West Indian Society Research Articles

The Haitian Revolution Race & Plantation Management in Early Nineteenth Century Jamaica

One of the ironies of Eric William's ground breaking work Capitalism and Slavery is that racism as a feature of slave society in the British West Indies has been relegated in favor of economic determinism. Although some scholars argue that racism is most difficult to measure plantation correspondence is replete with racial assumptions. One would be very surprised at the extent of racial comments by the Jamaican planters resulting from the Haitian revolution. Many of the Jamaican planters, while concerned with issues of security, were more concerned with the implications of a Jamaican society managed by former enslaved Africans. They could not imagine uncivilized Africans creating an orderly, stable and successful society. This paper argues that the paranoia among many of the Jamaican planters to the Haitian revolution, indirectly, contributed to further socio- economic and political decay in early 19th century Jamaican slave society. The planters' hysteria and repression towards their enslaved Africans were racially motivated1 and resulted in their vigorous resistance and sabotage of amelioration that was being recommended by the metropolitan authorities. The Jamaican planters were fearful of the results of amelioration. With the constant decline in the protection of British West Indian sugar from free trade advocates in London, the Jamaican planters' resistance to amelioration was counter-productive to efficient plantation management. Secondly, this paper refutes Eric Williams' argument that racism was a result of the economic forces existent in British West Indian slave society. I will show that both racism and economics operated simultaneously from the very beginning of British West Indian slave society. Thus, racial and economic motives were not in opposition to each other but were mutual partners.2 Development of Racial Theory: The larger European context from which the British emerged has to be the starting point for any serious study of racism in the Americas.3 Were the British racists in their categorization of Africans even before they arrived in the New World, as hinted by William Green?4 Was racism a by-product of slavery, as Williams claimed? In examining the development of racial theory the definition of 'race' has to be first studied followed by its meaning in both Catholic and Protestant thought. When that is examined, then, the practice of European racism can be described as a continuous development. European racism towards Africans started before their arrival in the Caribbean and developed into the scientific racism of the late 19th century.5 Franklin Knight argues that attitudes towards race and towards slavery were not necessary the same. The European concept of race started as a form of identification among the extended family, friends and members of one's village. It then moved onwards and outwards to the larger society. Thus, Englishmen in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries thought of themselves as a race distinct from the Spanish, the Portuguese and other Europeans. Nevertheless, as the Englishmen pushed farther and farther into the wider world and as they began to realize the diversity of the colours and conditions of man and society they changed their notions of race. Race took on characteristics of colour since all Europeans had similar features to be classified as white; Asians had similar features to be described as yellow and Africans south of the Sahara had similar features to be described as black. The colour element in race replaced the previous distinctions of 'Christians' and 'Infidels'.6 Once colour and culture became associated with race then the next logical step was the stereotyping of cultures which eventually led to racial discrimination. By the 16th century European ethnocentrisms had a tendency to place all non-Europeans in a colour continuum. Those more closely approximating white in appearance were regarded as more pleasing,7 while those less approximating white were less pleasing. …

Myths of the plantation society: slavery in the American South and the West Indies

Providing new insights into the origins of benevolent myths about the Old South, Dessens compares slave systems of the Caribbean and the American South from the early days of European colonization to the abolition of slavery. Her uncommon combination of historical and literary scholarship in a broad comparative framework explains why these two slave societies of the Americas developed so differently. She shows that underneath apparently obvious similarities, evolution of southern society and its West Indian counterparts diverged markedly, notably during debates over the existence of slavery. In both regions, climate and soil conditions favored the development of plantations that relied almost exclusively on the cultivation of such crops as cocoa, coffee, tobacco, cotton, indigo, and sugar and on the importation of other consumer goods. These agricultural economies required extensive manpower, and all colonial societies experienced a constant labor shortage. Both regions readily adopted the system of slavery. Dessens contrasts the institution in the West Indies and the American South, from its codification implementation to abolition and its aftermath. She also describes differences in both regions connected to their geography and varying status as territories. Her examination illuminates the emergence of a cultural distinction of the American South. Both before and after emancipation, antislavery forces found themselves defending their entire civilization, and the myth of benevolent plantation life - complete with paternal masters and contented slaves - was born. Southern fiction writers added their voices to the defense and wrote historical novels that glorified the Golden Age of the South. Dessens asserts that no parallel mythologizing existed in West Indian society, where plantation life was debunked rather than celebrated. In addition to primary sources such as diaries and slave narratives, scholars will be aspecially fascinated by Dessens' use of travel narratives, a fashionable genre in the 18th and 19th centuries, some written by American colonists visiting other colonies of the Western hemisphere and others written by Europeans visiting the American colonies.

