Sally , Price Richard
Published: April 2013

A selection of books reviewed by Richard and Sally Price.
Contesting the Past: Narratives of Trinidad & Tobago history
Authors: Brereton Bridget
Published: April 2013

Discusses the national narratives developed historically in Trinidad and Tobago. Author describes how the past has been interpreted differently, for different purposes, and by different ethnic groups. She first pays attention to 2 hegemonic historical narratives during the colonial era: the British imperial historical narrative and the French Creole one, associated with political and/or planter elites. Next, she discusses how since the mid-20th c. the anticolonial, nationalist movement responded to this, including academics, resulting in the Eric Williams-led Afro-Creole narrative, dominant in the decades since the 1961 independence, connecting Trinidad as a nation with African-descended Creoles. Further, she highlights challenges to the dominant Afro-Creole narrative, mainly since the 1970s, emerging partly in the domain of "public history", and mostly ethnicity-based. She discusses the politics of (Amerindian) indigeneity in Trinidad, the Tobago narrative, related to its distinct history, the Afrocentric narrative, and the Indocentric narrative, the latter including a more recent extreme Hinducentric narrative. Author points out that the Afro-Creole master narrative, and subsequent (ethnic) counternarratives eclipsed (at least academically) increasing class-based, or gendered historical narratives.
From Pariah To Patriot: The Posthumous Career Of George William Gordon
Authors: Johnson Howard
Published: April 2013

Examines the development of the reputation of George William Gordon in Jamaican collective remembering, in relation to changing social, political, and cultural contexts. Author describes Gordon's mixed-raced/brown background and later parliamentary activities in support of poor black labourers, and how he was sentenced to death by governor Eyre for supposedly inciting the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion led by Paul Bogle. He relates how Gordon was in British historiography depicted as a traitor, while soon after 1865 Gordon was also defended as martyr and hero, and as unjustly sentenced. He shows how up to the early 20th c. the establishment perspective of Gordon as traitor and agitator persisted, but that competing discourses also developed. These came more to the fore since the introduction of universal adult suffrage in 1944, when Gordon first was publicly recognized as a patriot, and he was increasingly seen as national hero after independence. In addition, Gordon was presented, e.g. by the JLP, as a symbol of brown-black cooperation across race and class. Author notes, however, how this was also contested, and that a reputational decline of Gordon set in since the 1980s, increasing after 1992, due to sharpened brown-black divides, related to economic decline among Jamaica's black majority and black nationalism.
Travel, Ethnography, and Nation in the Writings of Rómulo Lachatañéré and Arthur Ramos
Authors: Cunha Olívia M.G.
Published: April 2013

Analyses how the traveling to and residence in the US of Arthur Ramos from Brazil and Rómulo Lachtañéré from Cuba, between 1939 and 1952, influenced their (anthropological) writings on Afro-American cultures and religions, specifically with regard to the relation between nation and race. Author describes that while Ramos and Lachatañéré went to the US under differing conditions, in the case of Lachatañéré in exile, and had dissimilar intellectual and political perspectives, their writings during and after their stay revealed identical approaches to interpreting the relation between nation and race in respectively Brazil and Cuba. She describes how Ramos and Lachatañéré developed a broader perspective on Afro-American culture, whilst moving in the same intellectual, anthropological circles, including contacts with Melville Herskovits and Fernando Ortiz, in the US. Author relates how both compared between African-Americans, in Louisiana in the case of Ramos and in New York in the case of Lachatañéré, and Afro-Brazilians and Afro-Cubans (including Caribbean migrants in the US), and thus between different race relations in the US, Brazilian, and Cuban contexts.
The Ever-Studied Isle
Authors: Centeno Miguel A.
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]Cuba Transnational. Damián J. Fern ández (ed.). Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. xvii + 216 pp. (Cloth US$ 65.00)Cuba’s Aborted Reform: Socioeconomic Effects, International Comparisons, and Transition Policies. Carme lo Mesa-Lago & Jorge F. Pére z-Lópe z. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. xx + 223 pp. (Cloth US$ 59.95)Cuba, the United States, and the Post-Cold War World: The International Dimensions of the Washington-Havana Relationship. Moris Morley & Chris McGillion (eds.). Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. xi + 286 pp. (Cloth US$ 65.00)There are perhaps few countries other than France for which the ratio of academic word per population is higher than Cuba. Notwithstanding its symbolic significance over the past fifty years, it is important to remember that we are talking of a small island of something over ten million souls exporting sand and sugar. Even the Cuban diaspora has benefited from this arguably undeserved notoriety, and hardly a week goes by without yet another exile memoir. Over the past two weeks (this is being written in mid-August 2006), the attentionmeter once again jumped as Fidel’s illness and the temporary (?) transfer of power was documented by the global media. Given all this attention, new books on Cuba face a daunting challenge: to say something new about a place that has been much studied, but which, in many ways, has remained the same for the past half century. Is there something we don’t yet know?
Cuba Through A New Lens
Authors: Stubbs Jean
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered. Samuel Farber. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. x + 212 pp. (Paper US$ 19.95)Cuba: A New History. Ric hard Gott . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. xii + 384 pp. (Paper US$ 17.00)Havana: The Making of Cuban Culture. Antoni Kapcia. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2005. xx + 236 pp. (Paper US$ 24.95) Richard Gott, Antoni Kapcia, and Samuel Farber each approach Cuba through a new lens. Gott does so by providing a broad-sweep history of Cuba, which is epic in scope, attaches importance to social as much as political and economic history, and blends scholarship with flair. Kapcia homes in on Havana as the locus for Cuban culture, whereby cultural history becomes the trope for exploring not only the city but also Cuban national identity. Farber revisits his own and others’ interpretations of the origins of the Cuban Revolution.
Book Reviews
Authors: KITLV Redactie
Published: April 2013

