Caribbean Societies Research Articles

Sea of Storms: A History of Hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean from Columbus to Katrina, by Stuart B. Schwartz

Sea of Storms: A History of Hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean from Columbus to Katrina, by Stuart B. Schwartz. Lawrence Stone Lectures. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2015. 472 pp. $35.00 US (cloth). Stuart Schwartz's Sea of Storms is an ambitious book. The geography of the book, the entire circum-Caribbean region, covers a variety of distinct nations and cultures--independent islands, small nations on the isthmus of Central America, and the Caribbean regions of Venezuela, the United States and Mexico--with complicated links to imperial rulers and each other. Chronologically, five centuries of hurricane history includes thousands of distinct events. As natural disasters go, hurricanes are complicated in their causes, predictability, and outcomes. Creating a cohesive narrative from his unwieldy topic, and doing so in an engaging lively manner, is a notable achievement. Schwartz mainly concentrates on three main themes: the social-political implications for societies in a hurricane-prone region, changes in the nature and understanding of hurricanes over the five centuries since Europeans first established a presence in the Caribbean, and environmental causes and results of hurricanes. The book's methodology relies on inserting hurricanes into the fairly accepted periodization and issues of Caribbean historiography. Schwartz judiciously does not assert that the experience with hurricanes was the causal factor shaping Caribbean societies; rather, he convincingly demonstrates that Caribbean history and society cannot be understood without taking account of these storms. Hurricanes are the ubiquitous known unknowns of the Caribbean. They will occur every year from late summer through autumn, with unknown strength, points of origin, paths, and numbers. One of the implicit conclusions of Sea of Storms is that, everywhere and always, planning for and response to these disasters is political. Ideology, expediency, and personality have determined whether a governing state will learn from past storms to build and provide in anticipation of future storms or will offer aid in recovery. Political actors have used hurricanes to build legitimacy and supportive constituencies when useful; others have left natural disaster to the realms of charity or individual resiliency. Juxtaposing the Cuban government's response to storms during the period from 1996 to 2002 with the US government's actions during Katrina in 2005 (chapter eight) is a persuasive tactic to argue that wealth and resources do not determine a state's preparation for, or response to, disaster. The state forms only part of the institutional story of hurricanes. We also learn about the nature of charity and community by inserting hurricanes into Caribbean history. Philanthropic debates about the nature and targets of charity got thorough workouts from storms. Community response has been more constant than that of other social institutions. With these responses, Schwartz demonstrates the effects of hurricanes on shaping Caribbean societies. He also emphasizes that empathetic and constructive community response has always been the norm, much more than the exaggerated narrative of social breakdown (p. 327) that grabs attention. Sea of Storms demonstrates that the experience of hurricanes was not uniformly diverse across time; Schwartz finds systematic change in important aspects of dealing with hurricanes. …

Creole Hegemony in Caribbean Societies: The Case of Suriname

AbstractEvaluating the representation of the East Indian communities in the national political identity of Caribbean countries, and building on the discussion waged in Guyana and especially Trinidad and Tobago, this article elaborates on the example of Suriname. It argues that the Surinamese example differs from that of other countries in the region with respect to the ample opportunity the Indo‐Surinamese community had to change their exclusion from political representation. A second distinguishing feature of Suriname is the uncontested Creole preponderance. Theoretically, the article differentiates the Gramscian concept of hegemony into contested, resisted, and accepted hegemony in order to capture the relations between the Indian communities and the national political identity. The article argues that part of the difference between these Caribbean countries, and more specifically, part of the self‐restraint on the political agency of the Indian community in Suriname, can be attributed to these countries' ideologies and specific demographic and political constellations.