Nobody's Nation: Reading Derek Walcott

Nobody's Nation offers an illuminating look at the St. Lucian, Nobel-Prize-winning writer, Derek Walcott, and grounds his work firmly in the context of West Indian history. Paul Breslin argues that Walcott's poems and plays are bound up with an effort to re-imagine West Indian society since its emergence from colonial rule, its ill-fated attempt at political unity, and its subsequent dispersal into tiny nation-states. According to Breslin, Walcott's work is centrally concerned with the West Indies' imputed absence from history and lack of cohesive national identity or cultural tradition. Walcott sees this lack not as impoverishment but as an open space for creation. In his poems and plays, West Indian history becomes a realm of necessity, something to be confronted, contested, and remade through literature. What is most vexed and inspired in Walcott's work can be traced to this quixotic struggle.Linking extensive archival research and new interviews with Walcott himself to detailed critical readings of major works, Nobody's Nation will take its place as the definitive study of the poet.

Social work education in the West Indies

Social Work Education has been offered in the West Indies at a professional certificate level since 1961. Programmes exist within multi-disciplinary Departments of academic institutions in six countries. Given limited staff resources, they benefit from the availability of instruction in related subject areas but lack the autonomy to create fully integrated social work curricula. Graduates are prepared to function in a post-colonial (post slavery) West Indian society characterized by increasingly democratized patterns of social organization and indicators of modernization but with a serious catalogue of contextual, structural and human behavioural problems which impact the economic social and cultural lifestyles of the people. While there have been some positive developments, the major constraining factors for regional social work education are: limited resources which deny programme autonomy, limit staffing and subject offerings; an unsatisfactory dependence on metropolitan social work education models; and an insufficient sensitivity to the challenge to produce indigenous theory and culturally appropriate practice models. Challenges to be addressed are the need for authentic West Indian (Caribbean) social work models, the strengthening of field practice experience for students, more preparation for advocacy and policy development roles and the extension of professional education at the undergraduate level through the distance education mode, and at the post graduate level.

Representations of the Chinese in Anglophone Caribbean fiction

In West Indian societies, the Chinese, as relative latecomers, provide an example of a minority group coping with a foreign culture and subject to assessment by earlier arrivants. They often appear only briefly in novels, but their presence contributes to pictures of ‘authentic’ village communities and to impressions of culturally and economically diverse urban centres. Despite their economic links with the communities in which they live, novelists depict them as existing outside the power relations of Creole societies which are determined largely by class and colour oppositions stemming from the experiences of slavery and colonialism.

Navigating the Wide Sargasso Sea: Colonial History, English Fiction, and British Empire

