The History of Mary Prince

The History of Mary Prince

Author: Mary Prince

Publisher: Courier Corporation

Published: 2012-04-26

Total Pages: 82

ISBN-13: 0486146936

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Prince — a slave in the British colonies — vividly recalls her life in the West Indies, her rebellion against physical and psychological degradation, and her eventual escape in 1828 in England.


Jamaica in 1687

Jamaica in 1687

Author: John Taylor

Publisher: University of the West Indies Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13:

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This remarkable description of Jamaica in the late 1680s was written by a contemporary English observer, John Taylor, who spent some months on the island. The original manuscript is held by the National Library of Jamaica, and has rarely been used by scholars. It contains information about Jamaica under the Spaniards, about the English invasion of 1655 and about the formation of the subsequent society, including the treatment of slaves. There are sections on the island's settlement and architecture, including a particularly full description of Port Royal. John Taylor sets out fifty current laws, many of them unknown to other such collections. He also carefully explains the nature of Jamaica's birds, beasts and plants. Taylor offers an image of the island before the general spread of sugar cultivation, citing some creatures now extinct in Jamaica; he also makes many suggestions about the medical use of natural products. His world is still one in which certain places are enchanted, though he also describes an island whose main features will be entirely familiar to modern Jamaicans. and he provides an annotated version of the manuscript, which was originally more than 850 pages and was in three volumes. This edition covers the second half of volume 1 and the whole of volume 2, providing a rich tapestry of Taylor's observations and notes on Jamaica. Most of the remaining manuscript contains autobiographical material and nautical logs. Buisseret's edition provides an annotation and a glossary. The text will be useful to generations of scholars and students alike or to anyone with an interest in Jamaica and its colourful history. Co-published with the National Library of Jamaica and the Mill Press.


Fatal Revolutions

Fatal Revolutions

Author: Christopher P. Iannini

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2013-03-12

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0807838187

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Drawing on letters, illustrations, engravings, and neglected manuscripts, Christopher Iannini connects two dramatic transformations in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world--the emergence and growth of the Caribbean plantation system and the rise of natural science. Iannini argues that these transformations were not only deeply interconnected, but that together they established conditions fundamental to the development of a distinctive literary culture in the early Americas. In fact, eighteenth-century natural history as a literary genre largely took its shape from its practice in the Caribbean, an oft-studied region that was a prime source of wealth for all of Europe and the Americas. The formal evolution of colonial prose narrative, Ianinni argues, was contingent upon the emergence of natural history writing, which itself emerged necessarily from within the context of Atlantic slavery and the production of tropical commodities. As he reestablishes the history of cultural exchange between the Caribbean and North America, Ianinni recovers the importance of the West Indies in the formation of American literary and intellectual culture as well as its place in assessing the moral implications of colonial slavery.


The Indian Caribbean

The Indian Caribbean

Author: Lomarsh Roopnarine

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2018-01-19

Total Pages: 171

ISBN-13: 149681441X

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Winner of the 2018 Gordon K. and Sybil Farrell Lewis Award for the best book in Caribbean studies from the Caribbean Studies Association This book tells a distinct story of Indians in the Caribbean--one concentrated not only on archival records and institutions, but also on the voices of the people and the ways in which they define themselves and the world around them. Through oral history and ethnography, Lomarsh Roopnarine explores previously marginalized Indians in the Caribbean and their distinct social dynamics and histories, including the French Caribbean and other islands with smaller South Asian populations. He pursues a comparative approach with inclusive themes that cut across the Caribbean. In 1833, the abolition of slavery in the British Empire led to the import of exploited South Asian indentured workers in the Caribbean. Today India bears little relevance to most of these Caribbean Indians. Yet, Caribbean Indians have developed an in-between status, shaped by South Asian customs such as religion, music, folklore, migration, new identities, and Bollywood films. They do not seem akin to Indians in India, nor are they like Caribbean Creoles, or mixed-race Caribbeans. Instead, they have merged India and the Caribbean to produce a distinct, dynamic local entity. The book does not neglect the arrival of nonindentured Indians in the Caribbean since the early 1900s. These people came to the Caribbean without an indentured contract or after indentured emancipation but have formed significant communities in Barbados, the US Virgin Islands, and Jamaica. Drawing upon over twenty-five years of research in the Caribbean and North America, Roopnarine contributes a thorough analysis of the Indo-Caribbean, among the first to look at the entire Indian diaspora across the Caribbean.


Building a Nation

Building a Nation

Author: Eric D. Duke

Publisher: University Press of Florida

Published: 2018-10-15

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0813063728

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Caribbean Studies Association Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Award - Honorable Mention The initial push for a federation among British Caribbean colonies might have originated among colonial officials and white elites, but the banner for federation was quickly picked up by Afro-Caribbean activists who saw in the possibility of a united West Indian nation a means of securing political power and more. In Building a Nation, Eric Duke moves beyond the narrow view of federation as only relevant to Caribbean and British imperial histories. By examining support for federation among many Afro-Caribbean and other black activists in and out of the West Indies, Duke convincingly expands and connects the movement's history squarely into the wider history of political and social activism in the early to mid-twentieth century black diaspora. Exploring the relationships between the pursuit of Caribbean federation and black diaspora politics, Duke convincingly posits that federation was more than a regional endeavor; it was a diasporic, black nation-building undertaking--with broad support in diaspora centers such as Harlem and London--deeply immersed in ideas of racial unity, racial uplift, and black self-determination. A volume in this series New World Diasporas, edited by Kevin A. Yelvington


Beyond Coloniality

Beyond Coloniality

Author: Aaron Kamugisha

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2019-02-01

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 0253036275

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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.


Manuscript Sources for the History of the West Indies

Manuscript Sources for the History of the West Indies

Author: Kenneth E. Ingram

Publisher:

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 604

ISBN-13:

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This is a record of over 2000 manuscript sources for the study of the West Indies and its history. The major focus is on the collections of the Nation Library of Jamaica but other entries relate to manuscript sources in repositeries elswhere in Jamaica, the United States, Canada and Britain.


Histoire Naturelle Des Indes

Histoire Naturelle Des Indes

Author: Morgan library & museum (New York, N.Y.).

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 9780393039948

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In 1983, The Pierpont Morgan Library received, as the bequest of Clara S. Peck, an extraordinary volume whose beautiful paintings and descriptions document the plant, animal, and human life of the Caribbean late in the sixteenth century. Spaniards had already begun to exert influence over the indigenous people of the area when explorers from England and France arrived, among them Sir Francis Drake. The book, known as "The Drake Manuscript", and titled Histoire Naturelle des Indes when it was bound in the eighteenth century, gives us a wonderful picture of daily life at the time of Drake's many visits to the region. Although Drake's connection to the manuscript is uncertain, he is mentioned on more than one occasion by the authors. Drake himself is known to have painted, but none of his work survives. The work presented, here in full facsimile for the first time, is from the hands of two or more artists, most likely French, and the descriptions are French as well. Patrick O'Brian gives us a fascinating account of Drake the voyager. And in Verlyn Klinkenborg's introduction to the facsimile, we are given the background necessary to appreciate this magnificent manuscript to its fullest extent. Charles E. Pierce, Jr.'s preface and Ruth Kraemer's translations of the text round out this rich, beautiful, and historically invaluable book.