West Indian Society Research Articles

Revisiting the Plantation Society: The New World Group and the Critique of Capitalism

Abstract This paper examines the critique of capitalism provided by the New World Group. Emerging from the West Indian Society for the Study of Social Issues at The University of The West Indies, Mona, the Group was formed in 1963 specifically to address the reconfiguration of social and political forces in the wake of Caribbean territories gaining formal independence from European colonial powers. This reconfiguration went beyond matters of political economy, and included psychological and ideological reworkings, all items necessary to evaluate the kinds of societies West Indians could strive for. Set within intra-Marxist debates on early capitalist development, this paper focuses on the collaboration and creative tensions between Norman Girvan, George Beckford, and Lloyd Best as they helped one another construct their respective political philosophy, social theory, and economic analysis of the logic of plantation societies, which while incomplete from our vantage point, did mostly capture the historical dynamics found in the Caribbean.

“Dishonourable Blacks”? The 1983 “Rebel Tour” and Jamaican Nationhood and Identity

The efforts at nation-building in the West Indies have had to (and still have to) confront obstacles that are legacies of centuries of European colonization and enslavement in the region. Postcolonial challenges have included overcoming structural racism and the negative impact on identity of limiting stereotypes and prejudices; the empowerment of marginalized populations; the provision of greater socioeconomic opportunities; and the creation of more just and equitable societies. These were challenges they had in common with many other colonial and postcolonial societies across the globe. Cricket played a significant role in many of these struggles, and in so doing became an important part of anti-imperial movements within the region. It was, therefore, unsurprising — and perhaps inevitable — that West Indian nations and the West Indian cricket world would become involved in the fight against apartheid in South Africa. Examining social attitudes towards the anti-apartheid campaign within West Indies cricket provides us with insight that can help us to evaluate the broader nation-building efforts. One particularly illuminating episode was the formation of a West Indian “rebel” cricket team that toured South Africa in 1983 and 1984 in contravention of an international sporting boycott. These tours were a shock to many in the West Indies, with one commentator referring to them as “a collective affront to West Indian society, nationhood and history”. However, attitudes in the West Indies to the tour were by no means uniform: in fact, there were many voices in support of the cricketers. This paper examines the reactions in Jamaica to the initial announcement of the “rebel” tour in 1983 to see what light they shed on perspectives of identity and nationhood in the Jamaican society, and what they reveal about the state of the postcolonial project. It poses the question: was the action of the “rebels” an affront to Jamaican society, or rather a reflection of it?

The African ‘Other’ as Displaced Enslaved and Refugee: Internal Borders across Time and Place

AbstractTaking its point of departure in two historically separate legal cases involving the right to care for kin this article compares the perception and treatment of two groups subjected to forced migration—enslaved Africans and their descendants in the former Danish West Indian colonial society and African refugees in present-day Danish welfare society. Drawing on Balibar’s notion of ‘internal borders’ it demonstrates the key role of ‘the Other’ in the management of displaced people in contexts of structural inequality and their contradictory position of being legally embedded but socially detached in the society in which they are placed. This comparative historical lens illuminates how, across time and place, family and kin ties can figure as sites of contention between universal, ideal, morally accepted human rights and the actual rights bestowed by local authorities, whether in colonial plantation societies based on enslavement or in modern welfare states.

A Caribbean Visionary and His Literary Collection, Karlene Saundria Nelson

The voices of West Indian writers in the 1950s changed the landscape for Literature emerging out of the West Indies. These powerful literary voices were a means of creating and recording a facet of West Indian history and cultural heritage. West Indian writers wrote their stories through their own eyes. John Hearne was one of the most eloquent voices among them. He became a known voice in the West Indian literary world, using his recognition to facilitate the indigenous West Indian Literature genre’s development. He was also a prominent Jamaican political and social commentator. The John Hearne archive not only produced an important historical picture of the development of the West Indian Literature genre, but West Indian political history, and changes in the cultural and social fabric of the West Indian society, with special emphasis on Jamaica. This paper aims to present this archive as a fundamental body of primary resources for historical research.

