bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Empowered objects, powerless subjects: citizenship, religion, and political representation in twentieth-century Cuba
Authors: Gomes da Cunha Olivia Maria
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]Measures of Equality: Social Science, Citizenship, and Race in Cuba, 1902-1940. Alejandra Marina Bronfman. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xi + 234 pp. (Paper US$ 19.95)Afro-Cuban Religiosity, Revolution, and National Identity. Christine Ayorinde. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004. ix + 283 pp. (Cloth US$ 59.95)In the last ten years, research topics such as race and nation have been privileged areas for the historical and anthropological understanding of Caribbean and Latin American societies. Regarding Cuba in particular, social scientists have dedicated important scholarship to these issues by mapping conceptions of citizenship and political representation, while situating them within a broader debate on the making of the new postcolonial and republican society at the beginning of the twentieth century. By pursuing different aims and following distinct approaches, Alejandra Bronfman and Christine Ayorinde have made contributions to this academic literature. Through divergent theoretical and methodological perspectives, both of their books explore alternative ways of interpreting the making of the nation founded upon a multiple and fluid rhetoric of race.
Indic Lexicon in the English/Creole of Trinidad
Authors: Winer Lise
Published: April 2013

Examines the contemporary lexical component of the English/Creole of Trinidad (TEC) that is derived from languages of India. Author focuses on the TEC as spoken among Indo-Trinidadians, but also pays attention to Indic words used in the TEC of Afro-Trinidadians and other groups. Author sketches the history of Indian immigration into Trinidad, explaining how most came from the Bihar province in northern India and spoke Bhojpuri, rather than (closely related) Hindi, and how in the 20th c. Indian languages were replaced by English with education. She further focuses on retained Indic words incorporated in current-day TEC, and found 1844 of such words in usage. She discusses words misassigned locally as Indian-derived, but actually from other (European or African) languages. Then, she describes most of the Indo-TEC lexicon, categorizing items by their semantic-cultural domain, with major domains for Indian-derived words: religious practice, music, dance and stickfighting, food preparation, agriculture, kinship, and behaviour or appearance. Further, the author discusses to what degree Indic words have been mainstreamed within the non-Indian population of Trinidad, sometimes via standard English, sometimes directly assimilated into TEC, and made salient through the press or street food selling.
The slippery paths of commemoration and Heritage tourism: the Netherlands, Ghana, and the rediscovery of Atlantic slavery
Authors: Oostindie Gert
Published: April 2013

Reflects upon the commemoration of the Atlantic slave trade and American slavery. Author describes how the slave trade and slavery was recently "rediscovered", as a part of Dutch history, and he compares this to the attention to this history in other European countries once engaging in slavery. He argues that despite the fact that the history of the slave trade and slavery is worthy of attention in itself, contemporary political and social factors mainly influence attention to the slave trade and slavery, noting that in countries with larger Afro-Caribbean minority groups the attention to this past is greater than in other once slave-trading countries. He further deplores the lack of academic accuracy on the slave trade and slavery in slavery commemorations and in the connected search for African roots among descendants of slaves, and illustrates this by focusing on the role of Ghana, and the slave fortress Elmina there, as this fortress also has become a much visited tourist site by Afro-Americans. According to him, this made for some that Ghana represents the whole of Africa, while African slaves in the Caribbean, also in the Dutch colonies, came from various parts of Africa. Author attributes this selectivity in part to the relatively large Ghanaian community in the Netherlands.
Understanding a modern antique: challenges to representing Rastafari in the twenty-first century
Authors: Homiak John P.
Published: April 2013

Drawing increasingly upon digital technologies and the internet to assert a sense of community even as they cultivate an austere biblical persona, adherents of Rastafari can be thought of as simultaneously modern and antique. Their claim to antiquity is grounded in a collectively professed African-Ethiopian identity that has not only resisted the ravages of enslavement, colonialism, and European cultural domination but is seen to transcend local differences of culture and language. Theirs is a way of life organized around theocratic principles that begin with a recognition of the divine in all peoples and as the basis of all human agency. Rastafari assert the universal relevance of these principles to the conditions of modernity even as they persistently claim social justice on behalf of all peoples of African descent exploited by colonialism and the prevailing global capitalist-imperialist system. Based on these general themes, the Rastafari movement has come to represent a large-scale cultural phenomenon that has long since burst the chains of its colonial containment in Jamaica. From the late 1960s onward it has spread throughout the Caribbean and the Central and South American rimland to the major metropoles of North America and Europe as well as to many sites on the African continent.
Bookreview
Authors: KITLV Redactie
Published: April 2013