Englishness is not a fixed identity but a series of contesting identifies, a terrain of struggle as to what it means to be English. - Catherine Hall, White, Male, and Middle Class 26 So between you I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why was I ever born at all. - Jean Rhys, Wide Sea 102 In a twentieth-century universe increasingly dazzled by fragmentary subjects and delighted by the logics of a global economy, the task of feminist inquiry must be to refuse celebrations of difference in which what is most frequently forgotten is the question of how and why such differences continue to be reproduced. Feminist inquiry must, instead, enter into the ongoing struggles over difference, participating in the battle over the meaning of gender and ethnicity, sexuality and national identity; in short, it must enlist in the tempestuous border disputes over what counts as the way things are. Jean Rhys's best-known novel, Wide Sea, dramatizes the persistent struggles over meaning that are at the critical center of such a feminist politics of knowledge. Wide Sea succeeds in more than simply inserting itself into the literary and cultural frameworks of Jane Eyre, the novel that Gayatri Spivak has called a cult (263) of English feminism. Wide Sea also inquires into the production of knowledge about Englishness and, in the process, puts Englishness itself into crisis. This article is, therefore, just as much about the details of Rhys's modernist textual intervention as it is about the making of Englishness in the early nineteenth century, both before and following emancipation. I am interested in the connections forged by Rhys's text between a politics of imperialism and a politics of gender, between English nationhood and English womanhood, and between the local geographies of English fiction and the global terrain of colonialism in the nineteenth century. I would like, further, to read Rhys's text not only as an expose of empire but also as the occasion to confront the ever-shifting relations between complicity and resistance that mark all aspects of feminist thought. If Antoinette Cosway, the white West Indian woman of Wide Sea, has come to stand for a form of native resistance to English patriarchal power for many contemporary feminist readers of Rhys's text (as well as for Rhys herself), she also ultimately discloses a certain complicity with the very English patriarchal logics she challenges. My reading of Wide Sea consequently explores some of the ways in which the various feminisms of the text both unsettle and reenact many of the commonsense structures of Englishness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The competing narrative frames, authorial voices, and shifting points of view that characterize Wide Sea reenact the struggles over meaning that are embedded within the fictions of colonial identity and English imperial control. One of Rhys's early experiments with a title for the novel, Sargasso Sea (The Wide) Crossing Across (Letters 204), appropriately emphasizes this relentless movement.(1) Antoinette's narrative is literally shaped by the uncertainties of a Creole(2) vision that is fractured by the contradictory claims of British colonial history and the cultural residues of a dying West Indian plantation society. Her impossible task in Wide Sea is to negotiate between the contradictory logics of British colonialism while also wending her way through the Creole culture and postemancipation English society that continue to elude her.(3) Antoinette explains: ... a white cockroach. That's me. That's what they call all of us who were here before their own people in Africa sold them to the slave traders. And I've heard English women call us white niggers. So between you I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why was I ever born at all. …

SEARCHING FOR A FUTURE WAITING TO BE BORN

A little more two months ago I was flying over Tanzania in a small Cessna aircraft. Looking out of the window from the co-pilot's seat I saw lines of mango trees stretching mile after mile. The trees were a living monument to the thousands of slaves who were herded towards Zanzibar's brutal slave markets. As they travelled, mangoes provided refreshment on the terror marches, the trees grew as silent testimony. In 1994, the Bishop of Cape Coast in Ghana took me to visit the British fort that still stands intact on the palm-fringed shoreline. Within, a sign read Slave Quarters, and I began to walk into the dark tunnel leading to chambers where up to a thousand slaves were held in darkness. Beyond the cells was another tunnel, which led to a keyhole gate. Through this exit slaves would be pushed into the sea and pulled by ropes to the ships anchored in the bay. The chambers were a starvation block, a place where captives were slimmed down to be thin enough to pass through the keyhole gate, and docile enough to be contained on the long voyage to the Americas and the West Indies. Be in the dark, shouted a man from Jamaica, who had returned to discover his roots. See how it really was for them. They didn't have any electric light, nor room to move. hosts tried to protect me from his attention, saying Cool it man. It was a long time ago and we must forgive and forget. For my own comfort I wanted to agree, but the Jamaican was right. There is a need for reminder and a challenge about such a past. Being in Codrington reminds me of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel's (SPG) past, and its involvement in slavery. Codrington was left to SPG in 1710, a mere eight years after the society had been founded. In the deed of transfer, the following is written: My desire is to have the plantations continued entire, and three hundred negroes at least, always kept thereon; and a convenient number of professors and scholars maintained there; all of them to be under vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. The society maintained its plantations, albeit not very well. For a time too it had its own brand, and the Rev. Arthur Holt, writing in 1732, to question its continued use, wrote These letters SOCIETY in large letters are Brandished with a Red Hot Iron upon the naked breasts of the New Negroes as If they were So many Beasts, a Cruelty which I believe the Society will think it proper to discourage. The society did not think it proper to discourage, and eventually Holt took things into his own hands. This attitude reflected in its own way the view of the society that its task was to win over the slave holders rather than the slaves. In the sermons and discourses that it distributed in the colonies, therefore, the society urged that Christianity would not undermine slavery but strengthen it. The Christian slave would be more docile and diligent than the heathen Negro. Christianity would leave West Indian society undisturbed. The Christian slave would look for his reward in heaven, and in this life would abide in the same Calling wherein he was called.(1) As late as 1823, SPG, while making its policy towards slaves progressively more humane, nevertheless followed a policy that was coincident with colonial interest. The American historian J. Harry Bennett observed, Because it was an ecclesiastical body, and one closely identified with the hierarchy of the Church of England, the corporation was highly vulnerable to humanitarian attack. By 1832, the society accepted that the slaves would ultimately be freed, and in due course invited William Wilberforce to be one of its trustees. The title and sub-title of this lecture seek to express a deeply held belief that contemporary Christianity, approaching the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, needs to re-discover metanoia - repentance at its heart, and apply this to the place where we are, the life we are living and the destination we hope to achieve. …