Reproducing the British Caribbean: Sex, Gender and Population Politics after Slavery. By Juanita de Barros (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2014) 279 pp. $32.95

<i>Reproducing the British Caribbean: Sex, Gender and Population Politics after Slavery.</i> By Juanita de Barros (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2014) 279 pp. $32.95

Searching for the Erotic: Boundaries of Male Same-sex Desire in Caribbean Film

This article analyzes the representation of male same-sex desire in recent films by black Caribbean filmmakers, focusing on the narrative feature-length film Children of God (2009), written and directed by Kareem Mortimer, in contrast to the short film Riding Boundaries (2012), directed by Kerry Bovell, produced by Sekou Charles, and featuring poetry by Colin Robinson. I examine the difficulties in representing same-sex eroticism in the Caribbean because of larger societal concerns—from grappling with homophobic violence and internalized self-hate and shame to the dominant place of religion in Caribbean societies, which dramatically affects any engagement with sexuality. I focus on male same-sex desire in this article to situate roots of homophobia located at the intersections of misogyny, fear of the erotic and the feminine, and hetero-sexist patriarchy. Hence, I search for the erotic in these cinematic representations and ask when it is (ever) possible to imagine and thereby represent the expansiveness of the erotic, of desire, of love outside the bounds of religion, patriarchy, and colonial violence.

The Impact of the Congress of Vienna on Caribbean Politics and Society

For the hundreds of international delegates gathered at Vienna two hundred years ago, the focus of attention was, understandably, (as we have heard so many times,) the reconstitution of the European political frontiers severely altered during the French Revolutionary military campaigns between 1794 and 1814. The Napoleonic changes affected far more than just geographical boundaries and nominal administrations. There was also a major change in general mentality and political discourse, reflected in the comments of the English-Jamaican planter Bryan Edwards to his colleagues in the British Parliament in 1798: The times in which we live will constitute an awful period in the history of the world; for a spirit of subversion has gone forth, which sets at nought the wisdom of our ancestors and the lessons of experience. Edwards was obviously bemoaning threats to his comfortable way of life, but his lament would become relevant for all societies from that time

Good news from Latin America and the Caribbean: national and international restoration networks are moving ahead

Degradation of ecosystems is ongoing in Latin America but there is also a strong upswing in conservation and restoration efforts. SIACRE – the Ibero‐American and Caribbean Society for Ecological Restoration – is playing a key role in coordinating and promoting this trend at international, national, and subnational levels. In October 2014, SIACRE members organized the first national seminar on ecological restoration in Chile, with participants representing both academic and non‐academic sectors. This seminar served as the catalyst for this essay and was an historic event at the national level. Much work has been underway in the science and practice of restoration in Chile, but until now it has been fragmented. This first national seminar enabled helped the principal strengths and challenges that Chile has and must face in the transdisciplinary domain of ecological restoration. Since 2004, various meetings have been organized in the region, in order to communicate the importance of restoration, especially in Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, Brazil, and more recently in Chile and Argentina. Here we trace the history of national and subnational restoration networks in Latin America and the Caribbean, and of SIACRE, and then outline some goals and challenges for the coming years.

Toward a post‐conflict Colombia: restoring to the future

AbstractAt an historic moment, when Colombia is emerging from 60 years of armed conflict, the 7‐year‐old Colombian Network for Ecological Restoration (Red Colombiana de Restauración Ecológica [REDCRE]) has created four subnational nodes, and is actively developing several more. All of this is taking place in the context of the Ibero‐American and Caribbean Society for Ecological Restoration (Sociedad Ibero‐Americana y del Caribe de la Restauración Ecológica [SIACRE]). In mid‐November 2014, over 200 representatives of government agencies, academia, private enterprises, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) from the entire country attended a symposium to launch the Antioquia Province node, and take stock and plan the way forward. There are bright prospects of transdisciplinary and public–private collaborations in Colombia for ecological restoration and restoration of natural capital as part of a strategy to transition smoothly to a post‐conflict era. We suggest some goals and guidelines to help move forward an ambitious agenda to mainstream ecological restoration.

