West Indian Immigrants Research Articles

Cultural Consciousness and Gender Identity in Moses Ascending and Moses Migrating

Samuel Selvon’s literature lays emphasis on the development of a consciousness that moulds the entire issue of identity into a new shape. His literature comprises the story of West Indian immigrants in London and through his central characters, one can learn about Caribbeans’ realities in England. The arrival of commonwealth subjects in England after World War II was considered, by the protagonists as well as other characters in Selvon’s novel, as a possibility to form positive inter-racial relations to cope with the problems of decolonization, yet it signals the progressive failure of such possibility. His protagonists are subjected to cultural consciousness, existential struggle, crime, gender issues, love and hate, betrayal and death that lurk behind the city’s glimmer. Samuel Selvon outlines how their experiences and action influence the formation process of their identity and defines their behavior. This research paper endeavors to explore the cultural consciousness shared by Selvon’s protagonists as well as the issue of gender identity experienced by them, also aims to analyze the experience of exile commonly shared by Selvon’s main characters.

The Analysis of “Hybridity” in The Lonely Londoners from the Perspective of Postcolonial Theory

This article gives an analysis of “hybridity” in Samuel Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners from the perspective of postcolonial theory, which depicts the lives of West Indian immigrants in post-World War II in London, as well as their negotiation of identities within a new cultural landscape. The “hybridity” discussed in this paper includes linguistic hybridity, naming hybridity, culinary hybridity, and hybridity in spaces. These multidimensional features of “hybridity” reveal the wisdom and strategies that characters demonstrate in the process of constructing identity and seeking a sense of belonging. Drawing on postcolonial theories of hybridity, this thesis analyzes how characters adeptly employ strategies of “hybridity” to negotiate identity and regain a sense of belonging, thus presenting the diversity of belonging and subjectivity in the postcolonial context through characters’ exploration and negotiation of hybrid identities.

The Production of Space in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners: A Lefebvrean Reading

First published in 1956, Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners explores the experiences of West Indian immigrants in London, following the end of World War II. Written by a migrant novelist, who came to London in 1950, the story fictionalises the immigrants’ experiences and their struggles in the imperial centre of London. While the primary concern of the novel concentrates on the themes of identity, migration, and the politics of representation, it also deals with the production of space through the decisions made by the urban planners and designers, social movements and relations as well as the daily practices of the individual citizens. Sociologist Henri Lefebvre emphasises the significance of everyday life and the lived experiences of the individuals to analyse the process of how space is produced. Lefebvre’s reading of space as a social product challenges any reading of space as neutral and static. In other words, according to Lefebvre, space is not just a mere geographical or territorial notion, rather a living organism which goes through a production process and changes over time. Therefore, it is the aim of this paper to analyse how space is conceived, perceived, and lived in, and as a result, how it is produced and reproduced in Sam Selvon’s classic novel, The Lonely Londoners.

Reputación, racismo, género y honor en las cortes municipales de la Ciudad de Panamá, 1914-1917

Objective/Context: To analyze the elements that constituted the category of “honor” in Panama City during the period following the construction of the Canal, concerning race and gender; and to understand how migrant West Indian women negotiated these expectations of honor. Methodology: The research stems from an analysis of Panamanian legal codes to define “honor” as a socio-cultural construct and to understand moral anxieties about West Indian immigration. The cases of the Calidonia district in Panama City are also analyzed to observe the intervention of Afro-Antillean women in public and legal spheres of the state. Originality: In addition to analyzing a novel documentary source, such as the Panama City corregiduría cases, this article compiles the historiography on honor in Latin America and shows how this concept developed in Panama during the US imperial incursion and the construction of the Canal, and how Afro-Antillean immigrant women navigated Panamanian discourses of honor through their vulgar public quarrels, in which they asserted their own moral values and social status. Conclusions: The cases show that Afro-Antillean immigrant women did not fight for honor but for reputation and personal worth, presenting a counter-discourse to the dominant notions of honor and virtue. With their vulgar public lawsuits, they forced a local institution to listen to their grievances and thus negotiated a form of belonging to the new Panamanian state, reinforced their social ties and defended their reputations.