Race, Colonial Exploitation and West Indian Immigration in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico, 1800-1850

“Unlike some Latin American mainland societies which still contain large numbers of indigenous peoples,” Jorge Duany observed, “Caribbean societies are immigrant societies almost from the moment of their conception.” Médéric-Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint- Méry likened the latter to “shapeless mixtures subject to diverse influences.” Their population, Dawn I. Marshall reminds us, “is to a large extent the result of immigration—from initial settlement, forced immigration during slavery, indentured immigration, to the present outward movement to metropolitan countries.” Throughout their history, David Lowenthal noted, limited resources and opportunities kept West Indian societies in a constant state of flux, impelling continuous transfers of people, technology, and institutions within the area. Despite the frequency and importance of these population movements, the bulk of scholarship on American migration history has traditionally concentrated on areas favored by European settlement. Moreover, the overwhelming quantity of research on immigration to the United States, Canada, Argentina, and Brazil has tended to overshadow the study of similar processes in other American regions. Due to its historical association with the arrival of involuntary settlers, migratory currents in the Caribbean have been too narrowly identified with bondage, penal labor and indentured workers. Nowhere is the imbalance more conspicuous than in the study of trans-Caribbean migratory streams during slavery. Discussions on pre-1838 population shifts have centered largely on inter-island slave trading and the exodus prompted by Franco-Haitian revolutionary activity in the Caribbean. The parallel legacy of motion hinted by Neville N.A.T. Hall's “maritime” maroons and Julius S. Scott's “masterless” migrants has attracted noticeably less attention.

Race, Privilege, and the Politics of (Re)Writing History: An Analysis of the Novels of Michelle Cliff

The white creole occupies an ambiguous space in West Indian society. On the one hand she is the descendant of the colonizer: by virtue of her colour she is virtually guaranteed a position of relative power and privilege if she so chooses. Even if she does not choose, the creole is bound to her birthright by her race, since, as Albert Memmi observes, the colonial who does not accept the ideologies and privileges of the colonizer does not-cannot-effectively exist.' Still, the white creole is in many ways culturally black, or Afro-Caribbean: the Afrocentric dynamic permeates all classes and races of Anglophone Caribbean society regardless of its particular configurations within those groups.2 The creole is, in this sense, representative of both colonizer and colonized. The question then, of where the white creole writer locates herself in the West Indian intellectual community becomes of critical importance in evaluating whether her literature is to be read as an English novel of the tropics, or a Third World narrative (and therefore backward, an anthropological document not destined to join the ranks of real literature). Whereas the novels of the first generation of white West Indian writers in the 19th and early 20th century, such as H. G. De Lisser, can for the most part be read as no more than extensions of European colonial ideology placed in exotic

Consomption d'esclaves et production de « races » : l'expérience caraïbéenne

Jean-Luc Jamard, The Consumption of Slaves and the Production of ? Races ? : The Caribbean Experience. ? Because Caribbean societies were ? created ? out of imported populations and plantations slavery, scholars of West Indies studies are sensitive to this very special history. West Indies anthropology cannot neglect making a comparative and ? transformist ? analysis. After a model of Caribbean slavery in the area is presented, an intra-Caribbean comparison is made between types of slavery, their changes, abolition and effects. The consequences on the dynamics of social ? races ? and classes in West Indian society are then interpreted.