Lowenthal, the Caribbeanist

ABSTRACT For David Lowenthal, the Caribbean was not simply an academic interest, it was a passionate personal concern for a place, its people, its geographical history and heritage—and the return of that heritage when stolen (a concern that also applied to other parts of the world). His enormous library was as weighted with novels by Caribbean authors as by history and geography texts, and they formed the basis of his book, West Indian Societies, the culmination of many years of detailed observation and investigation of the (non-Hispanic) Caribbean. Lowenthal’s works on the Caribbean were to become significant reference points in interpretations of societal institutions and practices in the Caribbean and its diaspora and in the development of important new areas of research, such as environmental and landscape perception, islands and conservation and heritage studies.

Professor David Lowenthal, 1923–2018

Professor David Lowenthal, 1923–2018

Barrack Yard Politics

Taken together, C. L. R. James’s 1933 political pamphlet The Case for West-Indian Self Government and 1936 novel Minty Alley reveal the author’s competing visions of relations between Africans and Indians in the British West Indies. In The Case for West-Indian Self Government, James proclaims that West Indian societies are fit to govern their own affairs because they are modern and harmonious. However, James’s argument contradicts his literary sketches of the barrack yard in Minty Alley. The novel features a fractious relationship between Benoit and Mrs. Rouse, the owners of the yard. Mrs. Rouse responds to Benoit’s infidelity by remarking, “My blood and coolie blood don’t take.” They fight over ownership of No. 2 Minty Alley, but when Benoit dies, Mrs. Rouse buries him at the yard. Minty Alley portrays a barrack yard politics made through the combined—if tense—efforts of African and Indian descendants.

"Let's Put the Background to the Foreground" - nostalgi, turisme og iscenesættelse af en dansk kolonial fortid på de tidligere vestindiske øer

“LET’S PUT THE BACKGROUND TO THE FOREGROUND” - NOSTALGIA, TOURISM AND THE EVOCATION OF A DANISH COLONIAL PAST ON U.S. VIRGIN ISLANDS 
 When Denmark in 1917 sold the West Indies to the United States, official Danish colonialism came to an end. However, the transfer of the islands did not break Danish ties to its former colony. Instead, a group of Danish companies on the islands materialised the idea of an affective bond between the former colony and Motherland. Accordingly, ‘Island Danes’ on and off the islands expressed productive nostalgia and contributed to the creation of a space for tourism on the islands in the decades after 1917. For returnees to Denmark the nostalgia was often amplified. Through their heavy involvement in memory work, they came to form the national-romantic narrative of the colonial past in Danish public memory. Moreover, their efforts to remember – and remind Danes of - the history of Denmark on the islands, became entangled with the islands’ tourism strategy – developed by an inspired Danish tourist chief, and effected in part by the associations Friends of Denmark and The Danish West Indian Society. This way, by reproducing the past and staging a Danish culture on the islands, they indirectly attempted to take ownership over the history of the islands.

Husbands and Fathers

We know relatively little about enslaved men, especially African-born men in British West Indian slave societies, in their roles as fathers and husbands within slave households. A generation of scholarship on gender in slave societies has tended to neglect enslaved men, thus allowing old understandings of enslaved men as not very involved with families drawn from biased planter sources to continue to shape scholarship. This article instead draws on a rich set of records (both quantitative and qualitative) from Berbice in British Guiana between 1819 and 1834 to explore enslaved men’s roles within informal marriages and as husbands and parents. We show not only that enslaved men were active participants in shaping family life within British West Indian slave societies but that they were aided and abetted in achieving some of their familial objectives by a sympathetic plantation regime in which white men favored enslaved men within enslaved households.

