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Musings of a Caribbean Professor is a compilation of over 50 articles on Caribbean concerns that were previously published in newspapers across the Caribbean during the 34-year sojourn of its author while a professor of sociology at the University of the Virgin Islands. It is a treasure of information on select outstanding and lesser-known personalities, including Marcus Garvey. Such topics as China-Caribbean relations; Cuba in the Caribbean; legalization of marijuana; crime; juvenile delinquency; suicide; healthy marriages; corruption in government; Catholicism and Cuba and other pithy ones, including the popular festival of Carnival are addressed. Also, in the tenth subsection of the volume, three human-interest concerns, namely, aging, retirement as well as death and its aftermath, are addressed. Even two thought-provoking pieces entitled “Seeing Islam through Christian Eyes” and “The Mystery of Evil”, are included. As can be expected, three submissions on the military and security in Barbados/Caribbean (Dion’s research specialization) are grafted in.
This collection of essays offers a comprehensive overview of colonial legacies of racial and social inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean. Rich in theoretical framework and close textual analysis, these essays offer new paradigms and approaches to both reading and resolving the opposing forces of race, class, and the power of states. The contributors are drawn from a variety of fields, including literary criticism, anthropology, politics, and sociology. The contributors to this book abandon the traditional approaches that study racialized oppression in Latin America only from the standpoint of its impact on either Indians or people of African descent. Instead they examine colonialism's domination and legacy in terms of both the political power it wielded and the symbolic instruments of that oppression. The volume's scope extends from the Southern Cone to the Andean region, Mexico, and the Hispanophone and Francophone Caribbean. It contests many of the traditional givens about Latin America, including governance and the nation state, the effects of globalization, the legacy of the region's criollo philosophers and men of letters, and postulations of harmonious race relations. As dictatorships give way to democracies in a variety of unprecedented ways, this book offers a necessary and needed examination of the social transformations in the region.
Musings of an Inveterate Traveler II is the personalized experience of a pleasure traveler to: Alaska, British Columbia, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Israel. It includes text referenced pictures, personal comments, insights, history, travel snafus, animals, plants, people, places, humor, ironies, and the sheer joy of travelling as one of lifes greatest gifts. The book will be enjoyed by experienced and inexperienced travelers of all ages who can relate to the manifold experiences or who enjoy those adventures vicariously from the comfort of their easy-chair. The writing, like life, is filled with humor, ironies, ups and downs, twists, and curves. It is written without trying to judge the world, its leaders, or its economic systems; it takes place over four years, one unrelated trip at a time, with my partner Jean (aka JeanLu, Jeanala, JR,) and me as the only repeating characters. Each chapter contains opinions, personal preferences, various insights about people and me. My musings involve experiences common to all travelers; e.g., travel connection problems, errors and omissions, comic cultural contacts, joyful interludes, camaraderie, dining, shopping. Uncommon to many travelers I include spiritual musings about humans, animals, plants, rocks, the Earth, and the universe, Read, laugh and most of all, ENJOY!
My story begins in Montreal on August 6, 1931, the day before my father died. I was not quite five years old, and I was the fourth of six siblings that my mother was left to raise-at the height of the so-called Great Depression. I trace and comment on my life struggles through public school, high school, and thence to my first university degree. Throughout, I faced the dual problem of going to school without having the mandatory fees. But I point out that I completed my education debt-free, never having applied for or received a student loan. I also reveal how I coped with the double-edged difficulty of being both black and ambitious, while persevering in a mostly unwelcoming white-dominated environment. Then I tell how I managed to overcome numerous obstacles, to obtain a doctorate (in organic chemistry), and eventually go on to become a pioneering Canadian-born black scientist and educator-more than forty years ago. Parenthetically, the pivotal breakthrough in my professional career took place at about the same time (1947) in the same city (Montreal), that Jackie Robinson was making his breakthrough into organized baseball. So in every sense, this is the story of a "native son." Thomas "Tom" F. Massiah
This book provides a much-needed study of the lived experience of militarization in the Caribbean from 1914 to the present. It offers an alternative to policy and security studies by drawing on the perspectives of literary and cultural studies, history, anthropology, ethnography, music, and visual art. Rather than opposing or defending militarization per se, this book focuses attention on how Caribbean people negotiate militarization in their everyday lives. The volume explores topics such as the US occupation of Haiti; British West Indians in World War I; the British naval invasion of Anguilla; military bases including Chaguaramas, Vieques and Guantánamo; the militarization of the police; sex work and the military; drug wars and surveillance; calypso commentaries; private security armies; and border patrol operations.