Bastardy, Gender Hierarchy, and the State: The Politics of Family Law Reform in Antigua and Barbuda

Law's saliency in the development of West Indian societies began in the earliest days of settlement and has remained critical and constitutive. The author examines the transformation of Caribbean law over time as an instrument of class, kinship, and gender relations and investigates ethnographically the repeal in 1986 of illegitimacy as a legal category in Antigua and Barbuda. In contrast to the colonial era, working-class ideas about gender and family and actions by married women played a pivotal role in banishing bastardy and reconstituting the relationship between families and the state. This struggle reveals lawmaking as a deeply contextualized and gendered practice.

Basketball, Civil Society and the Post Colonial State in the Commonwealth Caribbean

In this paper the autonomous voluntary organizations of basketball leagues in ten countries of the Commonwealth Caribbean are examined. An index reflecting the strength of basketball organization, play and popular support in each country was constructed and and a framework to account for these differences was employed. The authors suggest that the significance of basketball organization lies in the fact that voluntary associations are poorly developed in the region. West Indian scholars have tied the stunted development of a civil society in the region to the historically rooted overly centralized political structures characteristic of Caribbean states. The weakness of civil society has restricted the democratic content of West Indian societies, despite the presence of formal democratic institutions. Finally, the implications of the existence and differential strength of basketball associations for the development of civil society and participatory democracy in the Anglophone Caribbean are explored.

Freedom of Thought and Expression: Nineteenth Century West Indian Creole Experience

In 1830 the Jamaican Legislature passed a bill stating that All persons of free condition shall henceforth be entitled to have and enjoy all the rights, privileges, and immunities and advantages whatsoever to which they would have been entitled if born and descended from white ancestors1 (my emphasis). By this enactment a class of Jamaicans (with counterparts scattered all over nineteenth century West Indian plantation society) acquired recognition and status tantamount to full citizen ship in a society which had up to then treated them as second class inhabitants; and as they were deprived of most rights and privileges, not least among them freedom of expression. That class of Jamaicans (referred to in the quotation above as such persons) were none other than the Free Coloureds — that group of native born and native bred West Indians who were to give special character to the West Indian social order during slavery and were to confound the otherwise simple arrangement of White, free, propertied and powerful overlords at the top and black, enslaved and powerless labour at the base.

Kinship and class in the West Indies: a genealogical study of Jamaica and Guyana

1. Introduction: assumptions, procedures, methods 2. Kinship, culture and theory 3. What is kinship in the West Indies? 4. The structure of genealogies 5. Marriage in the formation of West Indian society 6. Modern marriage and other arrangements 7. Sex role differentiation 8. Household and family 9 Conclusion

‘Black men in white skins’: The formation of a white proletariat in West Indian Slave society

(1986). ‘Black men in white skins’: The formation of a white proletariat in West Indian Slave society. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History: Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 5-21.

Lead Contact and Poisoning in Barbados Slaves: Historical, Chemical, and Biological Evidence

Lead contact and lead poisoning have received scant attention in discussions of early West Indian societies but are potentially important issues in considering the health and medical problems of blacks. Although our discussion focuses on Barbados, the West Indian historical literature strongly suggests that our general findings are applicable to other Caribbean areas and have implications for understanding some of the disabilities of early white populations as well. In this paper we also seek to illustrate how bioanthropological and chemical analyses of slave skeletal remains and historical data can complement one another in defining and investigating various dimensions of slave life.

Lead Contact and Poisoning in Barbados Slaves: Historical, Chemical, and Biological Evidence

Lead contact and lead poisoning have received scant attention in discussions of early West Indian societies but are potentially important issues in considering the health and medical problems of blacks. Although our discussion focuses on Barbados, the West Indian historical literature strongly suggests that our general findings are applicable to other Caribbean areas and have implications for understanding some of the disabilities of early white populations as well. In this paper we also seek to illustrate how bioanthropological and chemical analyses of slave skeletal remains and historical data can complement one another in defining and investigating various dimensions of slave life.