Marcus Wood; Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography (Lynn M. Festa)Michèle Praeger; The Imaginary Caribbean and Caribbean Imaginary (Celia Britton)Charles V. Carnegie; Postnationalism Prefigured: Caribbean Borderlands (John Collins)Mervyn C. Alleyne; The Construction and Representation of Race and Ethnicity in the Caribbean and the World (Charles V. Carnegy)Jerry Gershenhorn; Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge (Richard Price)Sally Cooper Coole; Ruth Landes: A Life in Anthropology (Olivia Maria Gomes Da Cunha)Maureen Warner Lewis; Central Africa in the Caribbean: Transcending Time, Transforming Cultures (Robert W. Slenes)Gert Oostindie (ed.); Facing up to the Past: Perspectives on the Commemoration of Slavery from Africa, the Americas and Europe (Gad Heuman)Gert Oostindie, Inge Klinkers; Decolonising the Caribbean: Dutch Policies in a Comparative Perspective (Paul Sutton)Kirk Peter Meigho; Politics in a ‘Half-Made Society’: Trinidad and Tobago, 1925-2001 (Douglas Midgett)Linden Lewis (ed.); The Culture of Gender and Sexuality in the Caribbean (David A.B. Murray)Gertrude Aub-Buscher, Beverly Ormerod Noakes (eds.); The Francophone Caribbean Today: Literature, Language, Culture (Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw)Sally Lloyd-Evans, Robert B. Potter; Gender, Ethnicity and the Iinformal Sector in Trinidad (Katherine E. Browne)STeve Striffler, Mark Moberg (eds.); Banana Wars: Power, Production and History in the Americas (Peter Clegg)Johannes Postma, Victor Enthoven (eds.); Riches from Atlantic Commerce: Dutch Transatlantic Trade and Shipping, 1585-1817 (Gert J. Oostindie)Phil Davison; Volcano in Paradise: Death and Survival on the Caribbean Island of Montserrat (Bonham C. Richardson)Ernest Zebrowski jr; The Last Days of St. Pierre: The Volcanic Disaster that Claimed Thirty Thousand Lives (Bernard Moitt)Beverley A. Steele; Grenada: A History of Its People (Jay R. Mandle)Walter C. Soderlund (ed.); Mass Media and Foreign Policy: Post-Cold War Crises in the Caribbean (Jason Parker)Charlie Whitham; Bitter Rehearsal: British and American Planning for a Post-War West Indies (Jason Parker)Douglas V. Amstrong; Creole Transformation from Slavery to Freedom: Historical Archaeology of the East End Community, St. John, Virgin Islands (Karin Fog Olwig)H.U.E. Thoden van Velzen; Een koloniaal drama: De grote staking van de Marron vrachtvaarders, 1921 (Chris de Beet)Joseph F. Callo; Nelson in the Caribbean: The Hero Emerges, 1784-1787 (Carl E. Swanson)Jorge Duany; The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and in the United States (Juan Flores)Raquel Z. Rivera; New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone (Halbert Barton)Alfonso J. García Osuna; The Cuban Filmography, 1897 through 2001 (Ann Marie Stock)Michael Aceto, Jeffrey P. Williams (eds.); Contact Englishes of the Eastern Caribbean (Geneviève Escure)In: New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids (NWIG) 79 (2005), no. 1 & 2
Ritual Piracy or Creolization with an Attitude
Authors: Romberg Raquel
Published: April 2013

Discusses a renewed view on "creolization", in relation to the Caribbean's social and cultural history. Author first points at the different creolization theories, noting a recurrence in these of the concepts of "mixture", "creative mixture", or "dialogue" between cultures, and describes how such "harmonious mix" views of creolization influenced forms of nationalism and nation building in the Caribbean, thereby blurring inequalities. She, however, points at the unequal power relations, or "contentious constitution", historically involved in creolization processes, with hegemonic (cultural and religious) colonial power over and against so-called superstitious or other vernacular interpretations. With a specific focus on late-19th c. creolization processes in urban slave and highland peasant-Maroon societies in Puerto Rico, she further shows how vernacular, magical religions and folk healing rechanneled hegemonic religious symbols, like the cross, to purposes other than those intended by the Church. She calls this a form of "ritual piracy", including tactical mimicry, representing thus subversion from within, but with maintained relations to the hegemonic, complicating the "resistance" aspect.
'An All Too Present Absence: Fernando Ortiz's Work on Abaku? in its Sociocultural Context
Authors: Palmié Stephan , Pérez Elizabeth
Published: April 2013

Focusses on the Abukuá associations, Afro-Cuban male initiatory secret societies, as such originated in Regla, Havana in 1836. Authors describe how Abakuá titleholders gained powerful social and labour positions in the Havana area, and how they were eventually outlawed in 1876. They point out how Abakuá societies by and since then were designated as negative and criminal in the public sphere, and condemned by many writers and politicians. They show how published accounts of Abakuá since the late 19th c and early 20th c. were thus seldom merely descriptive, but were presented as proof of Cuba's lagging modernity, and of a for some undesired Africanization. They further relate how Fernando Ortiz's studies and work on Abakuá fit in this. They note how Ortiz' s earlier "criminal anthropology" work on Abakuá was in the same negative and criminalizing vein, yet they point at changes, as in time he described and evaluated Abakuá as more positive, and as part of Cuban culture. They describe how Ortiz dedicated much effort to studying different aspects of Abakuá, and that extensive notations on these became part of his archive, which, as he told fellow-scholars, he would work out in an eventual monograph on Abakuá. The authors deplore that this monograph was not only never published, but also seems to have been lost.
The tragedy of the ñáñigos: Genesis of an unpublished book
Authors: Del Rosario Díaz María
Published: April 2013

