Kategoria BISAC: History >> Caribbean & West Indies - General

For more than half a century before World War II, black South Africans and American Negroes a group that included African Americans and black West Indiansestablished close institutional and personal relationships that laid the necessary groundwork for the successful South African and American antiapartheid movements. Though African Americans suffered under Jim Crow racial discrimination, oppressed Africans saw African Americans as free people who had risen from slavery to success and were role models and potential liberators. Many African Americans, regarded initially by the South African...

There are 27 million slaves living in the world today--more than at any time in history. Three hundred thousand of them are impoverished children in Haiti, who "stay with" families as unpaid and uneducated domestic workers, subject to physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. This practice, known locally as restavek ("staying with"), is so widespread that one in ten Haitian children is caught up in this form of slavery.

Jean-Robert Cadet was a restavek in Haiti from the late 1950s until the early 1970s. He told the harrowing story of his youth in Restavec: From...

Caribbean Visionary: A. R. F. Webber and the Making of the Guyanese Nation traces the life of Albert Raymond Forbes Webber (1880-1932), a distinguished Caribbean scholar, statesman, legislator, and novelist. Using Webber as a lens, the book outlines the Guyanese struggle for justice and equality in an age of colonialism, imperialism, and indentureship. In this fascinating work, Selwyn R. Cudjoe examines Webber's emergence from the interior of Guyana to become a major presence in Caribbean politics.

Caribbean Visionary examines Webber's insightful novel, Those That Be in...

Explores the mutual interaction between magic in Cuban popular culture and the social construction of the power of the Cuban socialist state. Book News
Describes how socialist ideology is intertwined with Afro-Cuban religious beliefs and practices. Chronicle of Higher Education
Analyzes the Cuban capacity for combining apparently incompatible beliefs such as socialism and various Afro-Cuban religious practices not only by legitimizing their practice but also by creating a historical narrative wherein the faithful many of whom are black and poor, two segments of the...

This unique book, part critique, tribute, and memorial, makes the case that the 1979-1983 Revolution was a transnational event that deeply impacted politics and culture across the Caribbean. With relevance for all micro-states, the book reflects on how Grenada's small size shapes memory, political and poetic practice, and efforts at reconciliation.

As contemporary Tambu music and dance evolved on the Caribbean island of Curacao, it intertwined sacred and secular, private and public cultural practices, and many traditions from Africa and the New World. As she explores the formal contours of Tambu, Nanette de Jong discovers its variegated history and uncovers its multiple and even contradictory origins. De Jong recounts the personal stories and experiences of Afro-Curacaoans as they perform Tambu-some who complain of its violence and low-class attraction and others who champion Tambu as a powerful tool of collective memory as well as a...

Of Cannibals and Kings collects the very earliest accounts of the native peoples of the Americas, including selections from the descriptions of Columbus's first two voyages; documents reflecting the initial colonial occupation in Haiti, Venezuela, and Guyana; and the first ethnographic account of the Tainos by the missionary Ramon Pane. This primal anthropology directly guided a rapacious discovery of the lands of both wild cannibals and golden kings.

Despite Haiti's proximity to the United States, and its considerable importance to our own history, Haiti barely registered in the historic consciousness of most Americans until recently. Those who struggled to understand Haiti's suffering in the earthquake of 2010 often spoke of it as the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, but could not explain how it came to be so.

In recent years, the amount of scholarship about the island has increased dramatically. Whereas once this scholarship was focused on Haiti's political or military leaders, now the historiography of Haiti...