On the backs of blacks: The Barbados free‐coloureds’ pursuit of civil rights and the 1816 slave rebellion

Free‐coloured groups were to be found in most West Indian societies during the eighteenth century. Whereas most academic research has concentrated on the social status, legal rights and economic achievements of the free‐coloureds, this paper examines their political responses in Barbados at the time of the 1816 slave rebellion. Relations between slaves and free‐coloured groups were full of tension and this was reflected both at the time of the rising and during the rest of the time that slavery prevailed on the island.

Extra-Marital Mating Patterns in Caribbean Family Studies: A Methodological Excursus

The author questions some of the major theoretical assumptions concerning the causal factors responsible for the mating patterns and sexual practices among certain Caribbean societies. It is suggested that present-day patterns and family structures among West Indian societies can be attributed to the plantation system of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries rather than to the African origins of those concerned. (summary in FRE)

Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life and His Architecture (review)

362 biography Vol. 2, No. 4 concern: "this is one of those letters, characteristic of Hamilton, which seem rational on the surface, but if dug into reveal ideas far from rational" (p. 319). Mr. Flexner seems to have little conception of genre. He looks down into Hamilton, but neglects to look across the bridge of common form—love letters, denunciations, claims for preferment and so on—to others trapped as well as liberated by the limits of language and the constraints of custom. I would suggest, too, that Hamilton's reflective letters of self-justification, which are crucial to Mr. Flexner's interpretation, deserve more cautious treatment than he accords to them—especially those sent to Schuyler and to McHenry on the occasion of the break with Washington. That Hamilton was an outsider is obvious, but important. It raises questions about the relationship of Hamilton's character and upbringing to West Indian society as a whole that cannot (in the present under-developed state of Caribbean social history) be fully answered. It also leads one to ask: who were insiders? Robert Calhoon ends his review of Shaw's book on John Adams with the comment that Adams was "a misfit . . . doomed to be deeply involved and slightly out of step." Surely very much the same could be said for Hamilton. Perhaps Hamilton's separateness consists not in his psychological troubles , but rather in his lack of a saturation in a didactic and moral culture , whether of the kind in which Adams, or Franklin, or Jefferson had been immersed. Mr. Flexner is helpful in provoking renewed thought about the relationship between the characters of the Founding Fathers, and the social and cultural matrix from which they grew. And he reminds us, by default, that it is a part of the biographer's task to establish what men have in common as well as what they bring uniquely to bear from their personal circumstances. Mr. Flexner is liable to submerge the achievements in the man; Broadus Mitchell is more likely to err in the opposite direction. But it is Mitchell's two-volume biography (1956) that remains the essential reading. The Hamilton presented to us by Mr. Flexner I do not find believable. Colin Brooks University of Sussex Robert C. Twombly, Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life and His Architecture . New York: Wiley Interscience, 1979. 444 pp. $20.00. A new biography of Frank Lloyd Wright should be an important event. Unquestionably the greatest American architect, he had a long reviews 363 and extraordinary life, and has yet to inspire a biography that could in any sense be called definitive. Robert Twombly's new book adds to the store of information but fails significantly to do justice to the man and his work. An architect's biography, if it is to be more than a catalog of events or a critical analysis of his work, must address how the work came to be. A major reason why architecture is called "the social art" is that, to exist, it requires an interchange between architect and client. With an architect of the stature of Wright, this interchange is of crucial importance to understanding the work, particularly because Wright himself did so much to obscure its nature. He would have us believe that only his genius and eloquence convinced clients to accept his revolutionary architecture. In fact, there is every indication that, except when his personal behavior was so outrageous that it drove clients away, he enjoyed broad and loyal support from architects, critics and laymen. In Wright's case, there is extreme difficulty in separating the myth from reality, but this is only a heightened example of a problem common enough in the lives of artists; if the artist himself does not create the myth, then critics and the public will, because society demands that its major artists be eccentric. It is essential, then, that the biography of an artist be something of a cultural history, setting artist and work in a broader context. Because in architecture there is no work without clients, they are a crucial part ofthat context. In Twombly's book, we find scarcely a mention of clients. This might be expected...