bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Hierarchies of whiteness in the geographies of empire: Thomas Thistlewood and the Barrets of Jamaica
Authors: Green Cecilia A.
Published: April 2013

Shows how a racial solidarity between whites in colonial Jamaica during slavery developed, but covered class differences between whites. Author examines the differences between the lesser-white, socially mobile settlers, and the upper plantocracy. She looks especially at social-structural factors, in particular genealogy and reproduction, that separated upper plantocratic families and dynasties, with connections with Britain, e.g. through absentee plantation owners, from less wealthy white settlers, that obtained intermediate positions as overseers, and generally were single males. She relates this further to the context with a white minority and a majority of slaves, and with relatively less women than men among the whites, that influenced differing reproductive patterns. The upper-class tended to achieve white marrying partners from Britain, alongside having children with slaves or people of colour, while lower-class whites mostly reproduced only in this last way. Author exemplifies this difference by juxtaposing the family histories and relationships, and relative social positions of Thomas Thistlewood, an overseer who came alone, and had an intermediate position, and the upper-class wealthy Barrett family, who were large land and slave owners, and established a powerful white dynasty in Jamaica, with British connections, over centuries, and that also included, sidelined, coloured offspring.
Caribbean development: an overview
Authors: Sutton Paul
Published: April 2013

Reviews development in the Caribbean, especially since 1990 to the present, and highlights future development prospects. Author discusses 2 reports from 2005 on present developments problems in the Caribbean region: the economics-focussed 'A time to choose: Caribbean development in the 21st century' by the World Bank, and the UN ECLAC report 'The Millennium Development Goals: a Latin American and Caribbean perspective', with a broader, also social and political, development agenda. He relates what both reports recommend for the Caribbean on the basis of their evaluations of past development. The World Bank report advocates a move toward the services sector, including tourism, offshore education, ICT services, and health services as most viable. The ECLAC report notes some social and political advances in comparison to other developing countries, but also remaining problems and inequalities. The author finds that the World Bank report's neoliberal, one-size-fits-all approach is not mindful of specific Caribbean realities, while the ECLAC study is more sensitive to local realities, and espouses a mixed economy. He thus considers the ECLAC approach preferable, but argues that it needs to go further, as it excludes Cuba and Haiti as atypical states.
Carribean migration and the construction of a black diaspora identity in Paul Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones
Authors: Chin Timothy S.
Published: April 2013

Analyses the novel 'Brown girl, brownstones' (1959) by Paule Marshall. Author argues that this novel offers a complex and nuanced understanding of how Caribbean migration impacts upon cultural identity, and how this cultural identity is dynamically produced, rather than static. He describes how the novel deals with Barbadian migrants to the US in the 1930s and 1940s, and further elaborates on how through this novel Marshall problematizes common dichotomies, such as between the public and the private, and between racial (black) and ethnic (Caribbean) identity. Furthermore, he indicates that Marshall through her representation of the Barbadian community, foregrounds the central role of women in the production of Caribbean identity in the US. In this, he shows, Bajan women's talk from the private sphere is very important. Further, the author discusses how the Barbadian identity is broadened to encompass Caribbean and African Americans in the novel, thus creating transnational black diaspora connections, such as by invoking James Baldwin and Marcus Garvey.
Through the looking glass on Cuba
Authors: Stubbs Jean
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]State Resistance to Globalisation in Cuba. Antonio Carmona Báez. Sterling VA: Pluto Press, 2004. vii + 264 pp. (Paper US$ 29.95)La Lucha for Cuba: Religion and Politics on the Streets of Miami. Miguel A. de la Torre. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. xi + 181 pp. (Paper US$ 21.95)By Heart/De Memoria: Cuban Women’s Journeys in and out of Exile. María de los Angeles Torres (ed.). Philadelphia PA: Temple University Press, 2003. vii + 192 pp. (Paper US$ 19.95)Looking at Cuba: Essays on Culture and Civil Society. Rafael Hernández. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003. vii + 145 pp. (Cloth US$ 24.95)In the politically charged world of scholarship on Cuba, it is salutary to comment in one review essay on four quite different volumes, each complementing the others. Three are single-authored, two on island Cuba (by Antonio Carmona Báez and Rafael Hernández) and one on Miami (by Miguel A. de la Torre). All three draw on theory and concepts and are male-authored and place-centric (Cuba/Miami). The fourth (by María de los Angeles Torres) is an edited collection of the personal testimonies of women seeking a place in between the hardened politics of Cuba and Miami.
Toward a Carribean cultural political economy
Authors: Sheller Mimi
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism and Cultural Hybridity. Shalini Puri. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. ix + 300 pp. (Paper US$ 24.95)Miraculous Weapons: Revolutionary Ideology in Caribbean Culture. Joy A.I. Mahabir. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. ix + 167 pp. (Cloth US$ 58.95)The relation between cultural production and political struggle, and between the aesthetic and the material as expressions of social relations, are absolutely central themes within Caribbean studies in all of its disciplinary and interdisciplinary guises. A key question for the field as a whole is what role it might play in generating new approaches to “cultural political economy,” which is emerging as an effective bridging concept at the intersections of anthropology, sociology, economics, political theory, and literary and cultural studies.
Book Reviews
Authors: KITLV Redactie
Published: April 2013