Reconstructs Fernando Ortiz' s anthropological study on Afro-Cuban culture since the early 20th c., in particular on the Abakuá male secret societies, also called "ñañigos", with origins in African societies in the Calabar region. Author describes how Ortiz developed from earlier positivist, criminological approaches to broader, appreciative studies of Afro-Cuban culture, with a lasting interest in the Abakuá societies. Ortiz studied several aspects of Abakuá and collected much data and information, and referred to Abakuá aspects in works from the 1930s and 1940s, and wrote articles on specific Abakuá aspects in the 1950s. Author shows how Ortiz from 1917 onward in his correspondence stated repeatedly to fellow-scholars his goal of writing a comprehensive, extensive monograph on Abakuá, for which he collected much information during his life. In the 1950s he cooperated for this purpose with Vera Rubin from Columbia University. Author points out, however, how this monograph on Abakuá, while probably written by Ortiz at the end of his life, and seen by some, cannot be found in the present.
The position and residential patterns of ethnic groups in Paramaribo’s development in the twentieth century
Authors: Bruijne Ad de , Schalkwijk Aart
Published: April 2013

Analyses ethnic residential patterns, in terms of spatial segregation, in Paramaribo, as these developed historically, and their correlation to the changing socioeconomic position of the various ethnic groups. Authors first point out how Paramaribo is at present one of the most multiethnic and multicultural cities of the Caribbean, and discuss the continuing importance of ethnic identity and boundaries. They further describe the history of Paramaribo's development since the period of slavery and after abolition, when many Creoles migrated to the city. Hindustani started migrating in higher numbers to Paramaribo since the early 20th c., mainly to the urban periphery, and since the 1960s also more Javanese. More recently (since the 1980s) migrants to Paramaribo include Maroons, Amerindians, Chinese, and Brazilians. Authors examine in how far the residential patterns were determined by socioeconomic factors, and/or by ethnicity. They conclude that socioeconomic factors have overall become more influential in residential patterns than ethnicity. They point out that residential ethnic mixing has increased, as almost half of Paramaribo's neighbourhoods are mixed, with no dominant ethnic group, although some ethnic concentration continues, as a quarter of the neighbourhoods can be called Creole, one-fifth of them Hindustani, and Creoles (and Maroons) reside for a higher percentage in the city centre, and Hindustani and Javanese more in the urban periphery.
Colonial Migrants: Recent Work on Puerto Ricans on and off the Island
Authors: Duany Jorge
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]Colonial Subjects: Puerto Ricans in a Global Perspective. Ramón Grosfoguel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. xi + 268 pp. (Paper US $ 21.95)Boricuas in Gotham: Puerto Ricans in the Making of Modern New York City. Gabriel Haslip-Viera, Angelo Falcón & Félix Matos Rodríguez (eds.). Princeton NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2004. viii + 240 pp. (PaperUS $ 24.95)Recent studies of Puerto Ricans have revisited their colonial status, national identity, and transnational migration from various standpoints, including postcolonial, transnational, postmodern, queer, and cultural studies.1 Most scholars in the social sciences and the humanities no longer question whether Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States. What is often discussed, sometimes angrily, is the exact nature of U.S. colonialism, the extent to which the Island has acquired certain “postcolonial” traits such as linguistic and cultural autonomy, and the possibility of waging an effective decolonization process. The issue of national identity in Puerto Rico is still contested as intensely as ever. What is new about current scholarly discussions is that many intellectuals, especially those who align themselves with postmodernism, are highly critical of nationalist discourses. Other debates focus on the appropriate approach to population movements between the Island and the U.S. mainland. For example, some outside observers insist that, technically speaking, the Puerto Rican exodus should be considered an internal, not international, migration, while others, including myself, refer to such a massive dispersal of people as transnational or diasporic. Much of this1. D uany 2002; Pabón 2002; Martínez-San Miguel 2003; Ramos-Zayas 2003; Rivera 2003; Negrón-Muntaner 2004; Pérez 2004. controversy centers on whether the geopolitical “border” between the Island and the mainland is equivalent to a national “frontier” in the experiences of Puerto Rican migrants.
Santería grand slam: Afro-Cuban religious studies and the study of Afro-Cuban religion
Authors: Palmié Stephan
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]Living Santería: Rituals and Experiences in an Afro-Cuban Religion. MICHAEL ATWOOD MASON. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002. ix + 165 pp. (Paper US$ 16.95)Divine Utterances: The Performance of Afro-Cuban Santería. KATHERINE J. HAGEDORN. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001. xvi + 296 pp. (Cloth US$ 40.00)The Light Inside: Abakuá Society Arts and Cuban Cultural History. DAVID H. BROWN. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2003. xix + 286 pp. (Cloth US$ 44.23)Santería Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban Religion. DAVID H. BROWN. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003. xx + 413 pp. (Paper US$ 38.00)Ethnographic objects behave in curious ways. Although they clearly are “our constructions,” field sites and even topically circumscribed (rather than spatially delimited) ethnographic problems lead double lives: places and problems change not merely because they factually undergo historical changes, but because researchers come to them from historically no less changeable epistemic vantage points. One can imagine generational cohorts of ethnographers marching across the same geographically or thematically defined terrain and seeing different things – not just because of substantial changes that have factually occurred, but because they have come to ask different questions. The process obviously has its dialectical moments. The figures we inscribe in writing from fleeting observations (based on changing theoretical conceptions) are no less subject to history than the empirical grounds from which our discursive efforts call them forth. The result is a curious imbrication of partially autonomous, but also partly overlapping, historicities of lives and texts which, at times, are more difficult to keep apart than it would seem at first glance. At least in the study of Afro-Cuban religious culture, the two practical and discursive fields – one circumscribed by the practical, but perhaps misleading label “Afro-Cuban religion,”1 and the other designated by whatever term one might like to affix to the study of it – cannot be easily separated: much as in the Brazilian case (Braga 1995, Capone 1999, Matory 1999, 2001), practitioners of Afro-Cuban religions and their ethnographers have engaged each other in a dialogue since at least the second decade of the twentieth century. That it took us so long to understand this fact has much to do with the way both “Afro-Cuban religion” and “Afro-Cuban ethnography” originally (and lastingly) became discursively objectified: the former largely under the sign of a search for “authentically African” elements in New World cultural practices, the second as an instrument for “verifying” (and thereby authorizing) such “Africanisms” (Scott 1991).
The explorer as hero: ‘Le Fidèle Apatou’ in the French wilderness
Authors: Bilby Kenneth M.
Published: April 2013

