Afro-Caribbean Communities Research Articles

Thick Black women and misogynoir in the Caribbean

ABSTRACT It is well documented that thick Black female bodies are idealized in Afro-Caribbean communities. However, there is also a long and deep history of oppression of thick Black women in Caribbean spaces based on their race, gender, and body shape and size, which continues to inform the lives of thick Black women in postcolonial Caribbean societies. This paper is an exploratory, grounded analysis of thick Black women’s quotidian experiences in this dialectic, explicitly focusing on Jamaica. Using Caribbean research methodologies situated in decolonial feminist epistemologies, I explore the everyday realities of voluptuous Black women who have to negotiate white Eurocentric body discourses in contemporary Jamaican society. The study foregrounds the voices of thick Black women as they articulate their own lived realities with navigating ‘misogynoir’ in Jamaican public spaces.

Reaching out to fathers in Afro-Caribbean contexts: a case study review of best practices from the Fatherhood is Sacred program in native communities.

Historical trauma has played a significant role in the difficulties of fathers to fulfill their coparenting roles in Native American communities. This pattern is also true for men in Afro-Caribbean communities. Fatherhood programs developed by the Native American Fatherhood and Family Association (NAFFA) have shown effectiveness in supporting fathers, enhancing their confidence and coparenting skills, and overcoming trauma in Native communities. This paper seeks to identify the opportunities and best practices for cross-cultural adaptation of the Fatherhood is Sacred program to Afro-Caribbean families and contexts.

Singing Blackness

In this article I propose the exploration of racial discourse in recent Black Caribbean rap and hip-hop productions. Rap and hip-hop are often used as a sociopolitical tool that—through writing and language—achieve to create activist movements. Specifically, I study the work of the Cuban hip-hop group Obsesión [Obsession] and of Cuban rapper Robe L Ninho and the work of Dominican rappers Circuito Negro and JNoa. I particularly focus on some of their songs that make of the genre an opportunity to approach the racial topic in their communities and a way to celebrate Blackness. This way, these hip-hop and rap songs break the most commercial, common, and expected pattern of lyrics that focus on topics that oversexualize the female (Black) body, that often objectify women, and that reproduce a patriarchal and heteronormative discourse. Instead, these songs, through the topics that they explore, aim to create community and craft a space for social activism. They do so, for example, by singing about hair (Obsesión and Robe L Ninho) and by singing about their Afro-Caribbean communities and their existence as Black people in their neighborhoods (Circuito Negro, JNoa). Among a variety of tracks, I mainly focus on songs that are connected in topic and that represent a continuumin the production of approximately the last decade. So, for example I analyze the songs “Los pelos [Hair]” by Obsesión (2014) and “N.E.G.R.O. [N.E.G.R.O.]” by Robe L Ninho (2022) that focus on Afro hair, celebrate the beauty of it, and denounce the prejudices against it almost a decade apart from each other. Then, I focus on the song “Revolufunk” by Circuito Negro (2011) and the song “Qué fue[What Happened?]” (2022) by JNoa. In this case also there is a generational gap between the artists that symbolize both the evolution of the genre and the consistency of the topics that they cover and that are connected to Blackness. In addition to the racial discourse and the connection of topics across the last decade, these songs also create an inter-Caribbean discourse that transcends the concept of nation and nationality and instead identifies with and shapes a message for Black Spanish-speaking Caribbean people. These songs reveal a poetic that adds urban sounds to a spoken word tradition and that mixes writing, oral tradition, and language in lieu to create a sociopolitical activist movement for Afro-Caribbean people. Also, by focusing on race in countries where the Black communities are often made invisible, they shed light on minorities that usually are relegated to the lowest layers of society. Thus, through their music, these artists raise awareness on their Blackness and on their communities, but they also create a transversal Afro-Caribbean narrative that connects and creates a sense of community among Blacks in the Caribbean in their native Spanish language. This study, so, represents an opportunity to shift a US-centered discourse on Blackness and race and opens new ways of living and understanding the African diaspora in other geographies.