The Free Negro Company of Christiansted: Struggles for equality, 1773–1799

This article examines the so-called Free Negro Company in the town of Christiansted on the island of St. Croix in the Danish-Norwegian West Indies in the latter part of the 18th century. It examines the range of practices and social strategies developed by these men to obtain recognition as free subjects and position themselves in the social space of a racially divided Caribbean society.The article shows that well before the more well-known instances of coordinated collective action in the beginning of the 19th century, the men of the Free Negro Company developed and applied a variety of social strategies. They challenged the social order that defined their place in society; challenges that took place in physical encounters with Euro-Caribbeans both in the streets and in courtrooms. These free Afro-Caribbean men continuously attempted to expand their space of action, and to emphasize to Euro-Caribbeans that they were free citizens and should be treated as equals. They challenged the distinctions created by the Euro-Caribbeans whilst at the same time setting themselves apart from the enslaved population.The article focuses on the period prior to the first British occupation of the Danish-Norwegian West Indies in 1801, in order to look for signs of opposition to the social order and attempts to achieve a better position in society. The article investigates the militia-like Free Negro Company from the first instance of its members tentatively challenging the racialized social order in 1773 until 1799, when the last mention of a similar case is found in the archival material examined. The Free Negro Company held a central position in the society, and an examination hereof provides the opportunity to get closer to the free Afro-Caribbeans, as individuals and as a group. The role and function of the Company in Danish-Norwegian West Indian society meant that its members came into regular contact with both Euro-Caribbeans and enslaved labourers, and that they often found themselves in situations marked by conflict.

Access to Information in the West Indies: Gradual Progression to Greater Openness

Since the turn of the 21st century, the region formerly known as the British West Indies has begun to embark slowly on the implementation of information rights legislation including freedom of information (FOI) legislation. The historical trajectory of the region has had a profound impact on its current position on the sharing of information between public entities and citizens. One of the challenges affecting the success of the implementation of FOI legislation is the state of recordkeeping in the territories, which has resulted in difficulties with providing access to official records and information over time. This article, from the perspective of an archivist/records manager, explores whether the historical past of the West Indies has some bearing on the slow enactment of FOI in the region and how proper recordkeeping could enhance the chances of success in implementation of FOI. It focuses on two main concepts, ‘open government’ and ‘citizen engagement’, underpinning FOI to assess whether the region has fully embraced these ideas and thus paved the way for implementation. It examines the Jamaican experience with FOI to determine whether this can be viewed as an effective model for other territories of the region to provide access to information for the betterment of West Indian society at large.

Towards “that republic in which complexions do not matter”: Derek Walcott’s <i>Drums and Colours</i> 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.

Enacting power: the criminalization of Obeah in the Anglophone Caribbean, 1760-2011

More than two and a half centuries after it was first outlawed in Jamaica in 1760, obeah remains illegal in most territories of the former British West Indies. Yet, opinions on the meaning and essential nature of this controversial Afro-Caribbean spiritual phenomenon vary widely. While many contemporary West Indians hold negative views of obeah, viewing it as evil witchcraft or sorcery, others point to its widespread use in healing, protection from harm and solving a wide range of everyday problems - positive views that were also commonly held by enslaved West Indians in earlier generations. Despite the scholarly attention obeah has received, relatively little has been written about the many laws enacted against it in different territories at different periods. Offering a perspective on obeah that challenges conventional conceptions of this widely misunderstood aspect of West Indian society and culture, the core of this book is a detailed examination of anti-obeah laws, and their socio-political implications, in seventeen jurisdictions of the English-speaking Caribbean from the period of slavery to the present. Aside from chronologically tracing in each territory the development of these laws and their major provisions, the book also examines how anti-obeah legislation has helped to create and perpetuate cultural distortions that resound into the present. Anti-obeah legislation, particularly after the end of slavery in the nineteenth century, played a central role in creating public misunderstandings of the meaning and role of obeah among the West Indian masses, and led to the stigmatization and devaluation among future generations of African-derived spiritual beliefs and practices.