The Avowal of Difference: Queer Latino American Narratives by Ben Sifuentes-Jáuregui (review)

Sifuentes-Jauregui, Ben. The Avowal of Difference: Latino American Narratives. Albany: State U of New York P, 2014. 279 pp. The Avowal of Difference is constructed around Jose Quiroga's influential assertion, in his 2000 monograph Tropics of Desire that the concept of cultural production is inadequate and, indeed, misleading for a Caribbean society that is not neatly divided, either ideologically or legally, into a neatly juxtaposed heterosexuality vs. homosexuality. The same can probably be said of Latin America and, perhaps, the world as a whole, at least as an opening gambit in decentering Western European/Anglo-American parameters of sexuality. However, since the latter realms are the centers of research on and publication about so-called homosexuality, worldwide encyclopedic coverage driven by probably only locally coherent categories has held sway in the massive explosion of bibliography about sexuality in recent decades. It is, therefore, no surprise to find that two of the three Library of Congress subject tracings for Sifuentes-Jauregui's book are Homosexuality in and Gays in literature, the first a reference to the comprehensive sociocultural phenomenon at issue; the second an indexing of the specific social subjects of that phenomenon. The Library of Congress only uses queer as a modifier --e.g., Queer theory, a central postulate of which is, precisely, the questionability of both homosexuality and as identitarian or classificational terms. Quiroga's point--and therefore Sifuentes-Jauregui's more detailed analyses --are that there is a continuity in sexual behavior that renders binary assignments rather meaningless. Moreover, when one engages in a calculus of sexual acts (e.g., sodomy literally understood) vs. ways of being in the world (e.g., performing fairy), things may get too complicated for transparent tracking. So much of the historically recoverable queer cultural production in Latin America has little to do with gay issues and speaks, really, more pertinently to significantly different cultural forces at play. This becomes true when one examines the relationship in Latin America of indigenous sexualities to modern life (often very present and potentially integral to it), as opposed to native American sexualities in the United States (confined to the reservation or to urban margins, with virtually no visibility: indeed the U.S. missionary movement did its best right up to the present day to obliterate traces of the berdache, the two-spirited, and intimate homosociality). Is it any wonder, then, that, at least in literature and the arts, U.S. Scholars may have some trouble understanding the presence of indigenous sexuality in Latin America, often lumping it in with the internationalizing urban (e.g., as can happen with the muxes of Juchitan). Latin American has worked under the aegis of three overlappling sexual ideologies, at least as the so-called homoaffective is concerned (let us agree here on the extreme usefulness of this Brazilian adjective). …

Det svenska kolonialprojektets komplexa rum: om slaveri under svensk flagg i slutet av 1700-talets karibiska och atlantiska värld

The Complex Space of the Swedish Colonial Project: Slavery under the SwedishFlag in the Late Eighteenth-Century Caribbean and Atlantic WorldWhen Sweden took over Saint Barthélemy in the Caribbean in 1784, the island was inhabited by French colonists and their slaves. As the island was too small and barren for large-scale plantations, the Swedish authorities decided to declare it a free-port, outlined the site for a new town, and issued an invitation to traders and merchants of any nationality to settle on the island. Within the space of a few years, a Swedish cosmopolitan town, Gustavia, was in place beside La Campagne, the French-dominated countryside. This essay takes a critical look at the first twenty years of the Swedish era on the island. A special focus is placed on the question of slavery and the coloured division of space on the island. Similar to all other late eighteenth-century Caribbean slave societies, the Swedish island simultaneously contained a hegemonic white space and a dominated and controlled black space. It was a multiracial and multi-ethnic society inhabited by white naturalized citizens and burghers, visiting white foreign merchants and émigrées, second-class semi-citizens comprised of freed slaves and gens de couleur, and African and Creole slaves. While the first two groups enjoyed certain rights, the lives of the latter two groups were controlled and regulated by slave laws and other legal restrictions.