Maximilian C. Forte; Ruins of Absence, Presence of Caribs: (Post)Colonial Representations of Aboriginality in Trinidad and Tobago (Neil L. Whitehead)Nick Nesbitt; Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature (H. Adlai Murdoch)Camilla Stevens; Family and Identity in Contemporary Cuban and Puerto Rican Drama (Lydia Platón)Jonathan Goldberg; Tempest in the Caribbean (Jerry Brotton)Michael Chanan; Cuban Cinema (Tamara L. Falicov)Gemma Tang Nain, Barbara Bailey (eds.); Gender Equality in the Caribbean: Reality or Illusion (A. Lynn Bolles)Ernesto Sagás, Sintia E. Molina (eds.); Dominican Migration: Transnational Perspectives (Rosemary Polanco)Christine M. Du Bois; Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media: The Struggle for a Positive Ethnic Reputation (Dwaine Plaza)Luis Raúl Cámara Fuertes; The Phenomenon of Puerto Rican Voting (Annabelle Conroy)Philip Gould; Barbaric Traffic: Commerce and Antislavery in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (William A. Pettigrew)Laurent Dubois; Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Yvonne Fabella)Sibylle Fischer; Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Ashli White)Philip D. Morgan, Sean Hawkins (eds.); Black Experience and the British Empire (James Walvin)Richard Smith; Jamaican Volunteers in the First World War: Race, Masculinity and the Development of National Consciousness (Linden Lewis)Muriel McAvoy; Sugar Baron: Manuel Rionda and the Fortunes of Pre-Castro Cuba (Richard Sicotte)Ned Sublette; Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo (Pedro Pérez Sarduy)Frances Negrón-Muntaner; Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture (Halbert Barton)Gordon Rohlehr; A Scuffling of Islands: Essays on Calypso (Stephen Stuempfle)Shannon Dudley; Carnival Music in Trinidad: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture (Donald R. Hill)Jean-Marc Terrine; La ronde des derniers maîtres de bèlè (Julian Gerstin)Alexander Alland, Jr.; Race in Mind: Race, IQ, and Other Racisms (Autumn Barrett)Livio Sansone; Blackness Without Ethnicity: Constructing Race in Brazil (Autumn Barrett)H.U.E. Thoden van Velzen, W. van Wetering; In the Shadow of the Oracle: Religion as Politics in a Suriname Maroon Society (George L. Huttar, Mary L. Huttar)In: New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids (NWIG), 80 (2006), no. 1 & 2
Experiments in indenture: Barbados and the segmentation of migrant labor in the Caribbean 1863-1865
Authors: Brown Laurence
Published: April 2013

Focuses on indentured and other labour migration from Barbados to other parts of the Caribbean starting in 1863. Within the context of the sugar estate-dominated agriculture of Barbados, as well as its high population density, the author describes the policies and decisions of the governors and local assemblies regarding emigration. He points out how the sugar industry's need for labourers remained dominant in the policies, but that the drought in 1863 caused privations and unrest among the labourers, resulting in more flexibility regarding allowance of indentured emigration schemes and recruitment, such as toward St Croix and Antigua, and later toward British Guiana, and to a smaller degree Jamaica. He discusses how this led to rivalries regarding labour immigrants between colonies, and further attempts at restrictions on labour emigration and recruitment in Barbados.
Bookshelf 2004
Authors: Price Sally , Price Richard
Published: April 2013

A selection of books reviewed by Richard and Sally Price.
Tangled roots: Kalenda and other neo-African dances in the circum-Caribbean
Authors: Gerstin Julian
Published: April 2013

Investigates descriptions of Afro-Caribbean dances in early chronicles and historical material. Author focuses on choreography, as well as on musical instruments and their use. He pays special attention to descriptions of the Martinican kalenda dance. He discusses descriptions from the 18th c. of black Caribbean dance in French and other colonies, by priests and others, of the kalenda as a couple dance within a ring, and descriptions of other widespread early dances in the Caribbean, such as chica. Author notes that in these early descriptions the authors focus obsessively on eroticism, thus simplifying and exaggerating the dances as sexual, and ignoring their variety. Further, he analyses early chronicles on other widespread dances in the circum-Caribbean, such as stick-fighting dances, bamboula, djouba, and belair, comparing with present-day Caribbean dances, and on "challenge dancing" involving a dance soloist "challenged" by a lead drummer, found, for instance, in kalenda and rumba. In addition, the author focuses on the dances' musical accompaniment by drums, and the drum types and methods, specifically transverse drumming and drumming with sticks on the side of the drum, found today in kalenda, and other Caribbean styles. He points at the inaccuracy of some chronicles, mixing up dance names, and recurring superficiality and stereotypes. He nonetheless concludes from them that slaves from the Congo/Angola region probably played a crucial role in forming these early dance styles, and that their spread was connected with French colonialism and slavery and migrations from (once) French colonies. He describes probable Congolese/Angolan influences, such as pelvic isolation, challenge dances, couple dancing within a circle, and transverse drumming, but indicates that these are over time combined with other African and other influences.
From Suazoid to folk pottery: pottery manufacturing traditions in a changing social and cultural environment on St. Lucia
Authors: Hofman Corinne L. , Bright Alistair J.
Published: April 2013