Music and Identity_ The Influence of Hip-Hop on the Formation of Urban Youth Culture

Introduction: Hip-hop, which emerged from the socio-economic hardships of African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Latino communities in the 1970s, has since become a global phenomenon that has a significant impact on the culture of urban adolescents worldwide. Review Literature: This investigation investigates the influence of hip-hop on the development of urban adolescent identity, examining its function as a platform for cultural engagement, social commentary, and self-expression. Methodology: This research examines the influence of hip-hop music, fashion, dance, and social media presence on the attitudes and behaviors of young people, utilizing a mixed-methods approach that includes a quantitative survey of 100 participants aged 16–35. Result and Discussion: Hip-hop's influence on fashion, language, and community is underscored by the findings, which also underscore its potential to inspire creativity and drive social change among urban youth. Conclusion: The study emphasizes the multifaceted influence of hip-hop, underscoring its significance in contemporary adolescent culture and its potential for future generations.

Panama in Black: Afro-Caribbean World Making in the Twentieth Century by Kaysha Corinealdi (review)

Reviewed by: Panama in Black: Afro-Caribbean World Making in the Twentieth Century by Kaysha Corinealdi Claire Alarid (bio) A Review of Panama in Black: Afro-Caribbean World Making in the Twentieth Century by Kaysha Corinealdi Panama in Black: Afro-Caribbean World Making in the Twentieth Century by Kaysha Corinealdi is a much-anticipated and crucial dive into the history of Afro-Caribbean diasporic communities, which White and Western academia often ignore or misrepresent. Corinealdi, a historian of modern empires, migration, gender, and activism in the Americas at Emerson College, delivers a powerful reading to challenge the narrative of Afro-Caribbeans and people of African descent as perpetual outsiders. By considering how Afro-Caribbean Panamanians helped construct their communities and the wider isthmus through activism, internationalism, and vision, Corinealdi dispels the myth of passive or reactionary participation, which targets communities of African descent across the globe, including in Panama. Corinealdi organizes her history both chronologically and thematically, using critical historical events to situate the larger themes and ideas the Afro-Caribbean diaspora has shaped in Panama and, later, the United States. Her first chapter, an introduction dedicated to the foundations of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora in Panama and the constructs which helped drive their activism, contains the bulk of Corinealdi's theoretical approach to this subject. Importantly, she outlines the opposing view that Panama was not the center of U.S. empire-making. Rather, it was an "inherently Iberian space" and a country intent on protecting itself from '"undesirable" and helpless Black foreigners (Corinealdi 2022, 3). Corinealdi argues otherwise, focusing on Afro-Caribbeans in Panama (and elsewhere) as producers of knowledge and active participants in their history, not passive bystanders "merely at the service of imperial and national structures" (Corinealdi 2022, 20). Corinealdi thus uplifts and promotes Black internationalism and multiculturalism, a vision for economic and political upward mobility, and Black enterprises that actively shaped the diaspora and the larger Panamanian culture. Chapter one, "Panama as Diaspora: Documenting Afro-Caribbean Panamanian Histories, 1928–1936," focuses on the Panama Tribune, a newspaper unique in its centrality as a source of current events and ideological vision for Afro-Caribbeans in Panama. The Tribune, Corinealdi argues, was a source of world-building that appealed to the working class owing to its candid discussions on immigration policy, discrimination, education, and labor through a critical and aspirational lens (Corinealdi 2022, 29). Important to Corinealdi's discussion is the established male-dominated leadership in the Black press internationally and the way the Tribune subverted this norm through a women's [End Page 123] section. In this section, writers like Linda Smart Chubb could freely discuss issues of interest to the diaspora and the role of women, who had long been erased as key contributors to the community and continued to experience exclusion (Corinealdi 2022, 33). By providing examples of the few women contributors with significant and often controversial ideas, many of which faced severe criticism, Corinealdi highlights that even within oppressed groups, some continue to face marginalization. Gender inequality within the diaspora received little recognition in the community, raising questions about the role of the patriarchy in shaping Afro-Caribbean Panamanian history. In this chapter, Corinealdi adds subtle commentary which feels poignant and relevant, musing about the opinions and feelings of the women mentioned without overstepping the limits of the historical record. Notably, she also focuses on the Tribune's merits and flaws, adding a refreshing nuance that neither oversimplifies nor overly complicates the diaspora and its actions. Corinealdi additionally emphasizes the international role of the paper, which connected local and national issues such as new immigration and citizenship laws to transnational and anti-imperial diasporic communities, asserting Panama as a place of inspiration, reflection, activism, and entrepreneurship valuable to Afro-Caribbean and Black communities globally (Corinealdi 2022, 38). In chronicling the history of the Tribune, Corinealdi simultaneously provides a look at the history of Panama, at the time entrenched in the passage of racist immigration laws aimed at non-Spanish speaking members of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. As Corinealdi provides context for the Panama Canal Zone, a territory legally controlled by the United States, and Western imperial influence that helped shape these policies, she decenters...