Reconstructs the life story and activities of the Aluku Maroon Captain Apatu in French Guiana. Author describes how Apatu aligned with and aided French explorer Jules Cerveaux in exploring the Amazon region in the late 1870s, and maintained contacts with other French colonial figures. Partly because his role and achievements in colonial expansion were valued by the French, Apatu became an important intermediary between the French and the Aluku Maroons. Author further outlines how Apatu due to these French contacts, and also a journey to Paris, adapted to and assimilated French culture, although he maintained his sense of Aluku identity. He sketches the context of the French-Aluku contacts through Apatu, discussing how Apatu's political position and ambitions sometimes met with distrust and tensions with fellow-Aluku. He further indicates that Aluku alliance with the French probably was intended as a protection against intrusions of the rivaling Ndyuka Maroons. Apatu maintained his important position and function as intermediary between French and other whites on the one hand, and the Aluku on the other up to his death in 1908. Author pays particular attention to how Apatu, and after him other Aluku, absorbed "Frenchness" while maintaining an Aluku identity. This, he argues, has remained relevant up to the present, in light of assimilation policies by the French in French Guiana, increasingly affecting the Aluku since the 1970s and threatening their Maroon culture.
‘Fascinans’ or ‘tremendum’? Permutations of the state, the body, and the divine in late-twentieth-century Havana
Authors: Palmié Stephan
Published: April 2013

Focuses on the introduction of capitalist elements, such as the use of the dollar as currency, in Cuba in the 1990s, and discusses survival strategies among the Cuban people, during the "special period" since 1989. Based on fieldwork and experiences in Havana, the author pays particular attention to the important role of (obtaining) dollars instead of the less valuable peso currency for Cubans in response to deprivations, and how this occurs through different forms of hustling people with money, including offering sexual favours to tourists, as well as to an increased focus on own interests instead of on courteous sharing among Cubans, and increased racial cleavages. He finds that the introduction of the dollar in Cuba, as well as tourism's growth, garnered income, but also stimulated inequalities in access to dollars and to dollar-prized commodities, and had morally problematic effects, because working formally for the state with wages in pesos generally paid less than informal work to obtain dollars. He describes how this increased instrumental thinking and made hustling widespread, and also stimulated shams and secular intentionality within the practice of Afro-Cuban religions, e.g. fake possessions to obtain dollar offerings to deities from foreigners at ceremonies. In addition, he refers to the ending of the circulation of the US dollar as currency in Cuba as decreed by the Cuban government in November 2004, making the dollar's role in practice historical.
July 1, emancipation day in Suriname: a contested ‘lieu de mémoire’, 1863-2003
Authors: Stipriaan Alex
Published: April 2013

Focuses on the annual celebration at the 1st of July of the abolition of slavery in Suriname (1863). Author describes how Emancipation Day celebrations in Suriname have developed over time. He relates how in the earliest celebrations after 1863 Emancipation Day was used by the authorities, in collaboration with the Moravian Church, to discipline and control the formerly enslaved, and thus strengthen the colonial status quo. This was done by emphasizing the necessity of white guidance for the blacks' development, and by creating a "cult of gratitude" to God and the Dutch king. Around 1900 a developing consciousness among Afro-Surinamese, due to migrations to the US, began contesting the way of commemorating slavery and the abolition, including a wider sense of belonging to an African diaspora in the Americas. Since then a gradual process of partly secularization of the celebrations began. Further, the author outlines how the African diaspora- and black consciousness influences, often from the US, continued to transform the content and style of the celebrations, but also had a wider influence among Afro-Surinamers regarding their sense of pride and cultural identity, reflecting in the changed names for Afro-Surinamers. The July 1 celebrations increasingly became linked to African-Surinamese ethnicity, while it also became a folkloric, festive, and wider national event, until it became again more politically charged since the 1980s.
Pepper and bones: the secessionist impulse in Nevis
Authors: Midgett Douglas
Published: April 2013