Overview of pottery manufacturing traditions in St Lucia, placed within the island's cultural history from pre-Columbian times up to present Afro-Caribbean folk pottery. Authors focus on manufacturing processes in different cultural traditions through history, looking at raw materials used, the shaping and finishing, decoration, and firing process. First, they sketch St Lucia's habitation history since the first Amerindian settlers in 200 AD, and evidence of pottery, which climaxed in the later Suazoid period pottery since about 1150 AD, and discuss how later European colonization and arrival of Africans contributed to the decline of Amerindian traditions, replaced by European and West African pottery traditions, although some Amerindian traditions remained. The pottery manufacturing of 3 main cultural traditions are examined, discussing differences, as well as similarities due to cultural blending: Suazoid pottery, later Amerindian Island Carib pottery, with origins in the Guianas region, related to the Kar'ina, and current St Lucian, West African-influenced, "folk pottery". Authors conclude that all 3 traditions mainly use local clay, and include hand-built and low-fired pottery. Shaping techniques include coiling, and in today's pottery also fashioning with smaller lumps. Surfaces are smooth and polished in today's pottery, but more scraped and scratched in Suazoid vessels. Further, they find that decoration is uncommon in today's pottery, while Suazoid ceramics included decorations, and that vessel shapes tend to be simple in all 3 traditions. They also find that women have been the principal potters through time, although pottery was a male activity among the Island Caribs in the mid-17th c.
Debating the viability of ethnicity
Authors: Bashi Vilna
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]Immigration and the Political Economy of Home: West Indian Brooklyn and American Indian Minneapolis, 1945-1992. RACHEL BUFF. Berkeley: University of Califomia Press, 2001. xv + 240 pp. (Paper US$ 18.95)Black Cuban, Black American: A Memoir. EVELIO GRILLO. Houston TX: Arte Püblico Press, 2000. xvi + 134 pp. (Paper US$ 13.95)West Indian in the West: Self Representations in an Immigrant Community. PERCY C. HINTZEN. New York: New York University Press, 2001. x + 200pp. (Paper US$ 18.50)Caribbean Families in Britain and the Transatlantic World. HARRY GOULBOURNE & MARY CHAMBERLAIN (eds.). Oxford UK: Macmillan, 2001. xvi + 270 pp. (Paper £15.50)Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation. ALEJANDRO PORTES & RUBÉN G. RUMBAUT. Berkeley: University of Califomia Press/ New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001. xxiv + 406 pp. (Paper US$ 19.95)"Ethnicity" and its meaning, both as an identity and as a resilient cultural influence, has dominated late twentieth-century social scientific analyses of the process of immigrant incorporation. Perhaps we may mark the crowning of the term with the publication of Glazer and Moynihan's The Melting Pot, one famous tome that "explained" varying "assimilation" outcomes among the "new" (post-1965) newcomers by examining their ethnic culture for flaws or strengths that justified socioeconomic failure or success. Muddying the ensuing policy debate was the use of buzzwords, like mainstream, deviant, assimilated, minority, black matriarch, absent father, and underclass, that were themselves categorizing and hierarchical. The tautology of hierarchically labeling groups and then asking why groups with different labels have different outcomes seems to be perpetually invisible to the parties in the assimilation debate, but the debate itself rages on. Newer scholarship has added a different voice to that debate, arguing that variance in "assimilation" is instead explained by incorporation into social hierarchies (like racially segmented societies). The books reviewed here all speak in some way or another to these themes. They also examine the web of complex relationships migrants construct when defining and creating support institutions like "home," "community," and "family."
Behind the banner of culture? Gender, ‘race,’ and the family in Guyana
Authors: Trotz D. Alissa
Published: April 2013

Suggests that the family plays a role in the production of gendered and racialized differences in the Caribbean. Author focuses especially on Guyana, and the differences between Afro- and Indo-Guyanese. First, she revisits earlier scholarly works on the Caribbean family, limited to domesticity and feminist responses. She stresses that representations of the Caribbean family serve(d) the imperatives of governance, and the social stratification, from colonial times to the present. She indicates how the Indo-Caribbean women as submissive housewives thus became opposed to the image of the Afro-Caribbean women as working matriarchs. She further discusses the historic development of the family and women's role therein among Indians in Guyana since indentureship, highlighting the strong influence of colonial manipulation.
‘Cleave to the Black’: expressions of Ethiopianism in Jamaica
Authors: Price Charles Reavis
Published: April 2013

Describes the development of Ethiopianism, and illustrates its ideological and thematic content and manifestations, especially focusing on Jamaica, while also referring to the US and South Africa. First, the author outlines the content of Ethiopianism, describing how it is pro-black, contests white hegemony, colonialism, poverty and oppression, looks at Africa, and points at black people's redemption. Therefore the Bible is reread, Africa (Ethiopia) the holy land, and God considered black. He discusses Ethiopianism's early origins in the slavery period, and how it could take political as well as non-political, mental forms. Author points at the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion as the vital link in developing Ethiopianism in Jamaica, and then describes 3 groups/movements embodying the movement: the influence of the preacher Bedward and his teachings against black oppression, Marcus Garvey's teachings and activities for black progress, and the first Rastafarians between 1930 and 1938, who were in part influenced by Bedward and Garvey.
Ti ponch: or, bookshelf 2002
Authors: Price Sally , Price Richard
Published: April 2013