Sally Price & Richard Price; Romare Bearden: The Caribbean Dimension (J. Michael Dash)J. Lorand Matory; Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé (Stephan Palmié)Dianne M. Stewart; Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience (Betty Wood)Toyin Falola & Matt D. Childs (eds.); The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World (Kim D. Butler)Silvio Torres-Saillant; An Intellectual History of the Caribbean (Anthony P. Maingot)J.H. Elliott; Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (Aaron Spencer Fogleman)Elizabeth Mancke & Carole Shammmmas (eds.); The Creation of the British Atlantic World (Peter A. Coclanis)Adam Hochschild; Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Cassssandra Pybus)Walter Johnson (ed.); The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas (Gregory E. O’Malley)P.C. Emmer; The Dutch Slave Trade, 1500-1850 (Victor Enthoven)Philip Beidler & Gary Taylor (eds.); Writing Race Across the Atlantic World, Medieval to Modern (Eric Kimball)Felix Driver & Luciana Martins (eds.); Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire (Peter Redfield)Elizabeth A. Bohls & Ian Duncan (eds.); Travel Writing, 1700-1830: An Anthology (Carl Thompson)Alison Donnell; Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History (Sue N. Greene)Luís Madureira; Cannibal Modernities: Postcoloniality and the Avant-garde in Caribbean and Brazilian Literature (Lúcia Sá)Zilkia Janer; Puerto Rican Nation-Building Literature: Impossible Romance (Jossianna Arroyo)Sherrie L. Baver & Barbara Deutsch Lynch (eds.); Beyond Sun and Sand: Caribbean Environmentalisms (Rivke Jaffe)Joyce Moore Turner, with the assistance of W. Burghardt Turner; Caribbean Crusaders and the Harlem Renaissance (Gert Oostindie)Lisa D. McGill; Constructing Black Selves: Caribbean American Narratives and the Second Generation (Mary Chamberlain)Mark Q. Sawyer; Racial Politics in Post-Revolutionary Cuba (Alejandra Bronfman)Franklin W. Knight & Teresita Martínez-Vergne (eds.); Contemporary Caribbean Cultures and Societies in a Global Context (R. Charles Price)Luis A. Figueroa; Sugar, Slavery, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico (Astrid Cubano Iguina)Rosa E. Carrasquillo; Our Landless Patria: Marginal Citizenship and Race in Caguas, Puerto Rico, 1880-1910 (Ileana M. Rodriguez-Silva) Michael Largey; Vodou Nation: Haitian Art Music and Cultural Nationalism (Julian Gerstin)Donna P. Hope; Inna di Dancehall: Popular Culture and the Politics of Identity in Jamaica (Daniel Neely)Gloria Wekker; The Politics of Passion: Women’s Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora (W. van Wetering)Claire Lefebvre; Issues in the Study of Pidgin and Creole Languages (Salikoko S. Mufwene)
Tourism's intimate economies
Authors: Maurer Bill
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]What’s Love Got To Do with It? Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic. Denise Brennan. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2004. ix + 280 pp. (Paper US$ 21.95)Behind the Smile: The Working Lives of Caribbean Tourism. George Gmelch. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. x + 212 pp. (Paper US$ 19.95)New research on Caribbean tourism solidly locates it within the regional shift from “incentive-induced exports” like bananas to “service-based exports” like data processing, offshore finance, and novel forms of mass tourism (Mullings 2004:294; Duval 2004). Earlier studies may have made mention of the similarities between plantation economies and tourism development, but new models like the all-inclusive resort demonstrate a near identity of form and structure with plantation systems: foreign dominance over ownership and profit leaves little multiplier effect for the Caribbean islands playing host to enclaved resorts. Agricultural exports have been in free fall since the end of preferential trade protocols, and export manufacturing after the North American Free Trade Agreement is in steep decline. If new service economies seemed to offer a solution to economic and social disorder, the reaction to the events of September 11, 2001 demonstrated the fragility of service-based exports and, in particular, of new kinds of tourism. It took four years for international tourism to rebound to pre-9/11 levels;1 with the perceived threat of SARS and avian flu, as well as the Iraq war and the weak U.S. dollar, official projections of the industry’s near future are “cautiously optimistic.”2
Herman Merivale’s black legend: rethinking the intellectual history of free trade imperialism
Authors: Rood Daniel
Published: April 2013