Describes the history of the recurring impulse for independence from the St. Kitts-Nevis state on the part of Nevis. Author examines the modern political history of the St. Kitts-Nevis state, in order to discern the motivations of the Nevisian people and politicians for their wish of secession. First, he sketches how Nevis and St. Kitts were historically linked since the 17th c., but that socioeconomic differences developed; as after the decline of sugar and plantation agriculture on both islands, St Kitts developed a largely proletarian rural population, whereas Nevis' population came to consist more of smallholders, resulting in the labour movement having more influence in St Kitts than in Nevis, which also had political repercussions. Nevisian parties favoured secession. Author reconstructs elections, partisan and general political developments in the St. Kitts-Nevis union since the 1950s, describing the long dominance of the St. Kitts-dominated Labour Party, and responses in Nevis. For Nevisian secession there seemed to be popular support. In 1998, however, the required majority on Nevis for secession was not obtained. Author concludes that the Nevisian wish for secession did not stem from any strong nationalistic zeal, or a particularly strong sense of separate identity or ethnicity, but mainly from economic and political reasons.
Bookshelf 2003
Authors: Price Richard , Price Sally
Published: April 2013

A selection of books reviewed by Richard and Sally Price.
Punishing the sea wolf: corsairs and cannibals in the early modern Caribbean
Authors: Lane Kris
Published: April 2013

Looks at how Western law was interpreted and applied to perceived cannibals and corsairs in the Spanish Caribbean in the 16th and 17th c., by Spanish jurists in the period, and at the development of the cannibal and corsair image in Spanish culture. Author outlines the convergence of terms suggesting a growing semantic linkage between certain indigenous peoples, specially the famed "Carib cannibals", and foreign, mostly Western European, corsairs poaching on Spanish wealth. He describes how of the Caribs, said to be cannibals, involved in piracy, an image was constructed of not only cannibals, but also greedy criminals, or rebelers against Catholicism, in order to (legally) justify punishments or wars against them, and thus Spanish rule. He then discusses how of French, British, and other corsairs in the Caribbean involved in piracy against the Spanish, an in some ways similar image was painted of fanatical canine types ruled by appetites, and also of anti-Catholic heretics and criminals, in order to justify punishments as well as the Spanish claim on rule of the Caribbean.
The irrelevance of independence: Martinique and the French presidential elections of 2002
Authors: Miles William F.S.
Published: April 2013

Focuses on the Martinican votes for the French presidential elections of 2002, and compares it with earlier elections, especially the one of 1981. Author surveys in this light the societal and political transformations that occurred in and regarding Martinique between 1981 and 2002. He discusses French policy in this period, and explains that while both left-leaning and right-leaning parties wanted to keep the island's "département" status intact, Socialist governments since 1981 were more supportive of decentralization, and the cultural specificity and identity of Martinique, but later also right-leaning governments, indicative of mainstreaming of overseas French multicultural politics. Then, he discusses Martinican politics, and the importance therein of Martinique's status as département with its associated French welfare state benefits. Most Martinicans favor this status because of these benefits over independence, but political parties reflect different views on this integration within France, ranging from pro-independence, to autonomy. Author further discusses the differences of Martinican votes with general French trends in the 2002 presidential elections.
Other Black Atlantic borders: escape routes, 'mocambos', and fears of sedition in Brazil and French Guiana (eighteenth to nineteenth centuries)
Authors: Gomes Flávio
Published: April 2013

Analyzes cultural exchanges and the formation of identities, specifically looking at Maroon societies established on the borders of colonial Brazil and French Guiana. Author identifies forms of micropolitical agency among slaves and escaped (former) slaves in this area in light of Portuguese and French colonial policies in the 18th and 19th c. First, he reconstructs the history of slavery in French Guiana and bordering Brazil, and especially of slave escapes across colonial borders, resulting in Maroon communities, and how the colonial authorities dealt with these escapes. He points out that the created Maroon societies affected and altered the world of those who were still enslaved, as well as of the entire surrounding society. Further he discusses transnational connections, particularly the impact of the Haitian Revolution on slaves, and of other ideas regarding freedom.
Apologies to Djankusó
Authors: Price Richard
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]In 19901 published a photo and captioned it "Gaama Djankusó (tribal chief, 1898-1932) wearing his ceremonial gorget and his "lóndd"' (Price 1990: 410), with the image credited to Morton Kahn's Djuka (1931: facing p. 106). The adjoining text, discussing the Saramaka chief's ceremonial uniform, explains that Before its general shape was altered during the twentieth century, the gaama's cocked hat was called by Saramakas "löndö," the more usual meaning of which is "cunt," because the shape of its orifice resembles the female genitalia. Tebini described to me how Gaama Djankusó (who died in 1932) proudly told him that Queen Wilhelmina herself had sent him his, and he noted that, "like a woman's private parts, it's good forever." (Price 1990:411)
Globalization, urbanization, and language in Caribbean development: the assimilation of St. Lucia
Authors: St-Hilaire Aonghas
Published: April 2013