Towards “that republic in which complexions do not matter”: Derek Walcott’s &lt;i&gt;Drums and Colours&lt;/i&gt; Fifty Years On

Derek Walcott’s three hour pageant, Drums and Colours, commissioned to celebrate the inauguration of the West Indian Federation was first performed at the West Indian Festival, April 25 – May 1, 1958. Some feel that the nationalist and didactic thrust of this early drama blunted it value as art. It is, however, the opinion of this paper that this play provides one of the earliest conceptual maps for Walcott’s orchestration of key thematic occupations such as the quarrel with history, racial and cultural syncretism and the evolution of a distinctive West Indian theatre style. Fifty years after the breakup of the Federation led to nationhood for the various territories beginning with Jamaica and Trinidad, the play is still a relevant gauge of Walcott’s conceptual evolution on issues as diverse as the role of the artist in West Indian society, his thesis on historical amnesia and the benefit of the proto-Christian virtues of compassion and forgiveness in the fashioning of modern Caribbean societies.

Edward Bliss Emerson's Transnational Journal: Danish West Indies, Puerto Rico, New England, 1831-1834

The journal and letters written by Edward Bliss Emerson in the Caribbean provide exciting, idyllic, and at times troublesome visions of that region, but also insights on the life of a sick, poor, religious and brilliant young man. Emerson’s reflections on life in St. Croix remain unquoted, and although brief excerpts from the Puerto Rico portion of the journal appeared in print in 1959 and 1991, his more extensive text supplements the contemporary publications, which only praised the colonial administration. A third, and equally important location, is the implicit base for his perspective – New England in the period of Jacksonian populist democracy. The journal presents terse reminders of daily activities, mixed with extensive descriptions of landscape, exotic civic and religious observances, business and social customs, fruits, music and sports, with personal meditations on Edward’s readings, his search for health, and his adaptation to a new life away from his family, with little prospect of wealth or longevity. His letters include periodic reckonings of the benefits and disadvantages that he saw to life in Puerto Rico. This diverse eyewitness account represents an important resource for researchers of Caribbean society and culture.

“Cock Mouth Kill Cock”: Language, Power and Sexual Intimacy in Constructions of Caribbean Masculinities

since Foucault's association of language and power or his connection of dominant discourse with social privilege, we have become more sensitive to the ways in which the disciplining of unruly bodies as a means of asserting one's authority and power position has incorporated control of meaning. How gendered bodies, for example, are interpreted and made legitimate to a dominant group becomes central to its assertion of power. Often, however, the very aggression in these discursive assertions or the excessive language performance betrays the slipperiness of this attempt to confer or confirm power. What Noel Cowell has referred to as exaggerated rituals1 includes exaggerated [speech] rituals, as Moji Anderson and Nadine McLean demonstrated in their article 'Straighten Up Your Argument': Language as Shibboleth of Jamaican Masculinity which appeared in the previous issue of Caribbean Quarterly.2 Yet, this very hyperbolic verbal exhibition is an attempt to mask men's anxiety about and investment in the changing norms/roles/expressions of masculinity. In this way, mouth kill cock - in other words, it is what comes out of your mouth that condemns you, or the hyperbolic statements of hyper-masculine men expose their own embrace of the very subjectivities they appear to condemn and their own discursive investments. The more public the display, the more magnified the exposure is. And the very excess in public display seems to be a strategy to camouflage heteronormative and patriarchal complicity with transgressive intimacies. Public speech rituals contrasted with private transgressive intimacies expose the contradictory and complex negotiations of masculinities in Caribbean societies. As a way to theorise the complexity of gender construction in general, and masculinities in particular, Caribbean critics have been making significant use of popular culture. 3 In this special issue, for example, sociologists Clinton Hutton and Rhoda Reddock mine popular music to demonstrate the discursive manoeuvres of the everpersistent patriarchal operatives in the construction of Caribbean masculinities, but they are also aware of the ways in which those very strategies of legitimisation announce patriarchy's undoing. Both recognise the way in which sexual intimacy and women's bodies become central discursive tropes in the construction of 'legitimate' masculinities and in the disavowal of not so much alternative, but more accurately, subjugated versions of transgressive masculinity.The possibility of deviation from gender norms is recognised by those who seek to police these vulnerable stereotypes by their implicit acknowledgment that these are constructions open to transgression. Not surprisingly, patriarchy's fear of women's (and some men's) ability to challenge gender norms is performed in the theatre of sexual intimacies. Because of the recognition of the possibilities of transgression, women's bodies and their expressions of sexual intimacy have been heavily policed by anxious men. Of equal significance is a discursive surveillance - the ways in which the language associated with women and women's bodies becomes a way of marking the feminine as a site of deviance and deficiency and as the boundary line of legitimate masculinities. In this regard, Clinton Hutton's essay begins an excavation of how this primarily patriarchal stratagem works. Hutton locates in 1990s popular street expression and dancehall music what he calls the gyalification complex. In examining the speech rimai of cursing that has elsewhere been associated with Afro-Caribbean men,4 Hutton shows how the female body is marked as a site of deviance from gender norms for some men. By marking these men as gyal, their gender designation is hegemonically repositioned so that their masculinity is brought into question. Via what Hutton calls symbolic castration, these patriarchal and hyper-masculine manoeuvres prepare the stage for violence to the body and in some cases involve making the gyal-man a passive sexual subject in a punishing aggressive sex ritual. …