From Banana Zones to the Big Easy: West Indian and Central American Immigration to New Orleans, 1910–1940. Glenn A.Chambers. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019. 199 pp.

From Banana Zones to the Big Easy: West Indian and Central American Immigration to New Orleans, 1910–1940. Glenn A.Chambers. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019. 199 pp.

Fractured Affinities in the African Diaspora: An Interview with Louis Chude-Sokei

Fractured Affinities in the African Diaspora:An Interview with Louis Chude-Sokei Erik Gleibermann (bio) and Louis Chude-Sokei Introduction As he recounts in his 2021 coming-of-age memoir, Floating in a Most Peculiar Way, Louis Chude-Sokei has lived a mini-cartography of the modern African Diaspora. He was born in 1967 on the eve of the Biafran Civil War to an Ibo father and a Jamaican mother who had met in the UK. After his father was killed in the war, the young Chude-Sokei immigrated to Jamaica, then to Washington DC, and finally to Los Angeles. But sitting with extended family at the dinner table, the young man searching for Black selfhood in America did not receive visionary affirmations of a joint African, Caribbean, Black American diasporic unity. Instead, he often heard ethnic prejudices and suffered a sense of alienation—immigrant and Black American communities lacked common identity. Out on the streets of South Central, his African American friends echoed a similar view. In our conversation that draws from his memoir and scholarly work, Chude-Sokei and I explored the tensions between cohesion and discontinuity in the African diaspora. He says his life story has made him particularly attuned to the rich interactions of its fragments and fissures. "My ear," he reflects, "is uniquely situated to eavesdrop on multiple conversations." —Erik Gleibermann Gleibermann: Louis, I'd like to get into exploring your memoir, but first, I think a helpful way to frame that conversation is with a startling statistic you reference in your 2014 Transition article "The Newly Black Americans," that more African immigrants have come to this country since 1990 than were brought here during the slave trade. When you add that statistic to the massive Afro-Caribbean multilingual immigrant waves of [End Page 96] recent decades, it's clear the demographics of Blackness in America are changing. The theme you emphasize in the article and also in the memoir is the alienation between various Black immigrant populations and African Americans. To what extent do you view your personal story of negotiating these communities as a lived embodiment of their conflicted perceptions of each other? Chude-Sokei: That statistic from The New York Times in 2005 really gave not just critical ballast to what I was doing as a scholar, but really hit me personally because this narrative in the memoir of being alienated amongst multiple Black diasporas was given a charge. That statistic said that however alienated you might feel in this experience, you're actually representative of a large cultural shift, and there is an ideological warmth that comes when you feel a part of something broader than yourself. The article came out when my first book came out, The Last "Darky," which is about West Indian immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I use blackface minstrelsy as a method for telling the story of how Black West Indians engaged African American culture, and in many cases passed as African Americans in a cultural context where African Americans were dominant. West Indians made up the first surge of Black immigrants in the years after the international slave trade was formally shut down in 1808. Between then and 1965, the number of Blacks coming into the United States was very small, with the exception of West Indians in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the dominant group was the Jamaicans. Being half Jamaican and half Nigerian, it's incredibly personal to me. The dominant number of people coming from Africa since 1965 have been Nigerians. I wanted the memoir to parallel my own intellectual understanding of this thing called Black diaspora and how so much of this discourse on it in the academy, which I'm committed to, is actually in flagrant disavowal of some of the tensions and contradictions of Black migration since 1965 and how they were made manifest on the street level. My story comes through Biafra and then Jamaica, the Middle Passage. A lot of Africans since 1965 have come from Biafra-like situations, political instability and genocide. Gleibermann: You are alienated right up until the last page of this book. There's no...