Do we do the past differently now? An interview with David Lowenthal

The purpose of the interview was to talk to David Lowenthal about the imminent release of his updated version of The Past Is a Foreign Country, a seminal work on history, memory and nostalgia which profoundly influenced debates on heritage culture following its initial publication in 1985. David served in the US Army during World War Two and during his long and distinguished career as a cultural geographer taught at Vassar College and the University of the West Indies. He is now emeritus professor of geography at University College London. His books include West Indian Societies (1972), Landscape Meanings and Values (with Edmund Penning-Rowsell, 1986), The Politics of the Past (with Peter Gathercole, 1989) and The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (1997). The interview took place in London on 24 September 2012.

Schizophrenic Island, fifty years after Fanon: Martinique, the pent-up 'paradise'

Although Frantz Fanon did not employ the term as such, the contemporary paradigm of 'social suffering' captures much of the angst that Fanon diagnosed in his treatments of fellow Martinicans as individuals and of Martinique as a society. Ambivalent relationships based on race (French whites vis-à-vis islanders 'of colour') and law (assimilationist statehood versus regional autonomy) continue to problematize Martinican society and polity. This is despite significant material gains (now in question as a result of looming austerity in the French economy) made in the half-century since Fanon's original diagnoses in Black Skin, White Masks (1952). Pierre Bourdieu's 'everyday life' methodology is joined to psychological analyses of Martinican behaviour to reveal schizophrenic tendencies in the mind and body politic. An overarching frame is the contrast between an externally sold image of island 'paradise' with a political and psychological reality fraught with frustration, anxiety, stress and contradiction. Understanding of French West Indian politics, culture and society is heightened by reference to the specialized literature of medical anthropology, psychiatric health and public health in postcolonial societies.

No ball!

Cricket is a game that is highly symbolic of modern West Indian achievement. In this paper the ‘no ball’ in cricket is used as a metaphor to highlight the importance of ethical management and leadership in creating influence and growth in these Caribbean nation states. Such ethical leadership can be instrumental in addressing issues of productivity and transforming of the workplace. Business reversals and general meltdown as in the case of billionaire Allen Stanford may be attributable to lack of oversight by an impartial umpire commissioned to identify and rectify the ‘no ball’ of unfair business dealing. Values of social justice and redressing the disadvantage wrought by the unidentified ‘no ball’ are concepts at the heart of the movement to independence in modern Caribbean nation states, as seen in the influence of trade unions on the evolution of that movement in most islands. Ethical leadership is one aspect of social responsibility and creating legitimacy that empowers institutions. The paper also defines the concept of social capital and attempts to relate trust and reciprocity to West Indian society. The implications of identifying unfair advantage and calling the ‘no ball’ are highlighted in the context of altering issues of social justice, trust and mutuality in the culture and management.

Hybrid Britons: West Indian colonial identity and Maria Riddell's natural history

This essay examines the national implications of natural history in Maria Riddell's Voyages to the Madeira, and Leeward Caribbean Isles: with Sketches of the Natural History of these Islands (1792). Riddell engages with the nationalism and theories of hybridity espoused by contemporary naturalists to question imputations of degeneration in the West Indies and to gesture instead toward the colonies' potential to foster a hybrid “British” national identity. This potential, however, is significantly undermined by instances of self‐censorship in Riddell's text. At a time of increasing tension between Britain and its Caribbean colonies, Riddell's selective elisions of well‐known aspects of West Indian society, such as slavery, register her efforts to reconcile these colonies with British values.

Variation in Venues of Slavery and Freedom: Interpreting the Late Eighteenth-Century Cultural Landscape of St. John, Danish West Indies Using an Archaeological GIS

An archaeological GIS is used to examine the late eighteenth-century cultural landscape of St. John, US Virgin Islands. Land use patterns are reconstructed using a combination of historic maps, tax records, and survey reconnaissance. The study demonstrates significant, heretofore undocumented, transitions taking place that reflect dynamic cultural and economic change within Danish West Indian plantation society that includes a significant trend towards land ownership by free-colored St. Johnians more than a half a century before emancipation. These venues of freedom are discussed in relation to broader patterns of estate consolidation and economic shifts.