Apples for Audubon and Eggplant for Oya

Harlem’s historic Sugar Hill neighborhood possesses several public parks and cemeteries used by African and Afro-Caribbean Diaspora communities for religious activities. In my research, I have identified and mapped sites of religious activities and conducted interviews with community members, revealing how practitioners of Santería, Vodou, and Yoruba traditions have adapted to their urban home via the use of public space. The religious traditions explored here require interaction with nature and the physical land. Therefore, I argue that public space serves as critical infrastructure for facilitating the practice of these religious traditions. I build on the views of Erika Svendsen, Lindsay Campbell, and Heather McMillen that practitioners who engage in this use of public space derive a psycho-social-spiritual benefit from those spaces, while simultaneously contributing to the diversity and democracy of these public spaces as Frederick Law Olmsted and others have theorized.

What is Meant by ‘Repair’ when Claiming Reparations for Colonial Wrongs? Transformative Justice for the Dutch Slavery Past

While Transitional Justice instruments have been implemented in plenty of post-conflict cases, what little knowledge we have about the effects of these measures shows contradictory findings, indicating that they are often ambiguous and disappointing. Consequently the last decade has seen a specific call for a ‘new agenda for practice’ proposing a transition from Transitional Justice to Transformative Justice. It is a request by scholars such as Paul Gready and Simon Robins (2014) to develop from the bottom-up a concept of justice that is more ‘transformative,’ specifically challenging ‘unequal and intersecting power relationships and structures of exclusion at both the local and the global level’. This article contributes to this consideration by exploring the Dutch debate on its slavery past with the following question: how could reparations—fundamental in the debate around the acknowledgment of the slavery past—facilitate transformative justice? In the Netherlands over the last decade, memory and reparation activists seeking recognition for slavery and the transatlantic slave trade have been influenced by two major events; the 10-point reparation claim put forward by the Caribbean CARICOM countries against the formerly colonizing powers in Europe (2013), and the UN-International Decade for People of African Descent (2015-2024). This article describes the reparation claims articulated by various groups in and outside the Netherlands addressing the slavery past of the Dutch and some of the institutional responses. Reparations have gained little conceptual attention in transitional justice scholarship, and in investigating the concept of reparation we refer to Lisa Laplante’s (2013) dictum, which is that ‘Reparations can and should be viewed through a lens of justice’. Laplante made an important intervention in the field by asking which reparations contribute to what kind of justice. Reading the Dutch question through the lens of Laplante’s continuum justice model (2013) makes it possible to identify different justice claims made by interested and affected parties. Laplante’s model ranges from a narrow (minimalist) to a broader (maximalist) conceptualisation of justice; distinguishing four types of justice aims: reparative justice, restorative justice, civic justice and socio-economic justice. All four types are relevant when considering the various options a government and a society have in dealing with (historical) injustice. The empirical findings suggest that current reparation claims in Afro-Caribbean and Surinamese communities are less about a specific product (such as an apology or reparations) but rather about a social process of relation building (such as addressing structural injustices). This notion of ‘social repair’ challenges and extends our current understanding of what justice for historical wrongs is about, but—as is argued in this article—it will at the same time also make reparations more acceptable to larger parts of Dutch society. It avoids the narrow ‘blame-and-guilt’ framework associated with reparations in politics and the media, which exacerbates the problem of acceptance in the first place.The key arguments in this article firstly show that reparation theory is essential in identifying the kind of claims for justice that are being made, and secondly evaluate whether those claims are being addressed. Laplante helps us to see that if these justice goals of social repair are not clearly articulated and addressed, we would be likely to disappoint memory politics and memory activists, who ‘may compromise the overall justice project,’ thus jeopardising the potential for a transformative outcome.The notion of social repair, as proposed in this article, recognizes a joint struggle for a more fair and equal society.