A selection of books reviewed by Richard and Sally Price.
Fact and fetish in creolization studies: Herskovits and the problem of induction, or, Guinea Coast, 1593
Authors: Maurer Bill
Published: April 2013

Focuses on the way Melville Herkovits used facts and facticity in his scientific work on creolization, and how these facts related to the theories in his work. Author relates this to the idea of fact as a stand-alone datum, or "fetish", independent of any theory for its existence. He describes how Herkovits in his work presented classifications of intensity of African retentions in different parts of the Americas, as well as of cultural elements, which Herkovits meant to be heuristic, yet, the author argues, seemed to precede the data. Further, the author discusses criticisms on this "economic anthropology". In addition, he sketches how the data as fetish, and related induction, developed out of the scientific revolution in Europe, separating arguments from facts, but also out of colonial ventures and the history of the slave trade in West Africa, making it a part of the study of creolization, of African slavery and the African diaspora. He points out, and applaudes, that Herkovits' theoretical stance changed from a strict empiricism to an awareness of the place of argument, or social convention, in the making of the facts themselves.
The family tree is not cut: marriage among slaves in eighteenth-century Puerto Rico
Authors: Stark David
Published: April 2013

Examines the frequency of slave marriage in 18th-c. Puerto Rico, through family reconstitution based on parish baptismal, marriage, and death registers. Author first sketches the development of slavery, and the work regimens and conditions of the not yet sugar-dominated slavery in Puerto Rico. Then, he describes the religious context and social implications of marriage among slaves, and discusses, through an example, spousal selection patterns, and further focuses on age and seasonality of the slave marriages. He explains that marriage brought some legal advantages for slaves, such as the prohibited separation, by sale, of married slaves. In addition, he explores how slaves pursued marital strategies in order to manipulate material conditions. He concludes from the results that in the 18th c. marriage among slaves was not uncommon, and appear to have been determined mostly by the slaves own choice, with little direct intervention by masters. Most slaves married other slaves, with the same owner.
‘La Comida Mambisa’: food, farming, and Cuban identity, 1839-1999
Authors: Dawdy Shannon Lee
Published: April 2013

Describes how Cuba developed a countrywide system of food meaning and production in the mid-19th c. that became a national, and eventually "nationalist", cuisine during Cuba's revolutionary moments. Author explains how the centrality of food within Cuban national identity was strongly related with the valency associated with the subsistence farming on small family farms ("sitios"), producing these native foods and Caribbean ingredients, e.g. cassava, guava, and sweet potatoes. The self-sufficiency of these small farmers was in emerging nationalist discourses opposed to the large-scale, export-oriented, colonial plantations and to slavery. Many small family farmers, of which many were ex-slaves, participated in the armed struggles in part to defend their right of independent, subsistence agriculture. Author outlines how since the early, mid-19th-c. Creole nationalism, Creole food and the small farms remained associated with authentic Cuban folk culture and with national identity, and related to independence struggles, and self-sufficiency, including during and after the 1959 Revolution.
United Nations International Drug Control Programme responds
Authors: Platzer Michael , Mirella Flavio
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]We would like to reply to the article written by Axel Klein entitled, "Between the Death Penalty and Decriminalization: New Directions for Drug Control in the Commonwealth Caribbean" published in NWIG 75 (3&4) 2001. We have noted a number of factual inaccuracies as well as hostile comments which portray the United Nations International Drug Control Programme in a negative light. This reply is not intended to be a critique of the article, which we find unbalanced and polemical, but rather an alert to the tendentious statements about UNDCP, which we feel should be corrected.
Slavery, antislavery, freedom
Authors: Brereton Bridget
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833-1874. CHRISTOPHER SCHMIDT-NOWARA. Pittsburgh PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999. xv + 239 pp. (Cloth US$ 50.00, Paper US$ 22.95)Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies. FREDERICK COOPER, THOMAS C. HOLT & REBECCA J. SCOTT. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. xiii + 198 pp. (Cloth US$ 34.95, Paper US$ 15.95)From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise andFall of Atlantic Slavery. SEYMOUR DRESCHER. New York: New York University Press, 1999. xxv + 454 pp. (Cloth US$ 45.00)Terms of Labor: Slavery, Serfdom, and Free Labor. STANLEY L. ENGERMAN (ed.). Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. vi + 350 pp. (Cloth US$ 55.00)These four books explore antislavery movements in the Atlantic world, and consider some of the consequences of abolition in postemancipation societies. They are immensely rich studies which engage one of the liveliest areas of enquiry in modern historiography - the transition from slavery to freedom in New World societies - and which represent U.S. historical scholarship at its finest. Each falls into a different category of academic publication.
National politics and ethnic identity in the Dominican Republic
Authors: Paulino Edward
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]The Struggle of Democratie Politics in the Dominican Republic. JONATHAN HARTLYN. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. xxi + 371 pp. (Cloth US$ 49.95, Paper US$ 17.95)Holocaust in the Caribbean: The Slaughter of 25,000 Haitians by Trujillo in One Week. MIGUEL AQUINO. Waterbury CT: Emancipation Press, 1997. xxii +184 pp. (Paper n.p.)Race and Politics in the Dominican Republic. ERNESTO SAGAS. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. xii +161 pp. (Cloth US$ 49.95)Azücar, Arabes, cocolos y haitianos. ORLANDO INOA. Santo Domingo: Ed. Cole and FLACSO, 1999. 219 pp. (Paper n.p.)Over the last few years there has been an increase in the publication of books about the Dominican Republic and Dominicans in the United States. This can be partly attributed to the increase of Dominican communities.1 Moreover, Dominican and Dominican-American writers who underscore the trials and tribulations of the immigrant experience are becoming more visible in the mainstream print.2
Patchwork history : tracing artworlds in the African diaspora
Authors: Price Sally
Published: April 2013