Discusses the trend toward Anglicization in St. Lucia, and the increasing demise of the Kwéyòl language in the historically Kweyol-speaking rural districts, related to perceived opportunities for economic advancement. Author explains how this influence of Anglicization spread from the, more English-focused, capital Castries to the rural areas of the islands. He places this perception of English for economic possibilities (of children), partly also fueled by US impact, alongside the gains of cultural nationalism including Kwéyòl promotion in the past 3 decades, such as increasing use of the language on the radio and festivals. Kwéyòl is also seen as a part of an St. Lucian identity. He points out how, nonetheless, the government or parents do not really invest in it, and favor knowledge of English among children.
American religion: diaspora and syncretism from Old World to New
Authors: Khan Aisha
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]Nation Dance: Religion, Identity, and Cultural Difference in the Caribbean. PATRICK TAYLOR (ed.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. x +220 pp. (Paper US$ 19.95)Translating Kali 's Feast: The Goddess in Indo-Caribbean Ritual and Fiction. STEPHANOS STEPHANIDES with KARNA SINGH. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. xii + 200 pp. (Paper US$ 19.00)Between Babel and Pentecost: Transnational Pentecostalism in Africa and Latin America. ANDRÉ CORTEN & RUTH MARSHALL-FRATANI (eds.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. 270 pp. (Paper US$ 22.95)Encyclopedia of African and African-American Religions. STEPHEN D. GLAZIER (ed.). New York: Routledge, 2001. xx + 452 pp. (Cloth US$ 125.00)As paradigms and perspectives change within and across academie disciplines, certain motifs remain at the crux of our inquiries. Evident in these four new works on African and New World African and South Asian religions are two motifs that have long defined the Caribbean: the relationship between cultural transformation and cultural continuity, and that between cultural diversity and cultural commonality. In approaching religion from such revisionist sites as poststructuralism, diaspora, hybridity, and creolization, however, the works reviewed here attempt to move toward new and more productive ways of thinking about cultures and histories in the Americas. In the process, other questions arise. Particularly, can what are essentially redirected language and methodologies in the spirit of postmodern interventions teil us more about local interpretation, experience, and agency among Caribbean, African American, and African peoples than can more traditional approaches? While it is up to individual readers to decide this for themselves, my own feeling is that it is altogether a good thing that these works still echo long-standing conundrums: the Herskovits/Frazier debate over cultural origins, the tensions of assimilation in "plural societies," and the significance of religion in everyday life. Perhaps one of the most important lessons that research in the Caribbean has for broader arenas of scholarship is that foundational questions are tenacious even in the face of paradigm shifts, yet can always generate new modes of inquiry, defying intellectual closure and neat resolution.
The provincial archive as a place of memory: confronting oral and written sources on the role of former slaves in the Cuban war of independence (1895-98)
Authors: Scott Rebecca J.
Published: April 2013

Focuses on the study of the role of former slaves in the Cuban War of Independence, in light of the avoidance of the theme of race within this war in Cuban historiography. Author discusses reasons for the silence on race issues, and for the historic construction of the "myth" of racial equality in this era. Then, she points at the difficulties in the studying of the presence of former slaves among the Cuban soldiers in the War of Independence, due to the absence of racial labels for the registered soldiers. She describes how the research on the theme became more local, and focused on the Cienfuegos region, in part because of Cienfuegos' extensive local archive. Then, she outlines the different approaches to research on the matter by the archives' director Orlando García Martínez, by Michael Zeuske, and by the author herself. The latter explains how she extended her archival research with oral testimonies of descendants in Cienfuegos of black soldiers, and how through examining life histories, collective biographies, and genealogies, she ascertained that the number of former slaves in the rebellious Cuban army was relatively small, but the number of free-born blacks and mulattoes was high.
Hidden markers, open secrets: on naming, race-marking, and race-making in Cuba
Authors: Zeuske Michael
Published: April 2013

Focuses on how in Cuba race-marking was interrelated with surname-giving, also after the abolition of slavery. Through researching life histories on the local level in the Cienfuegos region, the author examines names of former slaves, finding that these were after abolition in notarial records often marked with the adjectives s.o.a., or "sin otro apellido" (without other surname, taking into account the Iberian double surname tradition). This, according to him, points to a stigmatization of these black citizens and related to their former status as possession, and is thus a racial marker, only more hidden than the open racial assignations during slavery. He relates these postemancipation surnames of former slaves to the dotation of surnames during slavery, whereby most surnames of slaves were those of the last owner of the slaves. He also discusses differences in name-giving between the notarial records and everyday life. He further indicates that a new racism developed in the Cuban society of the late 19th c. and early 20th c., which was voiced more openly in the realm of culture, and regarding events as incarceration and death, and more hidden within the civil and judicial spheres, where the fiction of a race-blind republic was maintained.
The condition of the slaves on the sugar plantations of Sir John Gladstone in the colony of Demerara, 1812-49
Authors: Sheridan Richard B.
Published: April 2013