Glenn A. Chambers, From the Banana Zones to the Big Easy: West Indian and Central American Immigration to New Orleans, 1910–1940. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019. Pp. 200. $45.00 (cloth).

Glenn A. Chambers, <i>From the Banana Zones to the Big Easy: West Indian and Central American Immigration to New Orleans, 1910–1940</i>. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019. Pp. 200. $45.00 (cloth).

How Long, Not Long

A major theme of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series is West Indian joy. West Indian immigrants’ struggles against state resistance to everyday black life. In a rather profound contrast to McQueen’s other work—in which long takes of suffering bodies draw the viewer into the inescapability of the pain experienced by his subjects—joy disrupted provides the counterpoint to bodies in pain. Striking this balance between suffering and joyous bodies is one of the reasons that McQueen’s series may be his best effort yet to move between art cinema and popular genres. The various films in Small Axe fit in disparate genres, but all but one clearly fit into the category of racial injustice films. But McQueen’s play with genre is what allows him to creative straddle the line between hope and Afropessimism.

Tribute to Professor Emeritus Frederick Hickling

Tribute to Professor Emeritus Frederick Hickling

A Critical Review of Archival Sources Relating to the Intersection of West Indian Immigrants and the Anglican Church in Toronto, 1950-1985

A Critical Review of Archival Sources Relating to the Intersection of West Indian Immigrants and the Anglican Church in Toronto, 1950-1985

The Mother Country: A Dream for the Immigrants in Andrea Levy’s 'Small Island'

The post-World War II era oversaw a series of changing events in England. Pertaining to the mass immigration trend, Andrea Levy’s parents decided to leave for England. Andrea Levy’s parents arrived from Jamaica to Britain in 1948 on the ‘Empire Windrush’. The Windrush marks the upcoming great changes which England would face for its lifetime. It began with an urgent demand and ended with an identity crisis and cultural conflict. The first wave of immigrants including Levy’s family moved with the ray of hope and with the desire to taste what is commonly perceived as the ‘Better Opportunity’. Andrea levy has always been fascinated by the story of her parents’ immigration to Britain. She wanted to know what that experience was like, not only the Jamaicans wanting to make a new life in Britain, but also for the people who already lived in Britain and who would have to accommodate the new arrivals. Her aim was to see the experience from both sides, and this became the inspiration for her fourth novel, Small Island. Levy has been interested in the effect that the West Indian immigrants had on their white English neighbors. Andrea Levy is able to present the real picture of how and with what kind of dreams the Windrush started from Jamaica to England. This paper attempts to discover and analyze what made the Jamaicans trust England and also aims to analyze the history of, fall of the Empire and the shattered dreams of peace and prosperity of its colonies.

Conceptions of Race Beyond North America: The Subversion of the Colonial Racial Contract in The Bahamas

In his work Ethnic groups and boundaries, Frederick Barth argues that applying definitions to group of peoples has less to do with emphasizing a shared culture than with defining the sentiments of communality in opposition to the perceived identity of an ‘other’ (Barth). In applying Barth’s framework, modern Bahamian identity has developed—and is largely understood—in comparison to a Haitian ‘other.' Therefore, this essay will argue that, having gone through multiple iterations of the racial contract, policies of subjugation initially intended for black colonial subjects (e.g. uneven development and colonially encouraged distrust) have been subverted for use by The Bahamas’ post-independence government against those with Haitian ancestry. It will demonstrate that Bahamian sentiments towards Haitians are contextualized historically and based on a long-standing colonial tradition of discrimination and social control that pitted West Indian immigrants against them. While this subjugation is no longer enforced along phenotypical lines, elements of privilege connected to the racial contract are now adjudicated along different lines that may prove harder to distinguish, perhaps making the privileges attached to the dominant identity different from a North American context.