Migrating for a profession: becoming a Caribbean nurse in post-WWII Britain

Youths from the Global South migrating for further education often face various forms of discrimination. This Caribbean case study discusses how conditions in the home country can provide a foundation for educational migration that helps the migrants overcome such obstacles and even develop a strong sense of agency and self-empowerment. In the post-WWII period, numerous Caribbean women trained in nursing at British hospitals that have been described as marred by race and gender related inequality and associated forms of exploitation. Yet, the nurses interviewed about this training emphasised its high quality and downplayed the problems encountered. This positive attitude, it is argued, must be understood in the light of the key ideological role of education, particularly for a profession, as an avenue of social and personal mobility in the late-colonial Caribbean societies and the ways in which it enabled these Caribbean women to stake out a new life for themselves.

Theatre of the Rooted and Theatre of the Uprooted: Comparing Multiculturalism in African and Caribbean Theatre

IntroductionTHE VERY FOUNDATION OF THE CARIBBEAN society was multicultural. Correspond- ingly, avowed intention and constant declaration of leading lights of Caribbean theatre, from Derek Walcott through Errol Hill to Ron Williams, has been promotion and legitimising, through theatrical medium, of multicultural status of Caribbean. On other side of Atlantic, 'international multiculturalism'1 has long been foisted on native Africa by related factors of history, resulting what Ali Mazrui describes as a his 1986 film documentary series The Africans - A Triple Heritage. This triple heritage is generally appraised at levels of ethnicity, language and culture - or traditional African Islamic culture and Western culture, according to paradigm laid out by Mazrui.2However, such a broad layout of similarities history tends to conceal significant differences manifestation of multiculturalism two regions and their corresponding theatres. Multiculturalism Caribbean is integral, an inevitable part of life, and therefore always an integral part of Caribbean theatricality. In African theatre, on other hand, international multiculturalism is treated as incidental, intrusive and not always part of continent's history, a tag indicative of a contest of cultures. In this contest, indigenous culture appears to gain an upper hand through culturally committed theatrical craftsmanship. This essay pursues theme of diversity unity with regard to practice of multiculturalism African and Caribbean theatre and corresponding issue of identity.The term multiculturalism itself has not always been free of contention, and has recent times been viewed from contradictory perspectives. The search for parameters of multiculturalism theatre may therefore be befuddled ab initio by seeming ambivalence of definition(s) of term. The dilemma of multiculturalism theatre has rested precisely on this ambivalence.3 On one hand, multiculturalism refers to reality of a culturally diverse world, resulting diverse aesthetics, and need for mutual respect on part of cohabiting cultures. Recent definitions emphasise a positivist perspective of this term as an advantageous phenomenon; for example, Andrew Heywood considers multiculturalism to be either a descriptive term, as a general reference to cultural diversity, or a normative term, as an endorsement or celebration of such diversity.« On other hand, multiculturalism has also been seen to mean, especially when viewed from a Western, hegemonist or globalist standpoint, the assimilation of other groups into a base culture. 5 The distinction here is between two perspectives of multiculturalism: so-called cultural mosaic or cultural pluralism perspective, and melting pot or cultural assimilation perspective.6The sharp divide perspectives on multiculturalism is manifested at several societal levels, including level of politics and that of literary and popular as nations and communities grapple with theoretical purport of term and its practical implications. For example, recently, British prime minister David Cameron denounced thirty years of official multiculturalism and accommodation of non-British cultures on their own terms Britain. His contention was, and remains, that Britain had tolerated unfettered expression of different cultures for too long and in ways that run counter to our values. The panacea proposed by him, then, is a more muscular liberalism, which would involve, for example, making sure that people learn English . . . and . . . kids [of all backgrounds] are taught British history properly at school. Britain, Cameron would also insist, cannot continue hiding under cloak of cultural sensitivity or ignoring [contradictory cultural] differences ... with a hapless shrug of shoulders, saying, 'It's their isn't it? …