Reconstructs the business activities of the Scottish-born Liverpool merchant and plantation owner John Gladstone, placed within the context of slavery and the abolition of slavery, and the general colonial history of British Guiana, particularly in the Demerara colony. Author describes how Gladstone acquired several plantations with slaves in Demerara, and how he responded to the increasing criticism of slavery, and the bad conditions of slaves in these Demerara plantations. He describes how Gladstone was an absentee owner in Jamaica and Guyana, where he never set foot, and depended on information by his plantation attorneys or managers, who generally painted too positive a picture of the slaves' conditions, which in reality were characterized by high mortality rates, disease, and abuse of slaves. Also discusses the Demerara slave revolt of 1823 affecting some of Gladstone's plantations.
Through the diameter of respectability: the politics of historical representation in postemancipation colonial Trinidad
Authors: Scott Stephen Kingsley
Published: April 2013

Examines the concepts of "respectability" and "reputation" and their emergent functions in the colonial politics immediately following emancipation in Trinidad. Author explains how these concepts presupposed and entailed a different representation and valuation of local historical processes, and how the "diameter" of respectability relates to the emergence of an educated colored and black "petite bourgeoisie" as Trinidad's plantation complex developed into a class-based Creole society. He first discusses how after 1838 British education imposed British ideas of respectability in Trinidad, which in the last half of the 19th c. were adapted by an emerging local black middle class to be operative for their social mobility. He then juxtaposes the burgeoning of a large urban black underclass in the same period, and the revival by the underclass of the island's Carnival, where a set of values opposed to the norms of respectability were conjured.
Cuba on our minds
Authors: Rutheiser Charles
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]Conversatons with Cuba. C. PETER RIPLEY. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999. xxvi + 243 pp. (Cloth US$ 24.95)Real Life in Castro's Cuba. CATHERINE MOSES. Wilmington DE: Scholarly Resources, 2000. xi + 184 pp. (Paper US$ 18.95)The Cuban Way: Capitalism, Communism, and Confrontation. ANA JULIA JATAR-HAUSMANN. West Hartford CT: Kumarian Press, 1999. xvii + 161 pp. (Paper US$21.95)Castro and the Cuban Revolution. THOMAS M. LEONARD. Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. xxv + 188 pp. (Cloth US$ 45.00)Cuba has attracted a great deal of attention from both scholarly and popular authors since 1959. The literature that they have produced has generated much heat, but has shed a considerably smaller amount of light. Most accounts have been situated at the polar extremes of ideology, either condemning or celebrating the island's revolutionary experiment and its maximum leader (for the former is often virtually totally collapsed into the personage of Fidel Castro) with the same degrees of vociferous, simplistic certitude. However, neither the fulminating diatribes of the anti-Castro Right nor the fulsome paeans of the Euro-American Left have done much justice to making sense of the complex, confounding, and contradictory realities of Cuban society before, during, and after the Revolution. Indeed, contemporary developments have only magnified the distortions rendered by the astigmatic lenses of cold war intellectualism.
Race and nation in the Dominican Republic
Authors: Baud Michiel
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]Coloring the Nation: Race and Ethnicity in the Dominican Republic. DAVID HOWARD. Oxford: Signal; Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2001. x + 227 pp. (Paper US$ 19.95)Race and Politics in the Dominican Republic. ERNESTO SAGAS. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. xii + 161 pp. (Cloth US$ 49.95, Paper US$ 24.95)Peasants and Religion: A Socioeconomic Study of Dios Olivorio and the Palma Sola Movement in the Dominican Republic. JAN LUNDIUS & MATS LUNDAHL. London: Routledge, 2000. xxvi + 774 pp. (Cloth US$ 135.00)The social and political relations between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and especially their racial and ethnic contents, are extremely difficult to approach in an even- handed and unbiased way. Much ink has been spilled over the conflictive relations between these two countries, and on race relations in the Dominican Republic. Much of what has been said must be considered unfounded or biased, not to mention sensationalist. The books under review try to pro vide new insights into the issue and at the same time to steer clear of these problems.
Maroons in Suriname and Guyane: how many and where
Authors: Price Richard
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]While conducting research with Sally Price for a book (R. & S. Price 2002) about Maroons in Guyane (French Guiana) - all of whom have recent or ancestral roots in Suriname - 1 have come to realize that the Maroon population figures routinely used in the scholarly and popular literature are considerably out of date, for both Suriname and Guyane, as well as for the Maroon diaspora in the Netherlands.1 This brief essay is intended to provide new estimates, some of which have startling implications.
Protecting the Caribbean from itself: UNDCP and the ganja debate
Authors: Klein Axel
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]Drug policy in the Caribbean region provides a testing ground for one of the key themes in the social sciences over recent years, the relationship of knowledge and power. Acting as intermediary between northern donors and the microstates of the region, the organization - United Nations International Control Programme (UNDCP) - applies the models framed by northern expertise even when local experience suggests they are inappropriate. Instead of adapting, in the light of new evidence, the organization mobilizes its resources on stifling dissent.
The Caribbeanist hall of shame, 2001
Authors: Price Richard
Published: April 2013