El primer virreinato americano

This article explores the government of viceroy Christopher Columbus in the American territories. We return to the first Spanish settlement in Santo Domingo and the contradictions inherent to this expansionist proyect. The contradictions were part of the logic of the absolutist state and Columbus’ reaction against the controls imposed by the monarchs. Secondly, we look into the dificulties that the Admiral encountered to develop a mercantilist model. In this context, we examine the rationale behind the first government of the Indies and the features that defined the new West Indian society.

From Orature to Literature in Jamaican and Trinidadian Children's Folk Traditions

From Orature to Literature in Jamaican and Trinidadian Children’s Folk Traditions Cynthia James Abstract Cynthia James is a writer and Language Arts professor at the School of Education, The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad, where she teaches Children’s Literature in postgraduate and undergraduate programs. She is widely published in the field of Caribbean literary criticism. Dr. James is a graduate of Howard University, Washington, D.C. Inevitably, where there is an oral tradition alongside a written tradition with literacy the norm, distinctions become blurred and a good deal of cross-fertilization from one tradition to the other occurs. —Paula Burnett. (Introduction, xxviii) Introduction Folk tradition1 for children in the English-speaking Caribbean is regarded with both sentimentality and ambivalence. On the one hand, many adults give the impression that the folk tradition was central to their childhood, and they consider the children of today deprived of the indigenous moral, cultural, and spiritual values embedded in the stories they were told. On the other hand, even in the old days this treasured folk tradition was a hidden curriculum, saddled with the stigma of inferiority. At some point formal schooling took over, migration to urban centers became the goal, what was once rural became urban, and grandparents died off. In the vision many West Indian2 adults have for their children, the tales they grew up on smack of illiteracy and a waste of the child's time. All the same, in Caribbean daily life, folk mores exist side by side with globalized Western norms. West Indian society is a young society in which cultures with a strong oral basis—mainly African, Amerindian, and Asian—are just becoming exposed to each other, although they have long been side by side. New hybrid oral forms keep evolving in cross-cultural fusions. These hybrid folk forms, with their bases in ancestral orality, compete with the electronic and print media of modern Western culture. Standard English and Creole [End Page 164] jostle with each other in the creation of a Caribbean linguistic identity. This identity resists amalgamation. The indigenous syncretism emanating from the mixing of peoples signifies not a blend of cultures, but rather the similar economic and social conditions of colonization and the West Indian plantation. Those conditions have thrown up an identifiable Creole folk ethos that is not static, nor is it identical in all the territories. In a pan-West Indian way (and in places like Jamaica with its large population of African descendants), it is West African in root. But on islands like Trinidad, where successive waves of Asian plantation labor arrived in the late nineteenth century, this Creole ethos is composed of accommodations of Asian and European overlays on an entrenched West African base. The West Indian children's folk tradition mirrors this ongoing continuum composed of overlapping stages—a process marked by growing self-knowledge, but also by ambivalence. Such ambivalence can be imputed to West Indian migratory tendencies; lingering colonial prejudices; the paucity of publishing opportunities (and thus minimal self-representation); and the slow adaptation of interactive, participatory cultural modes to print technology. But oral and folk traditions are regaining importance as the development of literacy and the role played by storytelling are better understood. Three overlapping stages of the folk tradition in connection with children are examined in the following pages: (1) a documentation-literacy phase; (2) a period of reclamation of the voice, marked by respect for the evolutionary nature of Creole orality; and (3) the present phase marked by a fusion of oral and literary agendas—a fusion propelled by changing concepts of education and literacy. The Documentation-Literacy Phase (Beginnings of West Indian society to the 1970s) West Indian society (which was a slave society following the conquest of the indigenes) did not specifically place children in a category separate from adults. If children were valued it was because they would grow up to take their full share of labor—to produce profits for their owner sooner rather than later. The need for community in the face of adverse conditions, and the near absence of "childhood" knitted together old and young. This means that in traditional West Indian...