Essay on interpretations of visual art in societies of the African diaspora. Author relates this to recent shifts in anthropology and art history/criticism toward an increasing combining of art and anthropology and integration of art with social and cultural developments, and the impact of these shifts on Afro-American studies. To exemplify this, she focuses on clothing (among Maroons in the Guianas), quilts, and gallery art. She emphasizes the role of developments in America in these fabrics, apart from just the African origins.
The miracle of creolization : a retrospective
Authors: Price Richard
Published: April 2013

Expands upon ideas in the essay The birth of African-American culture (1992) the author co-wrote with Mintz, mainly concerning the creolization process among American blacks. Author describes how other scholars contested this essay, and argued that the African heritage, e.g. of African ethnicities, was more, and longer, present among slaves than Price and Mintz argued. He further expounds on these differing views regarding the speed and extent of cultural adaptation among (descendants of) African slaves in the Americas.
Bourgeois women in the early twentieth-century Dominican national discourse
Authors: Martínez Vergne Teresita
Published: April 2013

Argues that in the early 20th c. a male elite in the Dominican Republic, in formulating a national project toward modernization and economic progress, projected on upper- and middle-class women prescribed roles as subordinate to men. She argues that working-class women were totally seen as unimportant to nation building. She describes how in different writings of the time bourgeois women were depicted as incapable to contribute to the desired progress independently, i.e. other than serving men.
Re-evaluating the relevance of José Martí
Authors: Guerra Lillian
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]José Marti's "Our America": From National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies. JEFFREY BELNAP & RAÜL FERNANDEZ (eds.). Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1998. viii + 344 pp. (Cloth US$ 49.95, Paper US$ 17.95)Re-Reading José Marti (1853-1895): One Hundred Years Later. JULIO RODRÏGUEZ-LUIS (ed.). Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. xxiii + 158 pp. (Paper US$ 16.95)José Marti Reader: Writings on the Americas. DEBORAH SHNOOKAL & MIRTA MUNIZ (eds.). Melbourne: Ocean Press, 1999. xiii + 276 pp. (Paper US$ 19.95)Generated by the tide of commemorations in 1995 that marked the one-hundredth anniversary of the death of José Marti, a number of scholarly volumes have washed into the mainstream of debates on the origins and contradictions of identities now taking place across disciplines and geographic regions. A new generation of Latin Americanists, specialists of U.S. history, politics, and literature, as well as scholars in the ever-widening domain of cultural studies, have published works on José Marti's writings and life experiences. Taken together, they represent an unprecedented re-evaluation and reinterpretation of José Marti as both a man and a myth. In general, the methods, approaches, and conceptual points of reference on which these new works rely make for an exciting and unique set of arguments about who Marti was, why he mattered and what his writings teil us about the time in which he lived and the multiple societies of which he formed a part.
Bookshelf 2000
Authors: Price Sally , Price Richard
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]Another year, another monumental stack of new books with Caribbeanist interest of one sort or another. NWIG reviewers have been contributing full essays on more than seventy such books each year, but that still leaves well over one hundred others deserving of mention in this residual wrap-up of the 2000 season. We are deeply grateful to those scholars who have taken the time to provide reviews. And we are pleased to announce that the 2000 edition of the Caribbeanist Hall of Shame (created for scholars who commit themselves to reviews but then neither provide them nor relinquish the book so someone else can take on the task) has shrunk from a membership of 15 (in 1993, its inaugural year) to just two (identified, as has become our custom, by first and last initials). Despite our gentle reminders, J—e F—s failed to review The Dominican Republic and the United States: From Imperialism to Transnationalism, edited by G. Pope Atkins & Larman C. Wilson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998, paper, US$ 20.00) and B—a S—i never came through with a review of Constructing a Colonial People: Puerto Rico and the United States, 1898-1932, by Pedro A. Caban (Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1999, cloth US$ 60.00).
Slave medicine and Obeah in Barbados, circa 1650 to 1834
Authors: Handler Jerome S.
Published: April 2013