[First paragraphs]NWIG reviewers contributed essays on more than sixty books for the issues published in 2001, and we are grateful to these generous scholars for having shared their views. With the usual regret and remorse, however, we must announce this year's delinquent reviewers, who have (for whatever diverse reasons, and despite our gentle reminders) deprived NWIG readers of the opportunity to learn about what's new and interesting in Caribbean studies, and have deprived the books' authors of the opportunity to get a hearing in this forum. As has become our custom, we identify delinquent reviewers by their first and last initials, and give publication information on each book in question.
Between the death penalty and decriminalization : new directions for drug control in the Commonwealth Caribbean
Authors: Klein Axel
Published: April 2013

Traces the changes in public attitudes toward and political stances on drug control in the British Caribbean between 1980 and 2000. Author first discusses the origins of drug control, the role of US pressure, and the vulnerability of the Caribbean. He then looks at European involvement and the different plans and policies to control drugs in the region. Finally, he describes the consequences of these policy approaches on the justice system and legal reform, drug demand, and social structures in the region.
Labor and place in Barbados, Jamaica, and Trinidad : a search for a comparative unified field theory revisited
Authors: Dhanda Karen S.
Published: April 2013

Comparative study of 3 Anglophone Caribbean islands looks at the dynamics of economic change and development from 1750 to 1900. Author underlines the interplay between human agency and large- and small-scale forces in these sugar colonies. She focuses on labor, path dependence, and place to investigate economic change. She concludes that differing sets of attitudes, ideas, and practices as well as the availability of land and land use determined economic results.
The myth of the dumb Puerto Rican : circular migration and language struggle in Puerto Rico
Authors: Kerkhof Erna
Published: April 2013

Focuses on the character with which the link between language and identity has become invested in Puerto Rico, against the backdrop of migration and education. Author describes the efforts on the part of some of today's politicians and cultural elites to inculcate a 'historical myth' that revolves around the detrimental effect that contact with the English language is assumed to have on the mastery of Spanish, and on 'Puerto Rican identity'. She concludes with an estimate of the general effect of the language struggle on Puerto Rican identity.
Security, insecurity, and the U.S. presence in the Caribbean
Authors: Walker William O.
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba. PETER KORNBLUH (ed.). New York: The New Press, 1998. viii + 339 pp. (Paper US$17.95)Psywar on Cuba: The Declassified History of U.S. Anti-Castro Propaganda. JON ELLISTON (ed.). Melbourne: Ocean Press, 1999. 320 pp. (Paper US$ 21.95)Intelligence and the Cuban Missile Crisis. JAMES G. BLIGHT & DAVID A. WELCH (eds.). London: Frank Cass, 1998. x + 234 pp. (Cloth US$ 47.50)Live by the Sword: The Secret WarAgainst Castro and the Death of JFK. Gus Russo. Baltimore MD: Bancroft Press, 1998. xvi + 619 pp. (Cloth US$ 26.95)From Pirates to Drug Lords: The Post-Cold War Caribbean Security Environment. MICHAEL C. DESCH, JORGE I. DOMI'NGUEZ & ANDRÉS SERBIN (eds.). Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. viii + 161 pp. (Paper US$19.95)Cuba, the Caribbean, and the United States have been frequently and intimately linked for more than a century. Because of the status of the United States as a global power, viewing their common histories from the vantage point of the United States is understandable. Such a perspective consigns the Caribbean, and to a lesser extent Cuba, to the role of passive actors in the making of much of their own histories. Several recent publications, though written for very different purposes, permit us to ask whether Cuba and the Caribbean have not been more active participants in their recent histories than U.S. predominance in the region would seem to allow.
The Dominican Republic in the twentieth century : notes on mobility and stratification
Authors: Hoetink H.
Published: April 2013

Sketches some major social developments in 20th-c. Dominican Republic, concentrating on the turn of the last century, the early decades of the 20th c., the Trujillo period, and the post-Trujillo era. Author pays special attention the the question of 'color', stratification, and identity and the relation between the country and Haiti. He concludes that the Dominican Republic has experienced many great changes, making society more complex and more stratified.
Turning over a new leaf? The Havana cigar revisited
Authors: Stubbs Jean
Published: April 2013

Discusses the historical and contemporary context of the crisis and reforms in the Cuban cigar sector. Author focuses on developments in the period 1992-94 when Cuba sank to, and pulled out of, the depths of the post-1989 crisis. This was when competition from the post-1992 boom of cigars made with Havana seed leaf grown outside Cuba became fierce. She concludes by considering scholarly interpretations of the 1990s agrarian reforms and emphasizes the need to foreground the interplay between external and internal factors.
The Ashkenazi Jews of Curaçao, a trading minority
Authors: Abraham-Van der Mark Eva
Published: April 2013

First describes the early Sephardi presence in Curaçao, the arrival of the Ashkenazi in the 20th c., and the relations between these 2 groups. Author goes on to discuss the Ashkenazis' economic success and the exodus of the 1980s. She asks whether the success and the exodus can be attributed to the characteristics of the group itself or whether conditions and developments in Curaçao account for economic fortune and the departure of the Ashkenazi.