This study concerns two communities of sugar plantation labourers, the descendants of indentured immigrants from India, who live in the county of Berbice, British Guiana. The study is focused on the analysis of social conflict: the factors that cause it, the forms it takes and its social consequences.
Nothing But Freedom examines the aftermath of emancipation in the South and the restructuring of society by which the former slaves gained, beyond their freedom, a new relation to the land they worked on, to the men they worked for, and to the government they lived under. Taking a comparative approach, Eric Foner examines Reconstruction in the southern states against the experience of Haiti, where a violent slave revolt was followed by the establishment of an undemocratic government and the imposition of a system of forced labor; the British Caribbean, where the colonial government oversaw an orderly transition from slavery to the creation of an almost totally dependent work force; and early twentieth-century southern and eastern Africa, where a self-sufficient peasantry was dispossessed in order to create a dependent black work force. Measuring the progress of freedmen in the post--Civil War South against that of freedmen in other recently emancipated societies, Foner reveals Reconstruction to have been, despite its failings, a unique and dramatic experiment in interracial democracy in the aftermath of slavery. Steven Hahn's timely new foreword places Foner's analysis in the context of recent scholarship and assesses its enduring impact in the twenty-first century.
By the award-winning former president of the Linguistic Society of America, this collection of some of John Russell Rickford's pioneering works shows how linguists in sociolinguistics and creole studies can benefit from utilizing data, theories and methods from each other, as they more frequently did in the 1960s and 1970s, when both subfields, in their modern forms at least, were getting started. The volume addresses fundamental sociolinguistic topics such as social class, style, fieldwork, speech community, sociolinguistic competence and language attitudes with data from Guyanese and other Caribbean creoles. Recurrent concepts are also considered including language versatility, variation and change, vernacular use, school success and criminal justice in African America and the Caribbean, using models, case studies and methodologies from sociolinguistics. Theoretical and applied scholars, students apprehensive about sociolinguistic fieldwork, and those considering dynamic methods like implicational scaling about which little is written in linguistics textbooks, will find this volume invaluable. Includes a Foreword by Gillian Sankoff.
Mixing—whether referred to as mestizaje, callaloo, hybridity, creolization, or multiculturalism—is a foundational cultural trope in Caribbean and Latin American societies. Historically entwined with colonial, anticolonial, and democratic ideologies, ideas about mixing are powerful forces in the ways identities are interpreted and evaluated. As Aisha Khan shows in this ethnography, they reveal the tension that exists between identity as a source of equality and identity as an instrument through which social and cultural hierarchies are reinforced. Focusing on the Indian diaspora in the Caribbean, Khan examines this paradox as it is expressed in key dimensions of Hindu and Muslim cultural history and social relationships in southern Trinidad. In vivid detail, she describes how disempowered communities create livable conditions for themselves while participating in a broader culture that both celebrates and denies difference. Khan combines ethnographic research she conducted in Trinidad over the course of a decade with extensive archival research to explore how Hindu and Muslim Indo-Trinidadians interpret authority, generational tensions, and the transformations of Indian culture in the Caribbean through metaphors of mixing. She demonstrates how ambivalence about the desirability of a callaloo nation—a multicultural society—is manifest around practices and issues, including rituals, labor, intermarriage, and class mobility. Khan maintains that metaphors of mixing are pervasive and worth paying attention to: the assumptions and concerns they communicate are key to unraveling who Indo-Trinidadians imagine themselves to be and how identities such as race and religion shape and are shaped by the politics of multiculturalism.
At some point during the 1990s the size of the Asian Indian population in the United States surpassed the one million mark. Today&’s Indians in America are a diverse group. They come from every state in India as well as from around the globe: England, Canada, South Africa, Tanzania, Fiji, Guyana, and Trinidad. They also belong to many religious faiths, including Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, Jainism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism. Many have high professional skills and are fluent in English and familiar with Western culture. They have settled throughout the United States, largely in metropolitan areas. Namast&é America tells this story of Indian immigrants in America, focusing on one of the largest communities, Chicago.
How critical is education in the development struggle of a third world country? Responding to popular demands for more accessible education, the Guyanese government instituted numerous educational reforms, hoping to promote economic growth in both the modern and the traditional sectors of the economy. Many in the traditional sector, however, saw education as a means of economic advancement, and sought increasingly to move into higher social strata through employment in the modern sector. Consequently, the civil service and private firms gained an oversupply of personnel, while agriculture and small business suffered, and unemployment increased. The author examines Guyana’s educational system from historical, political, social, and economic perspectives, and draws implications for other developing countries.
The multivocalic rite known as Hosay in the Caribbean developed out of earlier practices originating in Iraq and Iran which diffused to Trinidad by way of South Asian indentured laborers brought to the Caribbean by the British from the mid-1800s to the early decades of the twentieth century. The rituals are important as a Shi'i religious observance, but they also are emblems of ethnic and national identity for Indo-Trinidadians. Frank Korom investigates the essential role of Hosay in the performance of multiple identities by historically and ethnographically situating the event in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and Caribbean contexts. Hosay Trinidad: Muharram Performances in an Indo-Caribbean Diaspora is the first detailed historical and ethnographic study of Islamic muharram rituals performed on the island of Trinidad. Korom's central argument is that the annual rite is a polyphonic discourse that is best understood by employing multiple levels of interpretation. On the symbolic level the observance provides esoteric meaning to a small community of Indo-Trinidadian Muslims. On another level, it is perceived to be representative of "transplanted" Indian culture as a whole. Finally, the rituals are becoming emblematic of Trinidad's polyethnic population. Addressing strategies used to resist integration and assimilation, Hosay Trinidad is engaged with theories concerning the notion of cultural creolization in the Caribbean as well as in the general study of global diasporas.