Rights, Gifts, Repair

Rights, Gifts, Repair

MIGRATION AND TRAUMA: A PSYCHOANALYTICAL STUDY OF SAMUEL SELVON'S THE LONELY LONDONERS

This paper focuses on the challenges faced by West Indian immigrants in London as reflected in Samuel Selvon's The Lonely Londoners. It brings to the consciousness of the reader, the eventual sense of failed promise which migrants experience on arriving the supposed “Promised Land” in the West. The reading of this paper is a form of therapy which has the ability to reduce obsession with the West and subsequently, the rate of migration to the West. To achieve this, the research employs the pychoanalytical theoretical framework and further employs the use of secondrary sources of data in its analyses The study projects that the West Indians' experiences of racism, rejection, cultural dislocation, stereotyping, disillusionment and culture shocks in alien lands can be seen as other forms of trauma. Trauma in the senses mentioned above ends up creating neurosis for its textual characters who in real life situations are ultimately patients. Therefore, there is a need to analyze and proffer solution to this trauma so as to salvage the self image, mentality and culture of the affected immigrants. Selvon in his work, ultimately envisions homecoming for West Indian immigrants who have not achieved success in the West.

The West Indies unbound

To paraphrase Oscar Handlin whose work wrought a revolution in U.S. immigration historiography in the 1950s, the history of West Indian immigration is the history of the West Indian people writ lar...

Black Immigrants, Perceptions of Difference, and the Abiding Sting of Blackness

Research Article| October 01 2016 Black Immigrants, Perceptions of Difference, and the Abiding Sting of Blackness Milton Vickerman Milton Vickerman Milton Vickerman is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Crosscurrents: West Indian Immigrants and Race (Oxford University Press, 1999), The Problem of Post-Racialism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and co-editor, with Hephzibah Strmic-Pawl, of “Race and Ethnic Relations: Continuity and Change” (Cognella, forthcoming). He was also co-researcher on a large-scale project that investigated one of the earliest efforts by a local government to pass anti-Latino immigration legislation. This research is summarized in Evaluation Study of Prince William County’s Illegal Immigration Enforcement Policy: Final Report 2010 (Prince William County Police Department and the University of Virginia Center for Survey Research, 2010), which he co-authored with Thomas M. Guterbock, Christopher S. Koper, Bruce Taylor, Karen E. Walker, and Timothy Carter. In other ongoing research on Latinos, Vickerman is investigating employer-Latino relations in new gateways. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Ethnic History (2016) 36 (1): 71–81. https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.36.1.0071 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Milton Vickerman; Black Immigrants, Perceptions of Difference, and the Abiding Sting of Blackness. Journal of American Ethnic History 1 January 2016; 36 (1): 71–81. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.36.1.0071 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Ethnic History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2016 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: African and Afro-Caribbean Migration: A Forum on Violet Showers Johnson’s “When Blackness Stings: African and Afro-Caribbean Immigrants, Race, and Racism in Late Twentieth-Century America” You do not currently have access to this content.

The U.S. South and Europe: Transatlantic Relations in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries ed. by Cornelis A. van Minnen and Manfred Berg (review)