Modernism after Postcolonialism: Toward a Nonterritorial Comparative Literature

Modernism after Postcolonialism: Toward a Nonterritorial Comparative Literature

Escrituras del yo, escrituras de la nación: Facebook, literatura y activismo en Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro

Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro is a renowned Puerto Rican writer and activist for LGBTI rights and Afro-Caribbean communities. Her literature focuses on the portrait of queer subjectivities and the celebration of Afro-American identity. In this paper, I connect the different arenas in which the author corroborates her political engagement in order to propose a new perspective on autobiography as a literary genre, including such a paradigmatic platform for self-representation as Facebook. This strategy, in turn, is coherent with the author’s proposal, since it is founded on the creation of a network of support for vulnerable communities and on the defense of a deep decolonization. Accordingly, the analysis and visibility of different ways to represent bodies and subjectivities converge in a study that, ultimately, questions the parameters in which writing, genre and nation are founded and interconnected.

"Sex Is a sin": Afro-Caribbean Parent and Teen Perspectives on Sex Conversations.

This study characterized (a) mothers' childhood and teenage experiences with sex conversations and (b) families' perceptions of current parent-child sex conversations within two underserved Afro-Caribbean communities in the U.S. Fourteen dyads comprised of Haitian and Jamaican mothers and teens (aged 14-18) living in Miami, Florida, completed semi-structured interviews sharing their experiences with sex conversations. Researchers analyzed data using thematic content analysis. Mothers' mean age was 41.85 years, (SD = 5.50) and teens' mean age was 16.35 years, (SD = 1.31). Most mothers reported forbidden or little childhood experiences with parent-child sex conversations. They affected their sexual attitudes, behaviors, and ability to discuss sex with their children. Although some mothers benefited from educational and skill development others shared fear-based messages with their children that some teens believed adversely affected the mother-child relationship quality. Culturally appropriate, skill-based approaches are necessary to improve families' communication self-efficacy for healthy sex conversations to occur in Afro-Caribbean families.

Afro-Caribbean Immigrant Faculty Experiences in the American Academy: Voices of an Invisible Black Population

Afro-Caribbean immigrants have been an integral part of the history and shaping of the United States since the early 1900s. This current study explores the experiences of five Afro-Caribbean faculty members at traditionally White institutions of higher education. Despite the historical presence and influence of Afro-Caribbean communities and the efforts within education systems to address the needs of Afro-Caribbean constituents, Afro-Caribbean faculty members continue to be rendered indiscernible in higher education and to be frequently and erroneously perceived as African–Americans. The study examines the lived experiences of these individuals in the hegemonic White spaces they occupy at their institutions with both White and Black populations. Through their narratives, issues of stereotyping, microaggression, and isolation are addressed. The participants also offer solutions to address these issues by university administrators, department heads, faculty development professionals, diversity officers, policy makers, and other stakeholders. The voices in this study shed light on an overlooked, misunderstood, and under-researched population within our faculty ranks in the American Academy.