Describes the medical beliefs and practices of Barbadian slaves. Author discusses the role of supernatural forces in slave medicine, the range of beliefs and practices encompassed by the term Obeah, and how the meaning of this term changed over time. He emphasizes the importance of African beliefs and practices on which Barbadian slave medicine fundamentally rested. In the appendix, the author discusses the early use of the term Obeah in Barbados and the Anglophone Caribbean.
The sweet trade revived
Authors: Lane Kris
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]Women Pirates and the Politics of the Jolly Roger. ULRIKE KLAUSMANN, MARION MEINZERIN & GABRIEL KUHN. New York: Black Rose Books, 1997. x + 280 pp. (Paper US$ 23.99)Pirates! Brigands, Buccaneers, and Privateers in Fact, Fiction, and Legend. JAN ROGOZINSKI. New York: Da Capo Press, 1996. xvi + 398 pp. (Paper US$ 19.95)Sir Francis Drake: The Queens Pirate. HARRY KELSEY. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998, xviii + 566 pp. (Cloth US$ 35.00)A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates. CAPT. CHARLES JOHNSON (edited and with introduction by DAVID CORDINGLY). New York: Lyons Press. 1998 [Orig. 1724]. xiv + 370 pp. (Cloth US$ 29.95)The subject of piracy lends itself to giddy jokes about parrots and wooden legs, but also talk of politics, law, cultural relativism, and of course Hollywood. This selection of new books on piracy in the Caribbean and beyond touches on all these possibilities and more. They include a biography of the ever-controversial Elizabethan corsair, Francis Drake; an encyclopedia of piracy in history, literature, and film; a reissued classic eighteenth-century pirate prosopography; and an anarchist-feminist political tract inspired by history and legend. If nothing else, this pot-pourri of approaches to piracy should serve as a reminder that the field of pirate studies is not only alive and well, but gaining new ground.
Have we passed the last post-? Theorizing post/colonial literature
Authors: Arnold A. James
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]Aime Cesaire. GREGSON DAVIS. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xvi + 208 pp. (Cloth US$ 59.95)Caribbean Poetics: Toward an Aesthetic of West Indian Literature. SILVIO TORRES-SAILLANT. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xiv + 353 pp. (Cloth £45.00)Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature. CHRIS BONGIE. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. xi + 543 pp. (Cloth US$ 65.00, Paper US$ 24.95)The three books under review here all make important claims for a Caribbean poetics, but they do so from perspectives that range from practical criticism (Davis), through comparative poetics (Torres-Saillant), to what is sometimes called high theory (Bongie). With the exception of Davis's book, which is a detailed treatment of a single seminal figure, they range widely and seek grounds for broad comparative assessments. The need to establish such grounds for comparison is witnessed by the volume History of Literature in the Caribbean, which Bongie and Torres-Saillant both reference. To find one's way in this potentially dizzying display of critical and theoretical acumen, it will be most helpful to proceed from the general to the particular, from high theory to practical criticism.
Ecumen(ical) texts: Caribbean nation-states and the global ecumene
Authors: Khan Aisha
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]The Haunting Past: Politics, Economics and Race in Caribbean Life. ALVIN O. THOMPSON. Kingston: Ian Randle, 1997. xvi + 283 pp. (Cloth US$ 70.95, Paper US$ 27.95)Nationalism and Identity: Culture and the Imagination in a Caribbean Diaspora. STEFANO HARNEY. Kingston: University of the West Indies; London: Zed Books, 1996. 216 pp. (Paper J$ 350.00, US$ 10.00, £6.00)Recharting the Caribbean: Land, Law, and Citizenship in the British Virgin Islands. BILL MAURER. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. xvii + 301 pp. (Cloth US$ 44.50)Building on views espoused by the American Enterprise Institute, columnist George Will solves the dilemma of unequal development among contemporary nation-states in one fell swoop: Western Europe and North America outstripped Latin America and its environs, among other places, for one reason - culture. Much meaning must be unpacked from that word, but the conclusion is: The spread of democracy, free markets, technology, and information is not enough to rescue ... nations, from the consequences of their cultural deficits. Such deficits, although not incurable, are intractable. (Will 1999:64)Another "lesson to be drawn," he says, is that "Government cannot revise culture, wholesale, but government has - it cannot help but have - cultural consequences" (Will 1999:64). Even as we embark on the twenty-first century, we cling to hoary, Age of Imperialism presumptions about the character and role of culture - signaled implicitly with a capital C. Such presumptions fuel statements like the above; governments convey material and moral improvements but these do not take hold in culturally inadequate environments.
Bookshelf 1999
Authors: Price Richard , Price Sally
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph in part]It is our pleasure to announce that in this millennial issue, the annual Caribbeanist Hall of Shame has shrunken dramatically and includes but eleven scholars and fourteen books. As always, we list those works that, as of press time (January 2000), have not been discussed because the scholars who agreed to review them have - despite reminder letters - neither provided a text nor relinquished the books so that they could be assigned to someone else. (As has become our custom, we indicate slack reviewers' names with both initial and final letters, in an attempt to forestall false accusations and protect the reputations of the innocent.) And as in past years, we hope this may serve as a kind of backlist "books received":
Disrupting the nation : gender transformations in the Trinidad Carnival
Authors: De Freitas Patricia A.
Published: April 2013

