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Against the lethargy and despair of the contemporary Anglophone Caribbean experience, Aaron Kamugisha gives a powerful argument for advancing Caribbean radical thought as an answer to the conundrums of the present. Beyond Coloniality is an extended meditation on Caribbean thought and freedom at the beginning of the 21st century and a profound rejection of the postindependence social and political organization of the Anglophone Caribbean and its contentment with neocolonial arrangements of power. Kamugisha provides a dazzling reading of two towering figures of the Caribbean intellectual tradition, C. L. R. James and Sylvia Wynter, and their quest for human freedom beyond coloniality. Ultimately, he urges the Caribbean to recall and reconsider the radicalism of its most distinguished 20th-century thinkers in order to imagine a future beyond neocolonialism.
Several of the chapters that appear in this book were first presented at a conference on "The Color of Hunger" on April 25, 1992. The book discusses the connections between race and hunger, both domestically and internationally; presents a personal narrative about hunger and poverty among people of color in the United States; probes the use of racial and geographic stereotypes that U.S. hunger relief organizations use in their fund-raising appeals to the general public; provides a psychological analysis of the link between racial prejudice and hunger; discusses the theory that development assistance programs of the United States are saturated with assumptions of white supremacy; analyzes development agencies and the international media; presents a historical summary of the linkage between hunger and race in the contemporary world; and offers case studies of hunger and race in different national contexts. The last chapter urges all to enter the fight against global apartheid.
"Contributes new perspectives on historical black identity formation and contemporary activism in Cuba."--Choice "Provides invaluable insight into the histories and lives of Cubans who trace their origins to the Anglo-Caribbean."--Robert Whitney, author of State and Revolution in Cuba: Mass Mobilization and Political Change, 1920-1940 "Adds a missing piece to the existing literature about the renewal of black activism in Cuba, all the while showing the links and fractures between pre- and post-1959 society."--Devyn Spence Benson, Davidson College In the early twentieth century, laborers from the British West Indies immigrated to Cuba, attracted by employment opportunities. The Anglo-Caribbea...
The dawn of the twenty-first century is an opportune time for the people of the Caribbean to take stock of the entire experience of the past forty years since the ending of direct colonialism. The authors believe it is now time to chart our future by carefully learning the lessons of the recent past. This interdisciplinary collection is the first to cross traditionally restrictive disciplinary barriers to address the tough questions that face the Caribbean today. What went wrong with the nationalist project? What, if any, are the realistic options for a more prosperous Caribbean? What are to be the roles of race, gender and class in a more global, less national world? Meeks and Lindahl include thought-provoking articles from twenty-one respected thinkers in diverse fields of study. The groundbreaking articles include critiques of existing bodies of thought, reformulations of general theoretical approaches, policy-oriented alternatives for future development, and more. This book is a must for statesmen, academics and students of political theory, social theory, Caribbean studies, comparative gender studies, post-colonial studies, Marxism and Caribbean history and anyone interested
Callaloo or Tossed Salad? is a historical and ethnographic case study of the politics of cultural struggle between two traditionally subordinate ancestral groups in Trinidad, those claiming African and Indian descent. Viranjini Munasinghe argues that East Indians in Trinidad seek to become a legitimate part of the nation by redefining what it means to be Trinidadian, not by changing what it means to be Indian. In her view, Indo-Trinidadians' recent and ongoing struggle for national and cultural identity builds from dissatisfaction with the place they were originally assigned within Trinidadian society. The author examines how Indo-Trinidadian leaders in Trinidad have come to challenge the im...
For postcolonial Africa, modernization was seen as a necessary outcome of the struggle for independence and as crucial to the success of its newly established states. Since then, the rhetoric of modernization has pervaded policy, culture, and development, lending a kind of political theatricality to nationalist framings of modernization and Africans' perceptions of their place in the global economy. These 15 essays address governance, production, and social life; the role of media; and the discourse surrounding large-scale development projects, revealing modernization's deep effects on the expressive culture of Africa.
Most studies view the Caribbean as disparate countries prone to revolution and ripe for rebellion. In a refreshing departure from the norm, Anthony Maingot, using historical and contemporary examples, explains that the region is actually populated by resilient, adaptable societies that combine both modern and conservative elements. Despite the Caribbean’s diverse languages, nationalities, racial differences, ideologies, microhistories, and political systems, it is defined by a similarity of challenges faced in the postcolonial-era challenges. Maingot examines the contemporary intellectual, social, economic, and cultural trajectories of Caribbean nations and locates the common conservative thread in its many revolutions and transitions. He concludes that this prevailing tendency deserves better acknowledgment, by which the Caribbean can chart possible productive paths that have not yet been considered, especially with regard to combating increased corruption. By focusing on changes since the 1990s, this ambitious volume, by one of the preeminent scholars in Caribbean studies, helps define the future course of investigations in this complex region.
This book explores Jamaican-American author Michelle Cliff’s (1946–2016) literary rebellion against the colonial, gendered and racist norms of Western Modernity. It studies the sexualized circuits of the Atlantic world, drawing on the fields of literary criticism, feminist theories, queer studies and Caribbean studies. In order to do this, the book develops the theoretical paradigm of intersectionality. It also addresses the disturbing questions concerning the sexual politics of transatlantic modernity as represented in Cliff’s novels. Cliff’s rebellious poetics envisions the colonial Caribbean past in new ways. Her novels tell stories about Caribbean queer characters setting the queer as a site of postcolonial agency and as a perspective out of which colonial history can be re-written. This book considers myths, rites, and cultural memory as sites of healing in the midst of colonial bodily politics. Transnational histories, identity and ethics emerge as intertwined in Cliff’s feminist novels.
"Stigma and Culture "by J. Lorand Matory is a courageous auto-ethnographic examination of the stigma attached to color. The work is a major contribution to a new scholarly genre, a form of anthropological theory-building in memoir form. Its varied gestures include: paeans to past mentors; rich recollections of childhood; ethnographic analyses of various cultural institutions, especially Howard University; re-conceptualizations of Caribbean/African significances vis-a-vis African Americans in the United States, and more. Such a wide-ranging effort is precisely what recommends this bookand what makes it like few other books in Anthropology or Africana Studies. Matory argues that several ironie...
Derived from the nationalist writings of José Martí, the concept of Cubanidad (Cubanness) has always imagined a unified hybrid nation where racial difference is nonexistent and nationality trumps all other axes identities. Scholars have critiqued this celebration of racial mixture, highlighting a gap between the claim of racial harmony and the realities of inequality faced by Afro-Cubans since independence in 1898. In this book, Rebecca M. Bodenheimer argues that it is not only the recognition of racial difference that threatens to divide the nation, but that popular regional sentiment further contests the hegemonic national discourse. Given that the music is a prominent symbol of Cubanida...