This work is a multi-disciplinary reconstruction and evaluation of the development and mobilisation of political consciousness in Guyana between the legal termination of physical enslavement in 1838 and the very eve of flag-and-anthem independence in 1966. Guyanese transformed themselves from disempowered colonial subjects to citizens of variable levels of awareness and empowerment during those one hundred and twenty-six years of struggle. Numerous organisations, themes, issues and tendencies within the movement receive careful attention in rigorous interrogation through the prisms of class, occupation, race, gender, colour and personality.
This book traces the creation of ethnic groups in nineteenth century Guyana and its ultimate impact on the colony's political consituencies as it moved to independence. The construction of the nation in the postcolonial period is approached through an analysis of cricket, trade unions and women traders in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The author argues that ethnicity as a historical relationship can be understood as a social experience if it is viewed as part of a set of overlapping identities which include class and gender. It also contends that ethnicity in Guyana was created in colonial times and deployed as a tool for dominance which has reconfigured itself to function effectively in postcolonial times.
A powerful biography that presents analysis of a black working-class woman who rose from a tenement slum in intensely racialized British Guiana to become a leading anti-colonialism, workers' rights and women's liberation activist in Britain. Jessica Huntley's Pan-African Life celebrates Huntley's importance as a leading figure in the Windrush-era resistance to the multiple, racialized injustices faced by black settlers, children and communities in Britain. Claudia Tomlinson details how Huntley became the elder stateswoman of radical black activism of her era through participation in decolonization movements and actions such as the Black Parents Movement and the International Bookfair of Radical Black and Third World Books, as well as her foundational role at Bogle L'Ouverture Publications, the leading black-led, pan-African publishing house and its associated radical bookshop. Based on extensive archival research and over 40 interviews with Huntley's closest family members, associates, comrades, authors, artists and friends, this book affords readers an opportunity to take a long-lensed view of the historical roots of the many contemporary racial injustices re-invigorated in recent debates. Tomlinson re-writes the history of a period and a struggle often told through a master discourse that is male, middle-class and privileged. In so doing, she shows how Jessica Huntley's fight for justice and the rights of all black people in Britain provides a useful lens into UK-based, black literary and cultural expression in the 20th century.
The Afrikan Revolution in Ayiti: Libète ou Lanmò, Freedom or Death is an Afrocentric re-examination and interpretation around the historiography of the Haitian Revolution and provides an in-depth study that highlights several significant Afrikan epistemological and cosmological aspects that led to freedom.
Revolutionary lives of the Red and Black Atlantic brings to light the life histories of a wide range of radical figures whose political activity in relation to the black liberation struggle was profoundly shaped by the global impact and legacy of the Russian Revolution of October 1917. The volume introduces new perspectives on the intellectual trajectories of well-known figures and critical activists including C. L. R. James, Paul Robeson, Walter Rodney and Grace P. Campbell. This biographical approach brings a vivid and distinctive lens to bear on how racialised social and political worlds were negotiated and experienced by these revolutionary figures, and on historic black radical engagements with left political movements, in the wake of the Russian Revolution.
The essays compiled in Poetry in Pedagogy: Intersections Across and Between the Disciplines offer praxes of poetry that cultivate a community around students, language, and writing, while presenting opportunities to engage with new texts, new textual forms, and new forms of text-mediated learning. The volume considers, combines, and complements multiform poetry within and beyond existing Teaching & Learning paradigms as it traverses Asia, The Atlantic, and Virtual Space. By virtue of its mélange of intersecting trajectories, across and between oceans, genres, disciplines, and sympathies, Poetry in Pedagogy informs interdisciplinary educators and practitioners of creative writing & poetry involved in examining the multiform through international, cross-disciplinary contexts.
Originally published in 1984, this is a documented account of the political history of the former British colony of Guyana. Providing a reflection of the increasing involvement of the United States in the Caribbean and Central America on the long-term political, social and economic effect that intervention can have on the small states of less developed countries during the period of 1945 to 1983. The text includes a detailed historical account of post-World War II politics and moves onto the emergence of the nationalist movement in Guyana in the late 1940s and the cold war period of the 1950s; concluding with the consequences both politically and economically in the 1980s.
Colin Palmer, one of the foremost chroniclers of twentieth-century British and U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean, here tells the story of British Guiana's struggle for independence. At the center of the story is Cheddi Jagan, who was the colony's first premier following the institution of universal adult suffrage in 1953. Informed by the first use of many British, U.S., and Guyanese archival sources, Palmer's work details Jagan's rise and fall, from his initial electoral victory in the spring of 1953 to the aftermath of the British-orchestrated coup d'etat that led to the suspension of the constitution and the removal of Jagan's independence-minded administration. Jagan's political odyssey continued--he was reelected to the premiership in 1957--but in 1964 he fell out of power again under pressure from Guianese, British, and U.S. officials suspicious of Marxist influences on the People's Progressive Party, founded in 1950 by Jagan and his activist wife, Janet Rosenberg. But Jagan's political life was not over--after decades in the opposition, he became Guyana's president in 1992. Subtly analyzing the actual role of Marxism in Caribbean anticolonial struggles and bringing the larger story of Caribbean colonialism into view, Palmer examines the often malevolent roles played by leaders at home and abroad and shows how violence, police corruption, political chicanery, racial politics, and poor leadership delayed Guyana's independence until 1966, scarring the body politic in the process.