Double Consciousness in Black and White

Double Consciousness in Black and White Robert Reid-Pharr (bio) At the panel “Callaloo: Literary and Cultural Studies,” Robert Reid-Pharr presented these remarks. It will come as no surprise when I say that we are in a moment of great change and crisis. To state the matter with some level of bluntness and sobriety, the US presidency has been taken by a right-wing nativist movement given new focus and energy by the cult of personality surrounding a real estate mogul and reality television star who openly and actively promises the harassment of Mexican and Central American immigrants, the increased racial and ethnic profiling of Arabs and Muslims, the continuation of the aggressive and often deadly policing of African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Latino communities, the dismantling of already anemic health care programs and policies, and the blunt reversal of the gains won by the women’s rights and feminist movements, particularly ready access to safe abortion. In this sense the United States has fallen rather depressingly in line with the anti-immigrant nativist political trends that have gripped Austria, Greece, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, among other places. We have, in fact, opted for a grotesquely American twist on the strong man politics and theatrics we saw during the years of Sylvio Berlusconi in Italy, grotesque in the sense that the rhetoric practiced and promised by the president-elect is and will be decidedly white supremacist while nonetheless maintaining a ridiculously ineffective cover of racial liberalism and color-blindness. The upshot is that, all the rhetoric of American fairness and progressivism notwithstanding, it is clear that though the recent US elections were about many things, at their center was a profound racial hostility and division. Indeed people of color overwhelmingly supported the president-elect’s opponent while a majority of whites, including majorities of middle-class, college-educated white men and women signed off on renewed white nativism. Our responsibility today, however, is to discuss the past and—more importantly—the future of the most influential journal of African American and African Diasporic literature and culture in the United States, Callaloo. We are specifically charged with the task of remarking the nature of the literary and cultural criticism that has appeared and will appear between the journal’s handsome covers. The matter that stalls us, however, the thing that steals and stills our breath is the fact that the character of our rhetorical—if not exactly our discursive—universe has changed. Our mouths are so full with the words “white” and “failure” that we find it nearly impossible to form proper sentences. My sense is that we have no choice then but to return to basics. Of course, the journal’s long history of representing and championing the varied cultures of the African Diaspora must be celebrated and continued. At the same time, I would suggest that the multi-valenced community loosely grouped under the label “Callaloo” should vigorously confront the illiberal and [End Page 153] anti-black ideologies that continue to molest and disable the peoples of Africa, Europe, and the Americas, no matter their race or ethnicity. Again, however, none of this is either surprising or novel. Where my comments do take a necessary, if not exactly new, turn is in my insistence that in our assessments of the frightening twist that has taken place in the politics and culture of the United States and elsewhere that we must radically expand what we take to be our natural purview. We must reconsider the most precious ideas developed within African American and African Diasporic cultural and literary studies, particularly, I would argue, double consciousness. Or to rush toward what I take to be the most significant of my claims, at least in the US context, we should build upon the insights of W. E. B. DuBois and his many students in order to name, critique, and ultimately dismantle what we might easily label white double consciousness. Within just the last few weeks, few months, few years we have seen the rather inglorious death of what one might think of a blank whiteness. In the polling booths of Wisconsin, Colorado, and Florida; on the angry streets...

Migration and Community Resilience in Nicaraguan Afro-Caribbean Coastal Communities

Bluefields, Nicaragua, is a diverse and complex city that has a panoply of cultures and languages. Youth face complex issues due to geographic, cultural, and linguistic differences from the broader Nicaraguan society. This theoretical analysis and literature review considers the marginalization of youth as a threat that encourages migration away from the community, further exposing youth to a future of isolation. Migration theories are reviewed and linked to the role that education can play in reducing these dangers and reinforcing cultural assets of the Bluefields community.

The Politics of Making Home: Opening Up the Work of Richard Iton in Canadian Hip Hop Context

Toronto hip hop music from approximately 1986–2000 featured several successful singles that demonstrated a focus on representational patterns, where the city was refashioned aligned with the aesthetics of AfroCaribbean diasporic communities. These tracks can be read as aggressive sonic attempts at fashioning a counterdiscourse to exclusionary local politics with the biopolitics of hip hop music and aesthetics that made “home,” forging nodes of belonging in the diaspora. Popular renderings of Afrodiasporic life reproduced an exclusionary logic that continued to render Aboriginal life not only invisible but also relationally irrelevant to notions of “home” and articulations of “belonging.” Moving through a colonial sublime that grounded an aesthetics of belonging on the exclusion of Aboriginal populations, hip hop's superpublic have worked through and begun to recognize the contingent nature of belonging and the necessary inclusion and consideration of Aboriginal presence.

Fighting Discrimination: W. Arthur Lewis and the Dual Economy of Manchester in the 1950s

We document, for the first time, the institution-building activities of the development economist W. Arthur Lewis (1919-1991) as founder of Community House and the South Hulme Evening Centre, two further education centres which sought to fight discrimination among the Afro-Caribbean communities of Manchester in the 1950s. We depict the struggle by Afro-Caribbeans to achieve a decent standard of living (and to escape from the ‘subsistence economy’ which provides the basis for Lewis’ most famous model) as a game of snakes and ladders in which the two main potential ladders out of poverty are first, the ability to generate non-wage income through self-employment and second, ‘vertical social capital’, i.e. membership of social networks of a kind which gave the employee the ability to fight back against discrimination. The most imaginative aspect of Lewis’s design for his further education centres is his incorporation of activities which build vertical social capital alongside conventional vocational training. Using a bargaining model to understand the ability of Afro-Caribbeans to resist discrimination, we find that Lewis’ social centres had a significant positive impact on Afro-Caribbean income and poverty levels. Through a merger between Community House and the West Indian Sports and Social Club, Lewis helped to create an innovative institution which has endured through to the present.