Stage of encounters: migration, mobility and interaction in the pre-colonial and early colonial Caribbean

The Caribbean Sea was centre stage in the earliest, sustained encounters between the New and Old Worlds, heralding the mass movement of people, goods and ideas between two previously unconnected parts of the world. The repercussions of this are woven into the fabric of modern multi-ethnic Caribbean society. However, our current understanding of this important chapter in world history is skewed due to large shortfalls in our knowledge of indigenous agencies in these encounters. A trans-disciplinary field of research, based on the synergy of archaeological and network approaches towards local contexts, provides fresh insights into how indigenous agency developed during these encounters, particularly in terms of migration, mobility and interaction dynamics. The present article illustrates how four indigenous Caribbean communities (re-)negotiated, adapted and integrated their multi-scalar social networks prior to and in the course of the different phases of the colonization process.

The Attack of the Creolian Powers: West Indians at the Parliamentary Elections of Mid‐Georgian Britain, 1754–74

This article seeks to build upon recent work on the impact of empire in mid‐18th‐century Britain by study of the electoral experience of parliamentary candidates who had lived in the West Indies and could boast a direct familiarity with the Caribbean. By 1750, a significant number of rich planters had relocated to Britain, and, in common with the Indian nabobs, their efforts to enter parliament aroused much adverse commentary at the elections of 1754–74. While these attacks were damaging to their interest, and occasioned the most thorough review of Caribbean society to date, the West Indians were able to respond by adapting their political campaigns to assuage metropolitan sensibilities, thereby ensuring that they were not bracketed with the nabobs or rebellious North Americans as imperial sources of domestic upheaval. Their success highlights the possibilities for successful imperial integration in mid‐Georgian Britain, although the West Indians could not rely on the same strategies to combat the abolitionist movement after 1787.