Author uses the presence and performance of women in Trinidad's Carnival, and the narratives surrounding them, to comprehend the linkages between Carnival and the Trinidadian national identity, between gender and the nationalist project. She contends that the public debates surrounding the perceived 'feminization' of Carnival are highly charged because it both exposes the dilemma of post-colonial nation-building and strikes at the heart of the nationalist project.
Names and naming in Afro-Caribbean cultures
Authors: Burton Richard
Published: April 2013

Compares naming practices in the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean and in Afro-American culture. Author asks how one is to interpret multiple identities and the parallel practice of taking over the names of the powerful as is common in both Afro-creole and Afro-American culture. He argues that Afro-creole culture is not a culture of resistance but an oppositional culture. It is a subaltern culture in part derived from a dominant culture which it can only oppose from within.
Karikuri : the evolving relationship of the Karinya people of Guyana to gold mining
Authors: Forte Janette
Published: April 2013

Focuses on the interplay between the Karinya in northwestern Guyana and the intensifying gold mining activities in their homelands. Author documents how many Karinya were drawn into gold mining and how this activity and the contact with outsiders affected their lives. She concludes that in these encounters with outsiders the Karinya have fared badly, lacking the social organization and leadership that might have allowed them to create some space for themselves.
Paule Marshall and the search for the African diaspora
Authors: Gikandi Simon
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]The Fiction of Paule Marshall: Reconstructions of History, Culture, and Gender. DOROTHY HAMER DENNISTON. Knoxville: University of Tennesee Press, 1995. xxii + 187 pp. (Paper US$ 15.00)Toward Wholeness in Paule Marshall's Fiction. JOYCE PETTIS.Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995. xi + 173 pp. (Cloth US$ 29.50)Black and Female: Essays on Writings by Black Women in the Diaspora. BRITA LINDBERG-SEYERSTED. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1994. 164 pp. (Paper n.p.)Literary history has not been very kind to Paule Marshall. Even in the early 1980s when literature produced by African-American women was gaining prominence among general readers and drawing the attention of critics, Marshall was still considered to be an enigmatic literary figure, somehow important in the canon but not one of its trend setters. As Mary Helen Washington observed in an influential afterword to Brown Girl, Brownstones, although Marshall had been publishing novels and short stories since the early 1950s, and was indeed the key link between African-American writers of the 1940s and those of the 1960s, she was just being "discovered" in the 1980s. While there has always been a small group of scholars, most notably Kamau Brathwaite, who have called attention to the indispensable role Marshall has played in the shaping of the literary canon of the African Diaspora, and of her profound understanding of the issues that have affected the complex formation and survival of African-derived cultures in the New World, many critics have found it difficult to locate her within the American, African-American, and Caribbean traditions that are the sources of her imagination and the subject of her major works. Marshall has embraced all these cultures in more profound ways than her more famous contemporaries have, but she has not gotten the accolades that have gone to lesser writers like Alice Walker. It is indeed one of the greatest injustices of our time that Walker's limited understanding of the cultures and peoples of the African Diaspora has become the point of reference for North American scholars of Africa, the Caribbean, and South America while Marshall's scholastic engagement with questions of Diaspora has not drawn the same kind of interest.
Bookshelf 1998
Authors: Price Richard , Price Sally
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]With the usual solemnity, it is once again our duty to announce the annual Caribbeanist Hall of Shame. As always, we list those books that, as of press time (January 1999), have not been reviewed because the scholars who agreed to the task have - despite reminder letters - neither provided a text nor relinquished the books so that they could be assigned to someone else. (Continuing the practice initiated in 1997, we indicate names with both initial and final letters, in an attempt to forestall false accusations and protect the reputations of the innocent.) And as in past years, we hope these paragraphs may serve as a kind of backlist "books received." We are pleased to report that the advent of email has helped make this year's list even briefer than in the past. (As George Mentore wrote, in reply to an email, "Thank you for the gentle reminder; shame, as you know, always works for Caribbeanists.") And we join other NWIG readers in expressing heartfelt thanks to all those scholars who did take the time to prepare reviews and share their assessments.
Speech community formation : a sociolinguistic profile of the Trio of Suriname
Authors: Carlin Eithne B.
Published: April 2013

Overview of the Trio language. Brings together both extralinguistic factors, such as historical, economic, sociological and cultural factors that have and still contribute to the present-day status of the Trio Amerindians and their language and internal sociolinguistic factors, that is, factors that influence the choice of what the Trio speak to whom, how, and when. Shows that Trio sociolinguistically-speaking is in a strong position.
Ki sorto di Reino/What kind of Kingdom? : Antillean and Aruban views and expectations of the Kingdom of the Netherlands
Authors: Verton Peter , Oostindie Gert
Published: April 2013

Article, based on the research report Ki sorto di Reino / What kind of Kingdom (1998), presents the outcome of an opinion poll carried out on the 6 Dutch Caribbean islands in 1997-98. The survey covers the views and expectations of the Antilleans and Arubans with regard to the Kingdom, and in particular the Netherlands. Themes covered include the constitutional structure; residence and passport; protection of national territory, democracy, and constitutional rule; economic support; respect; and education.
Cookbooks and Caribbean cultural identity : an English-language hors d'oeuvre
Authors: Higman B.W.
Published: April 2013