HIV-related stigma in African and Afro-Caribbean communities in the Netherlands: Manifestations, consequences and coping

HIV-related stigma in African and Afro-Caribbean diaspora communities in the Netherlands was investigated. Interviews with HIV-positive and HIV-negative community members demonstrated that HIV-related stigma manifests as social distance, physical distance, words and silence. The psychological consequences of HIV-related stigma among those diagnosed with HIV reported were emotional pain, sadness, loneliness, anger, frustration and internalised stigma. The social consequences included decreased social network size, limited social support and social isolation, and resulted from not only enacted stigma but also self-imposed social withdrawal. Also, poor treatment adherence was a health-related consequence. People living with HIV employed both problem-focused and emotion-focused coping strategies to mitigate the negative consequences of stigma. Problem-focused coping strategies included selective disclosure, disengagement, affiliating with similar others, seeking social support and, to a lesser extent, activism. Emotion-focused strategies included distraction, positive reappraisal, religious coping, external attributions, disidentification and acceptance. HIV-related stigma clearly permeates African and Afro-Caribbean communities in the Netherlands, and should be targeted for intervention.

HIV status disclosure among HIV-positive African and Afro-Caribbean people in the Netherlands

HIV status disclosure is often characterized as a dilemma. On the one hand, disclosure can promote health, social support, and psychological well-being. On the other, disclosure can lead to stigmatization, rejection, and other negative social interactions. Previous research has shown that HIV status disclosure is a reasoned process whereby the costs and benefits to oneself and to others are weighed. As such, understanding disclosure requires understanding the reasons for and against disclosure employed by people living with HIV (PLWH). In this study, disclosure among a population disproportionately affected by HIV in the Netherlands, namely African and Afro-Caribbean diaspora, was investigated. Reasons for nondisclosure were fear of stigmatization, previous negative experiences with disclosure, having observed the stigmatization of other PLWH, shame, the desire to protect others – particularly one's children and family – from stigmatization by association and/or worrying, and the belief that one's HIV status is a private matter. Participants reported disclosing because they were in a close and supportive relationship, disclosure led to emotional release, disclosure could lead to emotional or financial support, they felt a perceived duty to inform, and they had a desire to educate others about sexual risk-taking. The findings suggest that stigma plays an important role in disclosure decisions among these populations. They further point to a need for HIV-related stigma reduction interventions in African and Afro-Caribbean communities and culturally sensitive counseling for PLWH whereby caregivers do not automatically assume that disclosure is best but rather provide a safe environment in which the costs and benefits of disclosure can be weighed and strategies for disclosure can be developed, if perceived as beneficial by PLWH.

DanceHall: From Slaveship to Ghetto (review)