Focusses on the lectures and theories of economist and colonial bureaucrat Herman Merivale on the imperial transition of British colonialism from slave labour to free labour, and toward free trade, in 1839. Author specifically shows how Merivale propagated the free trade imperialism of the reformed British Empire by using the "Black Legend" way of thinking, i.e. criticizing Spanish colonialism, to caricaturize the second British Empire, and thus justify imperial policy reforms. Author elaborates on this Black Legend tradition, going back to writings of Las Casas, and how it served as justification for "better" imperialisms of other colonial powers than Spain, and how Merivale's views followed this tradition. He shows how Merivale as part of this criticized the mismanagement, slavery, brutality, mercantilism, and the concentration of power and wealth in Cuba and other Spanish colonies, as negative examples contrasted to the British approach. Author points out, however, how Merivale's views were in part paradoxical and ambiguous, as he favoured a social hierarchy and an imperial authoritarianism limiting free labour.
Symbolic legacies of slavery in Guyana
Authors: Thompson Alvin O.
Published: April 2013

Focusses on the commemoration and symbolic functions of the slavery past in the Americas, with a particular focus on Guyana. Author explains that while symbolic representations of the legacies of slavery increased in the Americas since the 1960s, the nationalist government under Forbes Burnham since 1970 went further in using the slavery past as its ideological foundation. He discusses how this relates to Guyana's history and ethnic development of 2 main, often opposed groups of African- and Indian-descended groups, calling on their respective slavery or indenture past in emphasizing their national significance. He further describes slavery-related symbolic representations promoted under Burnham, specifically the 1763 slave revolt led by Cuffy, presented as first anticolonial rebellion aimed at liberation, and as a precursor to the PNC government, and other slave rebellions and rebels, such as led by Damon in 1834. He points out how some Indian-Guyanese found that Indian heroes were sidelined in relation to these. Author then describes how the annual commemoration of Emancipation Day continues to refer to the martyrdom of these slave rebels, along with other discursive connections, such as regarding reparations. He also pays attention to the activities of nongovernmental organizations in Guyana up to the present in commemorating the slavery past, often with broader African diaspora connections.
A view from the concrete jungle: diverging enviromentalisms in the urban caribbean
Authors: Jaffe Rivke
Published: April 2013

Examines the disconnect between supralocal environmental discourse and policy and local understandings of environment and nature in urban areas of Jamaica and Curaçao. Through research among residents of ghettos or marginal neighbourhoods Riverton and Rae Town in Kingston, and Wishi/Marchena and Seru Fortuna in Willemstad, the author examines local environmental perceptions, placed also in a wider Caribbean context, and if and how these differ from "professional", or Western environmentalist discourse and themes. She notes that the respondents value wild, unpolluted nonurban places, but value natural resources for their instrumental above their intrinsic value, while they further object against garbage, waste, and pollution, but see them as connected to social problems. They further display coherent beliefs about the earth and human-environment relationships, influenced by religious views, combining misanthropy, anthropocentrism, and animism. Author then points out how these views diverge from "professional" versions of environmentalism of governmental or nongovernmental organizations. These can be attributed to differences in environmental worldviews, and to the fact that supralocal actors articulate environmental problems as separate, whereas the local residents consider these as interrelated with social and economic (urban) problems, including poverty, and marginalization. Author calls for incorporation of local-level environmental perceptions to make environmental policies more relevant and successful.