Analysis of 119 English-language cookbooks (1890-1997) published in or having to do with the Caribbean. This study of the history of cookbooks indicates what it means to be Caribbean or to identify with some smaller territory or grouping and how this meaning has changed in response to social and political developments. Concludes that cookbook-writers have not been successful in creating a single account of the Caribbean past or a single, unitary definition of Caribbean cuisine or culture.
The cultural politics of biomedicine in the Caribbean
Authors: Brodwin Paul E.
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]Healing the Masses: Cuban Health Politics at Home and Abroad. JULIE M. FEINSILVER. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. xx + 307 pp. (Cloth US$ 45.00, Paper US$ 17.00)The Blessings of Motherhood: Health, Pregnancy and Child Care in Dominica. ANJA KRUMEICH. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 1994. iii + 278 pp. (Paper NLG 47.50)Disability and Rehabilitation in Rural Jamaica: An EthnographicStudy. RONNIE LINDA LEAVITT. Rutherford NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1992. 249 pp. (Cloth US$ 39.50)Based on research in three Caribbean societies, these books explore the contours of biomedicine ("Western" or scientific medicine) as a cultural system and an instrument of state power. On a theoretical level, the authors take up the blurred boundaries between Western biomedicine and other forms of healing as well as the political meanings and contradictions hidden behind everyday clinical routines. Their particular research projects, however, ask what has happened to the dream of universally accessible medical care in the past twenty years in the Caribbean region. The books focus on a community-based pediatric disability program in Jamaica(Leavitt), maternal and child health care in Dominica (Krumeich), and Cuba's national project of medical modernization (Feinsilver). Specific diseases or clinical outcomes are less at issue than the cultural and political dimensions of planned health development and the social transformations it sets into motion on both local and national levels.
Bookshelf 1997
Authors: Price Richard , Price Sally
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]Once again it is our sad duty to announce the annual Caribbeanist Hall of Shame. As always, we list those books that, as of press time (January 1998), have not been reviewed because the scholars who agreed to the task have - despite reminder letters - neither provided a text nor relinquished the books so that they could be assigned to someone else. (Continuing the practice initiated in 1997, we indicate names with both initial and final letters, in an attempt to forestall false accusations and protect the reputations of the innocent.) And as in past years, we hope these paragraphs may serve as a kind of backlist "books received." We are pleased to report that this year's list is significantly briefer than in the past. And we join our readers in expressing heartfelt thanks to all those scholars who did take the time to prepare reviews and share their assessments with us.
Spaniards, 'pardos', and the missing mestizos: identities and racial categories in the early Hispanic Caribbean
Authors: Schwartz Stuart B.
Published: April 2013

Traces the history of the mestizos, the descendants of Spanish-Indian contacts during the early stages of Caribbean settlement. Author asks whether they constituted a separate ethnicity. He also looks at the question why the position of the mestizos in the Spanish Caribbean seems different from that in other areas in Spanish America.
The changing face of Nassau : the impact of tourism on Bahamian society in the 1920s and 1930s
Authors: Saunders Gail
Published: April 2013

Description of the development of the Bahamian tourist industry in the interbellum. Author analyses tourism's impact on the socioeconomic and political life of the colony, including race relations and its effect on white, coloured, and black entrepreneurs.
The naming of Haiti
Authors: Geggus David
Published: April 2013

When St. Domingue declared its independence it was renamed Haiti, an Amerindian name. Author explores what the founding fathers of Haitian independence might have known about the Amerindian past in the Caribbean and in South America. He also raises questions about ethnicity and identity in 19th-c. Haiti.
Tracking the Caribbean sound: three current hits
Authors: Bilby Kenneth M.
Published: April 2013

[First paragraph]Zouk: World Music in the West lndies. JOCELYNE GuiLBAULT (with GAGE AVERILL, ÉDOUARD BENOIT & GREGORY RABESS). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. xxv + 279 pp. and compact disk. (Cloth US$ 55.00, Paper US$ 27.75) Calypso Calaloo: Early Carnival Music in Trinidad. DONALD R. HlLL. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993. xvi + 344 pp. and compact disk. (Cloth US$ 49.95, Paper US$ 24.95) Calypso & Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad. GORDON ROHLEHR. Port of Spain: Gordon Rohlehr, 1990. x + 613 pp. (Paper US$ 40.00)In 1983, from my Hstening post in Cayenne, the southernmost extension of the French Caribbean, I reported that "popular musicians in the Lesser Antilles are in the process of breathing life into new musical varieties blending soka, cadence, and reggae" (Bilby 1985:211). Little did I know that what I was describing was the sudden emergence, at that very moment, of an entirely new music in French Guiana's fellow Départements d'Outre-Mer to the north, Martinique and Guadeloupe. Down in Cayenne, which has always had close ties to the French Antilles, there was a feeling in the air that some fresh and invigorating cultural trend was about to burst forth. Even in the Maroon villages of the French Guianese interior, where I relocated in early 1984, the excitement was palpable.