Reviewed by: DanceHall: From Slaveship to Ghetto Katherine Miranda Sonjah Stanley Niaah. 2010. DanceHall: From Slaveship to Ghetto. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. 238 pp. ISBN: 0776630415. An examination of “reggae’s progeny,” Sonjah Stanley Niaah’s interdisciplinary study addresses dancehall as a musical genre, performance space, aesthetic style and philosophical ethos, examining the phenomenon through its myriad socio-cultural implications. Stanley Niaah delves into dancehall’s contemporary performance practices in Kingston and across the globe, conceptualizing its inception in the physical spaces of Jamaica’s dance halls during the latter half of the twentieth century when recorded music played on sound systems began to dominate formal and informal social events. Unlike recent cultural studies scholarship that examines the ways elements of popular music may reflect, challenge, contest and/or otherwise interact with socio-cultural and national categories (see Rivera, Marshall, and Pacini Hernández 2009), Dancehall’s theoretical framework does quite the opposite. Rather than interpreting aspects of Jamaican culture or identity through dancehall, Stanley Niaah reads dancehall as contemporary Jamaican culture and identity. Through her theoretical “performance geography” framework, the author maps dancehall’s complex systems of practice and spaces of production and consumption to emphasize its everyday place in the lives of inner-city Kingston youth and the ways it reflects contemporary Jamaican social reality. The study underscores how localized dancehall practices and experiences also reflect the continued impoverishment and marginalization of Afro-Caribbean communities across the region, the centrality of resistance in Black Atlantic cultural expressions and the global impact of Jamaican culture, and complicates research focused solely on musical elements or critiques of dancehall’s “slackness.” Each chapter examines an aspect of dancehall performance, material and spatial conditions and social practices. “Performing Geography in Kingston’s Dancehall Spaces” maps and classifies the locations and uses of dancehall venues to historicize their contemporary use within a tradition of working-class appropriation of public space for celebration and discusses the state policing of commercialized, official and unofficial dancehall events. In “Ritual Space, Celebratory Space,” Stanley [End Page 276] Niaah uses a broad theoretical interpretation of ritual that touches on Victor Turner’s communitas to argue that dancehall practices bridge the popular, performative and celebratory in what the author terms “sacred geographies.” Outlining the names, times, themes, types and purposes of one-time and recurring dancehall events such as Passa Passa, Bembe Thursdays and British link-ups, this chapter intimates a complex matrix of rules and codes where the sacred and secular coalesce through “transcendence of social structure that brings the participant under the authority of the community” (p. 90). “Geographies of Embodiment – Dance, Status, Style” examines the role of the dancer (including interviews with Gerald “Bogle” Levy and Stacey, Dancehall Queen 1999), the economic and social rewards of dancing, the popularization and chronology of specific dance moves and the role of gender and women in the dancehall space and defines dance as a “sixth sense” of embodied elocution. The chapter “Performing Boundarylessness” argues that dancehall practices transcend class, temporal and spatial boundaries both within and outside of Jamaica. It explores Buju Banton’s international tours, the sound system Stone Love and selector Tony Matterhorn, international appearances of dancehall queens, the popularity of dancehall in Japan and the video recording of dancehall events. The final chapter, “A Common Transnational Space,” examines the common geneaologies of Jamaican dancehall, South African kwaito and Puerto Rican reggaetón as black performance genres that are largely “shaped in the margins” (p. 188) of the ghetto, criticized for vulgarity, use informal and/or public spaces to perform, rely on dance and movement for popularity, and are produced in small recording studios. Stanley Niaah insists on the common liminality or “in-between” spaces of these phenomena—created in the margins but mainstreamed, popularly supported but rigorously policed by state authorities. DanceHall is thus a detailed survey of contemporary dancehall practices. What the book’s title proposes is ironically what the work does not do, however, and Stanley Niaah’s tracing of continuities from “slave ship” to “ghetto” are largely unsubstantiated. For example, Stanley Niaah claims current Kingston dancehall events that warm up between 1:00 and 5:00 am are “reminiscent of secret slave...

The phenomenon of information technology for small community-based businesses

The information technology phenomenon has become a feature of most small businesses. Over the last few decades, small businesses have played a major part in UK economy and in local communities. Companies can now reach consumers almost anywhere in the world at a very low cost, while consumers can easily find product and company information. This paper investigates and explores the reasons why Afro-Caribbean and Asian communities in the UK lack skills and knowledge in the use of information technology. It uncovers and explores their business development prospects for the 21st century. The data were collected from a sample of 12 organisations, representing various communities across UK. The results indicate that most small community organisations predict the future with information technology. They feel it necessary to establish continuity, attract a wider audience and bring revenue to their events. With over 10 million home internet users throughout the UK, it is vital to have an effective communication tool with fully trained individuals.

A Comparison of Bahamian Cat and Dog Caregivers on New Providence

This article offers the first comparison of actions and attitudes of Afro-Caribbean caregivers who keep only cats or only dogs. A total of 330 Bahamian caregivers found that women primarily keep cats; men primarily keep dogs. Cat keepers were more attached to their companion animals but no more sensitive toward nonhuman animal-welfare issues than dog keepers. When considering actions toward pets, the study noted few differences between the two types of caregivers. Both types reported low neutering rates and lack of confinement. Findings suggest that although both cat and dog caregivers thought themselves good pet caregivers, both types would benefit from animal-welfare education. In communities where cat populations pose a threat to indigenous wildlife and current care-keeping practices may be a cause for concern, caregivers may need education as to the implications of their actions. Given the similarity in dog-keeping practices in the West Indies, the findings about cat caregivers reported here may be applicable to other Afro-Caribbean communities. Further research on cats should be done to allow better understanding of the dynamics and behavior of cat populations on small islands.