Suite as Sugar is a testimony to the unseen forces, always vigilant, ever ready, imbuing the characters in this collection with both resilience and trauma. From Winnipeg winterscapes to Toronto’s condo culture, from Havana’s haunted streets to Trinidad’s calamitous environs, the stories in Suite as Sugar are permeated with the violence of colonial histories, personal and intimate, reflecting legacies of abandonment and loss. The veil between the living and the dead is obscured, chaos becomes panacea, and characters take drastic measures into their own hands. Survivors of all kinds seek strategy and solace: a group of homeless people organize an occupation of vacant condos, a new resident to a disturbing neighbourhood tries to make sense of madness, a dog investigates the sudden disappearance of his owner. The five intertwined vignettes in the title story are set in a Caribbean country where the spectre of the sugar plantation haunts everyone. Tying this collection together is the casual brutality of our everyday lives, whether seen through the eyes of animal, spirit, or human being. A RARE MACHINES BOOK
Imagine the tension that existed between the emerging nations and governments throughout the Latin American world and the cultural life of former enslaved Africans and their descendants. A world of cultural production, in the form of literature, poetry, art, music, and eventually film, would often simultaneously contravene or cooperate with the newly established order of Latin American nations negotiating independence and a new political and cultural balance. In Black Writing, Culture, and the State in Latin America, Jerome Branche presents the reader with the complex landscape of art and literature among Afro-Hispanic and Latin artists. Branche and his contributors describe individuals such as Juan Francisco Manzano, who wrote an autobiography on the slave experience in Cuba during the nineteenth century. The reader finds a thriving Afro-Hispanic theatrical presence throughout Latin America and even across the Atlantic. The role of black women in poetry and literature comes to the forefront in the Caribbean, presenting a powerful reminder of the diversity that defines the region. All too often, the disciplines of film studies, literary criticism, and art history ignore the opportunity to collaborate in a dialogue. Branche and his contributors present a unified approach, however, suggesting that cultural production should not be viewed narrowly, especially when studying the achievements of the Afro-Latin world.
Gordon Rohlehr's critical work is outstanding in the balance it achieves between its particularity and its breadth--from the detailed unpacking of a poem's inner workings, to locating Caribbean writing in the sweep of political and cultural history--and the equal respect he pays to literary and to popular cultural forms. Indeed, along with Kamau Brathwaite, Sylvia Wynter and Kenneth Ramchand, no critic has done more to establish the subject of Caribbean writing and its distinctive aesthetics.These essays, written between 1969 to 1986, first published in radical campaigning newspapers such as Tapia and Moko, and first collected in 1992, were the work of a young academic who was both changing the university curriculum, and deeply engaged with the less privileged world outside the campus. Rohlehr catches Caribbean writing at the point when it leaves behind its nationalist hopes and begins to challenge the complex realities of independence. My Strangled City, a record of how Trinidad's poets responded to the upsurge of revolutionary hopes, radical shams, repressions and disappointed dreams of 1964-1975, is an indispensable account of those times and the diversity of literary response that continues to speak to the present. And if in these essays Trinidad is Rohlehr's primary focus, his perspective is genuinely regional. His native Guyana is always present in his thoughts and several essays show his deep interest in the cultural productions of a "dread" Jamaica, and in making insightful comparisons between, for instance, reggae and calypso.
Orwell Hughes - 20 years old, active in sports, arts and church - enjoys life as a young man coming of age in 1974’s Lusaka, where his father (James “Bwana” Hughes) is a Canadian diplomat and Orwell attends the University of Zambia. Orwell endears himself to African peers Benjamin Mudenda, Winter Banda, and Cepheus Belo, through interests in African languages, history, justice, and aspirations. Yet, he suffers racism and awkward social relationships with young women that his father and older brother Richard can’t help him solve. Orwell invites Tracy MacDonachie, his former Sunday school teacher and youth leader - who encouraged him as an impressionable lad back home in Canada - to visit him in Zambia, hoping that this older, successful and wiser man can continue to mentor him. Orwell’s sisters Suzanne and Janice Joanne invite Tracy’s sisters Kathleen and Alicia, to visit. The MacDonachies arrive for Easter but stay longer than planned, and are not as remembered; Tracy woos Orwell’s girlfriend Georgina. Several other Canadians join Bwana Hughes’s team, including Karla Bryant, whom Orwell agrees to tutor in English while the university has been closed by a workers’ strike. His hopes revive when he joins Tracy’s boxing clinic.
The Cuban model of communism has been an inspiration—from both a positive and negative perspective—for social movements, political leaders, and cultural expressionists around the world. With changes in leadership, the pace of change has accelerated following decades of economic struggles. The death of Fidel Castro and the reduced role of Raúl Castro seem likely to create further changes, though what these changes look like is still unknown. For now, Cuba is opening in important ways. Cubans can establish businesses, travel abroad, access the internet, and make private purchases. Paths for Cuba examines Cuba’s internal reforms and external influences within a comparative framework. The collection includes an interdisciplinary group of scholars from around the world to explore reforms away from communism.