Reviewed by: The U.S. South and Europe: Transatlantic Relations in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries ed. by Cornelis A. van Minnen and Manfred Berg Daniel Kilbride (bio) The U.S. South and Europe: Transatlantic Relations in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Edited by Cornelis A. van Minnen and Manfred Berg. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013. Pp. 307. $50.00 cloth; $50.00 ebook) The writing of United States history is in the midst of a definite international turn. Whether this trend goes the way of other fads or whether it will prove to have legs is an open question. If this book is any barometer of what the future is likely to hold, though, the prospects for the transnational impulse in United States history look good. These essays—most of them, anyway—show that situating American history in an international context rests not on some flimsy theoretical foundation but on the historical record. Southerners, like other Americans, engaged deeply in the world around them, particularly Europe, for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, as in the case of British abolitionists before the Civil War, the world came butting into Dixie and forced the encounter. Just as often, southerners came calling on Europe—for capital, for recognition, as a mirror for identity, or for a myriad of other reasons. Inevitably, the essays in a volume like this will vary widely in quality. The standouts include Sarah Silkey’s essay on how southern state governors eager to court British capital responded to the embarrassing details of Ida Wells’s reports by moving to suppress mob violence. Although hardly stirred by the purest of motives—governors sought not justice for its own sake, but the rehabilitation of the South’s image abroad—transatlantic pressure compelled them to move against white supremacy. Clive Webb explores how Britons puzzled over how to make use of America’s freedom movement. It was one thing to be inspired by the fight for black rights in the late Jim Crow South, but quite another to make its tactics—and even its goals—relevant to the struggle of West Indian immigrants in 1960s Britain. The West Indian community lacked the size, homogeneity, visionary leadership, and institutional foundation of its American counterpart. It also lacked an easily identifiable target, since racism in Britain was customary [End Page 128] and cultural, not legal. Lewis Massari’s essay on the background of Gunnar Myrdal’s American Dilemma is not only richly informative but entertaining and even funny. Myrdal collaborated with many American social scientists but particularly with North Carolinian Arthur Raper. Raper impressed upon Myrdal how ostensibly democratic institutions like the courts could be warped by racism. He also took from his American experience a greater faith in the power of sociology to promote social change, a faith that may strike modern readers as naïve, if well intentioned. The essays on the pre–Civil War era are more uneven. Daniel Nagel makes good use of the perspectives of the German forty-eighters—republicans and nationalists exiled after the failed 1848 revolutions—on southern slave society. Although a diverse lot, in general they brought over with them a Hegelian worldview that led them to conceptualize the sectional crisis as a necessary, even inevitable one, pitting progress against reaction. The sooner a resolution came, the better for humanity, they believed. Kathleen Hilliard offers an interesting meditation on antebellum South Carolinians’ connections with Venice, a city whose past glories and contemporary decline held up a troubling reflection to the city of Charleston. Hilliard is to be commended for the tight focus of her essay, which bares down on Carolinians in one time and place specifically without yielding to the temptation to extrapolate about the South more generally. South Carolina after all was sui generis, which is useful to keep in mind when reading Lawrence McDowell’s contribution on the meaning of English chivalry for elite South Carolinians inclined to play the knight in chivalric performances. Here again it is necessary to remember that studies of antebellum South Carolina tell us very little about anything going on outside South Carolina. It was, after all, possible for women and men outside of the Palmetto State...

Narrating Diaspora in Edwidge Danticat's Short-Story Cycle The Dew Breaker

A short-story cycle consisting of nine interconnected stories, Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker (2004) uncovers and creatively maps a Haitian American world whose traumatic experiences remain lar...

Herman Cain and the Rise of the Black Right

There have always been Black conservatives. Some of the most prominent Black political figures in this country’s history from Booker T. Washington to Condoleezza Rice may be termed conservatives. However, these conservatives were not elected officials. They served in either unofficial roles or were appointed. The rise of conservative Black politicians with an electoral base such as Herman Cain and Allen West is a new phenomenon. At least in theory, such Black conservatives might find a base in the Black community among three constituencies—the Black church, the military, and African and West Indian immigrants. This article explores the likelihood of a mass base among Blacks for the rise of a Black Right. It contrasts the varieties of Black conservatism and gives special attention to the religious views of Herman Cain and Clarence Thomas contrasting them with the prophetic tradition in Black religion of such figures as Martin Luther King and Jeremiah Wright. Ultimately, the extreme individualism and absence of the notion of a linked racial fate distinguish them from the vast majority of Blacks.

Nationalism and immigrant labor in a tropical enclave: the West Indians of Colón City, 1850–1936

Focusing on Colón City, Panama, this article illustrates how early twentieth-century narratives about Central American enclaves as backward and isolated places contributed to the exclusion of West Indian immigrants from imaginings of the national citizenry. In showing how enclave narratives distanced tropical workers and places from the global economies and modern technologies they helped create, the article contributes to our understanding of the history of modern disconnections between the global realities of immigrant labor and the nationalist ideologies that exclude them.