Caribbean Culture

Caribbean Culture

Author: Kamau Brathwaite

Publisher:

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13:

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The book presents a representative selection of the papers presented at the second Conference on Caribbean Culture in honour of Kamau Brathwaite.


High Mas

High Mas

Author: Kevin Adonis Browne

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2018-09-26

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 149681939X

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Overall Winner of the 2019 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature High Mas: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Culture explores Caribbean identity through photography, criticism, and personal narrative. Taking a sophisticated and unapologetically subjective Caribbean point of view, the author delves into Mas—a key feature of Trinidad performance—as an emancipatory practice. The photographs and essays here immerse the viewer in carnival experience as never before. Kevin Adonis Browne divulges how performers are or wish to be perceived, along with how, as the photographer, he is implicated in that dynamic. The resulting interplay encourages an informed, nuanced approach to the imaging of contemporary Caribbeanness. The first series, “Seeing Blue,” features Blue Devils from the village of Paramin, whose performances signify an important revision of the post-emancipation tradition of Jab Molassie (Molasses Devil) in Trinidad. The second series, “La Femme des Revenants,” chronicles the debut performance of Tracey Sankar’s La Diablesse, which reintroduced the “Caribbean femme fatale” to a new audience. The third series, “Moko Jumbies of the South,” looks at Stephanie Kanhai and Jonadiah Gonzales, a pair of stilt-walkers from the performance group Touch de Sky from San Fernando in southern Trinidad. “Jouvay Reprised,” the fourth series, follows the political activist group Jouvay Ayiti performing a Mas in the streets of Port of Spain on Emancipation Day in 2015. Troubling the borders that persist between performer and audience, embodiment and spirituality, culture and self-consciousness, the book interrogates what audiences understand about the role of the participant-observer in public contexts. Representing the uneasy embrace of tradition in Trinidad and the Caribbean at large, the book probes the multiple dimensions of vernacular experience and their complementary cultural expressions. For Browne, Mas performance is an exquisite refusal to fully submit to the lingering traumas of slavery, the tyrannies of colonialism, and the myths of independence.


Caribbean Middlebrow

Caribbean Middlebrow

Author: Belinda Edmondson

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9780801448140

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It is commonly assumed that Caribbean culture is split into elite highbrow culture--which is considered derivative of Europe--and authentic working-class culture, which is often identified with such iconic island activities as salsa, carnival, calypso, and reggae. This book recovers a middle ground, a genuine popular culture in the English-speaking Caribbean that stretches back into the nineteenth century. It shows that popular novels, beauty pageants, and music festivals are examples of Caribbean culture that are mostly created, maintained, and consumed by the Anglophone middle class. Much of middle-class culture is further gendered as "female": women are more apt to be considered recreational readers of fiction, for example, and women's behavior outside the home is often taken as a measure of their community's respectability. The book also highlights the influence of American popular culture, especially African American popular culture, as early as the nineteenth century.


Martha Brae's Two Histories

Martha Brae's Two Histories

Author: Jean Besson

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 9780807854099

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Based on historical research and more than thirty years of anthropological fieldwork, this wide-ranging study underlines the importance of Caribbean cultures for anthropology, which has generally marginalized Europe's oldest colonial sphere. Located at


Resisting Paradise

Resisting Paradise

Author: Angelique V. Nixon

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2015-09-25

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1626745994

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Winner of the Caribbean Studies Association's 2016 Barbara T. Christian Award for Best Book in the Humanities Tourists flock to the Caribbean for its beaches and spread more than just blankets and dollars. Indeed, tourism has overly affected the culture there. Resisting Paradise explores the import of both tourism and diaspora in shaping Caribbean identity. It examines Caribbean writers and others who confront the region's overdependence on the tourist industry and the many ways that tourism continues the legacy of colonialism. Angelique V. Nixon interrogates the relationship between culture and sex within the production of “paradise” and investigates the ways in which Caribbean writers, artists, and activists respond to and powerfully resist this production. Forms of resistance include critiquing exploitation, challenging dominant historical narratives, exposing tourism's influence on cultural and sexual identity in the Caribbean and its diaspora, and offering alternative models of tourism and travel. Resisting Paradise places emphasis on the Caribbean people and its diasporic subjects as travelers and as cultural workers contributing to alternate and defiant understandings of tourism in the region. Through a unique multidisciplinary approach to comparative literary analysis, interviews, and participant observation, Nixon analyzes the ways Caribbean cultural producers are taking control of representation. While focused mainly on the Anglophone Caribbean, the study covers a range of territories including Antigua, the Bahamas, Grenada, Haiti, Jamaica, as well as Trinidad and Tobago, to deliver a potent critique.