Three Ancient Colonies: Caribbean Themes and Variations

“This book is mostly a meditation, a personal look back,” Sidney Mintz confesses, “not weighty scholarship” (p. 24). Despite the modest disclaimer, the text sheds light on the characteristics that set the Caribbean apart in world history while also highlighting the diversity within the region. Jamaica, Haiti, and Puerto Rico each followed distinctive historical trajectories, Mintz tells us, which intertwined and overlapped economically, socially, and politically.What distinguished the region, Mintz argues, was the development of large-scale sugar plantations and the use of African slavery to cultivate the crops—what he calls the “plantation complex” (p. 12). This oppressive system encouraged the development of regimented and hierarchical conceptions of race, skin color, and social difference. Plantations and slavery shaped the colonies in ways that would last even after the collapse of these economies.Mintz combines anthropological and historical methods seamlessly to “make my own sense out of the past” and to learn how the past continues to be experienced in Jamaica, Haiti, and Puerto Rico (p. 22). To understand the specificity of these societies, he focuses on church-founded peasant villages in Jamaica, rural market women in Haiti, and workers on American-owned sugar plantations in Puerto Rico. This comparative approach reveals key distinctions among the three societies and therefore how the chronology of economic development was central to both the similarities and differences across the region. The rise of plantation economies in Jamaica and Haiti in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries set them on a different path from Puerto Rico and the Hispanic triad (which also included Cuba and Santo Domingo). Sugar only became a core feature of the Hispanic triad in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, under the ownership of American investors.The development of the sugar plantation complex in Jamaica and Haiti in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was paired with the emergence of a secondary economy in which masters forced slaves to cultivate their own subsistence crops. These crops provided the basis for the creation of a local market economy that shaped the future of the societies in important ways. The cultivation of these small plots of land produced what Mintz calls a “proto-peasantry.”Where Jamaica and Haiti differ, as Mintz highlights, is in the postemancipation period, during which the determining factor was access to land. Since Jamaica remained a colony long after emancipation, the state and the elite were able to continue to extract labor from the ex-slaves who were prevented from gaining access to land. This system therefore blocked the development of a peasant society. On the other hand, Haiti, as a result of the government’s inability to exert power, progressed in the nineteenth century into a peasant society in which the government extracted taxes but was otherwise unable to prevent the occupation of the land by laborers.In contrast to both Jamaica and Haiti, Puerto Rico remained a largely undervalued colony in the Spanish empire until the nineteenth century, when sugar cultivation boomed. By this time, however, slavery was in decline and Puerto Rico already had a poor white laboring class; the labor force, therefore, was a mixture of white, black, and mixed-race people. This meant that the strict racial hierarchies that existed in Jamaica and Haiti did not develop with the rise of sugar in Puerto Rico.Throughout the book, the uniqueness of the Caribbean experience is a consistent theme. In the concluding chapter, Mintz revisits the uses of the terms creole and creolization to argue that the terms reflect the specificity of the Caribbean experience. “Creolization, as the process by which slaves dealt with the immediate postenslavement trauma they faced,” cannot, he argues, be applied to cultural contact and change elsewhere in the world (p. 205). Creolization, Mintz reminds us, was the result of violence against and control of heterogeneous groups who “responded creatively to the condition” (p. 197). The social institutions that they built in response to the plantation complex have remained central to Caribbean societies ever since.Since Mintz offers compelling overarching arguments about the region while also leaving room for debate, expansion, and further comparisons, this book will be an excellent choice for both undergraduate and graduate courses. Students will gain a deep appreciation of the centrality of the Caribbean in world history and especially of the roles of Haiti, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica in the increasing globalization of the early modern period. Moreover, readers will learn about the distinctiveness of the region, such as the differences between slavery in the Caribbean and the US South. Along the way, they will see the enduring connections between the past and the present and will understand the importance of interdisciplinary scholarship.

Learning motivation and giftedness in sociocultural diverse Latin America and the Caribbean societies

This theoretical review aims to integrate state-of-the-art learning motivation theoretical concepts within the context of gifted and talent development models for native children living in Latin America and the Caribbean sociocultural diverse societies. Motivation as a determinant factor and a promoter of gifted achievement is analyzed. Also the relation between motivation, outstanding performance and underachievement is discussed and tendencies found in social-emotional development of the gifted linked to motivation are explored. Final remarks are given on the significant role of motivation in the achievement of gifted and talented children living under diverse socio-cultural influences that bias their performance on standardized measures. Recommendations highlight the importance of further research, in order to reach a convergence of theoretical and practical elements needed to promote Latin American childrens talent.