Memory and the Archival Turn in Caribbean Literature and Culture

Memory and the Archival Turn in Caribbean Literature and Culture

Author: Marta Fernández Campa

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-04-15

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 3030721353

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This book discusses an archival turn in the work of contemporary Caribbean writers and visual artists across linguistic locations and whose work engages critically with various historical narratives and colonial and postcolonial records. This refiguration opens a critical space and retells stories and histories previously occluded in/by those records, and in spaces of the public sphere. Through poetics and aesthetics of fragmentation largely influenced by music and popular culture, their work encourages contrapuntal ways of (re)thinking histories; ways that interrogate the influence of colonial narratives in processes of silencing but also centre the knowledge found in oral histories and other forms of artistic archives outside official repositories. Discussing literature and selected artwork by artists from Britain, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and Trinidad and Tobago, Memory and the Archival Turn in Caribbean Literature and Culture demonstrates the historiographical significance of artistic and cultural production.


Contemporary Caribbean Cultures and Societies in a Global Context

Contemporary Caribbean Cultures and Societies in a Global Context

Author: Franklin W. Knight

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2006-05-18

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 0807876909

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The Caribbean ranks among the earliest and most completely globalized regions in the world. From the first moment Europeans set foot on the islands to the present, products, people, and ideas have made their way back and forth between the region and other parts of the globe with unequal but inexorable force. An inventory of some of these unprecedented multidirectional exchanges, this volume provides a measure of, as well as a model for, new scholarship on globalization in the region. Ten essays by leading scholars in the field of Caribbean studies identify and illuminate important social and cultural aspects of the region as it seeks to maintain its own identity against the unrelenting pressures of globalization. These essays examine cultural phenomena in their creolized forms--from sports and religion to music and drink--as well as the Caribbean manifestations of more universal trends--from racial inequality and feminist activism to indebtedness and economic uncertainty. Throughout, the volume points to the contending forces of homogeneity and differentiation that define globalization and highlights the growing agency of the Caribbean peoples in the modern world. Contributors: Antonio Benitez-Rojo (1931-2004) Alex Dupuy, Wesleyan University Juan Flores, City University of New York Graduate Center Jorge L. Giovannetti, University of Puerto Rico Aline Helg, University of Geneva Franklin W. Knight, The Johns Hopkins University Anthony P. Maingot, Florida International University Teresita Martinez-Vergne, Macalester College Helen McBain, Economic Commission for Latin America & the Caribbean, Trinidad Frances Negron-Muntaner, Columbia University Valentina Peguero, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point Raquel Romberg, Temple University


Cultural Conundrums

Cultural Conundrums

Author: Natasha Barnes

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2006-08-21

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780472069392

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Cultural Conundrums investigates the passions of race, gender, and national identity that make culture a continually embattled public sphere in the Anglophone Caribbean today. Academics, journalists, and ordinary citizens have weighed in on the ideological meanings to be found in the minutiae of cultural life, from the use of skin-bleaching agents in the beauty rituals of working-class Jamaican women to the rise of sexually suggestive costumes in Trinidad’s Carnival. Natasha Barnes traces the use of cultural arguments in the making of Caribbean modernity, looking at the cultural performances of the Anglophone Caribbean—cricket, carnival, dancehall, calypso, and beauty pageants—and their major literary portrayals. Barnes historicizes the problematic linkage of culture and nation to argue that Caribbean anticolonialism has given expressive culture a critical place in the region’s identity politics. Her provocative readings of foundational thinkers C. L. R. James and Sylvia Winters will engender discussion and debate among the Caribbean intellectual community. This impressively interdisciplinary study will make important contributions to the fields of Afro-diaspora studies, postcolonial studies, literary studies, performance studies, and sociology. “Postcolonial cultural criticism is celebrated for its mastery of generalization and condemned for its inability to historicize. Cultural Conundrums is unique in its ability to find a middle ground. It touches on some of the most important and contentious issues in the field. This book will account for why it was in those small islands that what we now call cultural studies was invented.” --Simon Gikandi, Princeton University Natasha Barnes is Associate Professor of African American Studies and English at the University of Illinois at Chicago.


Caribbean Literature and the Environment

Caribbean Literature and the Environment

Author: Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780813923727

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Examines the literatures of the Caribbean from an ecocritical perspective in all language areas of the region. This book explores the ways in which the history of transplantation and settlement has provided unique challenges and opportunities for establishing a sense of place and an environmental ethic in the Caribbean.


Readings in Caribbean History and Culture

Readings in Caribbean History and Culture

Author: D.A. Dunkley

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2011-12-08

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 0739168479

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This collection of eleven essays is designed to highlight some important new voices who have been doing research on the general subject areas of the history and culture of the Caribbean. The essays in this volume also address a number of themes which are critical to developing an understanding of current scholarly work on the two broad subject areas. Among the themes examined are colonialism, slavery, and the involvement of the Christian Church in both colonial rule and enslavement. The essays also analyze the pre-independence and post-independence periods of the twentieth century, with examinations on topics that include prostitution, departmentalization, education, visual art, and the musical form known as Reggae. The purpose of this book is to stimulate discussion around these important topics based on the perspectives of a number of new scholars. The book is also designed as a teaching device, principally for courses focusing on Caribbean society, whether in the past or the present.