Writing Possibilities of the Past: Jamaica Kincaid’s &lt;em&gt;Mr. Potter&lt;/em&gt;

most of her literary works, Jamaica Kincaid is preoccupied with the traumatic history of imperialism and slavery and the continued repercussions of that history on contemporary postcolonial Caribbean society. writing fiction, Kincaid engages this thing that happened and who look like me that began in 1492 with the arrival of Christopher Columbus, as she explains in her essay In History. Her reference all who look like me indicates her concern for a shared history of Caribbean people of color. Kincaid then asks about this thing: Is it a collection of facts, true and precise in details, and if so, when I come across these true and precise details, what should I do, how should I feel, where should I place myself? Why should I be obsessed with these questions?1 She suggests here that the history recorded in facts and details is not able accommodate her (and who look like her). We can read this as History with a capital H, use Edouard Glissant's term: a totality that excludes other histories that do not fit into that of the West.2 this case, it excludes a history that Kincaid could place herself in. Glissant explains how the Caribbean is confronted by this absence of history:The French Caribbean is a site of a history characterized by ruptures and that began with a brutal dislocation. Our historical consciousness could not be deposited gradually and continuously like sediment. . . but came together in the context of shock, contraction, painful negation, and explosive forces. This dislocation of the continuum, and the inability of the collective consciousness absorb it all, characterize what I call a nonhistory. The negative effect of this nonhistory is therefore the erasing of the collective memory.3In response this nonhistory, Glissant calls on writers explore the obsession of the that has not yet emerged as a history to show its relevance ... the immediate present.4 As her own aforementioned quote shows, Kincaid is also affected by this obsession. Almost as if replying Glissant's call, throughout her oeuvre she continuously engages the history of slavery and colonialism as well as their perpetuating effects on people in the Caribbean. her fictional texts she does so creatively, as in Mr. Potter (2002). Glissant points out that [t]he problem faced by collective consciousness makes a creative approach necessary, in that the rigid demands made by the historical approach can constitute ... a paralyzing handicap.5 He postulates that writers must 'dig deep' into [collective] memory6 fill the void that the absence of history has caused in the Caribbean. This recalls Glissant's approach history as he performed it in his play Monsieur Toussaint (1961 ). the preface its first edition he writes, For those whose history has been reduced by others darkness and despair, the recovery of the near or distant is imperative. To renew acquaintance with one's history, or by others, is relish fully the present, for the experience of the present, stripped of its roots in time, yields only hollow delights.7 This poetic endeavor8 undertakes uncover history meaningful Caribbean people that is absent due the eradicating effects of Western history. Glissant here suggests that the history that hitherto was obscured or obliterated could be found again then provide a basis for present-day subjectivity. Appropriately enough, he calls the play a prophetic vision of the past.9In Mr. Potter, Kincaid's narrator likewise creates a prophetic vision of the past in that the engagement with the provides a stepping stone into the future10 while satisfying contemporary needs. Yet instead of trying recover or renew her acquaintance with the past, the narrator purposefully creates it anew and corresponding her wishes. this novel, the narrator presents herself as the author11 of the text in which she writes the life of her absentee biological father-the eponymous Mr. …

Toward a model of promoting youth development in the Caribbean through agriculture investment

For young people to be fully vested in society, they must be given the resources to become empowered for productivity. A model for engagement based on an analysis of a selection of youth agricultural programs with emphasis on those living in developing nations is presented. The model takes into account the social, cultural, ethnic, and resource diversity in the Caribbean region and argues that a flexible, rather than a fixed model is more contextually appropriate. After a review of select youth programs in the Caribbean and Africa, we offer a model with components that compliments particular circumstances within a country and would allow for flexible implementation. From this perspective, the face and, more importantly, the engagement of youth in Caribbean society can be significantly enhanced if these young people are supported by appropriate interventions that allow them to fully engage in the agricultural sector.