Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge
Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge

Author: Jerry Gershenhorn

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2004-01-01

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 9780803221871

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Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledgeis the first full-scale biography of the trailblazing anthropologist of African and African American cultures. Born into a world of racial hierarchy, Melville J. Herskovits (1895?1963) employed physical anthropology and ethnography to undermine racist and hierarchical ways of thinking about humanity and to underscore the value of cultural diversity. His research in West Africa, the West Indies, and South America documented the far-reaching influence of African cultures in the Americas. He founded the first major interdisciplinary American program in African studies in 1948 at Northwestern University, and his controversial classicThe Myth of the Negro Pastdelineated African cultural influences on American blacks and showcased the vibrancy of African American culture. He also helped forge the concept of cultural relativism, particularly in his bookMan and His Works. While Herskovits promoted African and African American studies, he criticized some activist black scholars, most notably Carter G. Woodson and W. E. B. Du Bois, whom he considered propagandists because of their social reform orientation. ø After World War II, Herskovits became an outspoken public figure, advocating African independence and attacking American policymakers who treated Africa as an object of Cold War strategy. Drawing extensively on Herskovits?s private papers and published works, Jerry Gershenhorn?s biography recognizes Herskovits?s many contributions and discusses the complex consequences of his conclusions, methodologies, and relations with African American scholars.

Trinidad and Tobago
Trinidad and Tobago

Author: Lise S. Winer

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 1993-02-01

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 902727679X

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This volume describes the English and English Creole of Trinidad and Tobago. Sources from the early 19th through late 20th centuries are gathered from a wide range of materials: novels, editorials, advertisements, cartoons, proverbs, newspaper articles, plays, lyrics of traditional songs and calypsos, and oral interviews. Many of the older texts are now made easily accessible for the first time. The introduction includes descriptions of the historical background, the sound system, grammar and vocabulary, speech styles, social and linguistic interaction of Creole and English, and implications for education and spelling. The older sources demonstrate much closer links to other Caribbean English Creoles than previously recognized. The texts and recordings of oral interviews are invaluable resources for researchers and teachers in linguistics, Creole Studies, Caribbean studies, literature, anthropology and history.

Black Lives
Black Lives

Author: James L. Conyers

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-05-20

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 1317475798

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The chapters in this text comprise biographical sketches of previously unknown (or lesser known) African-Americans, among them General Daniel Chappie James Jr; William Levi Dawson (composer); Vinnette Carroll (director and playwright); and Elizabeth Ross Haynes (political speaker and activist).

Trinidad Yoruba
Trinidad Yoruba

Author: Maureen Warner-Lewis

Publisher:

Published: 1999-05

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 9789766400545

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Offers a comprehensive description of the West African language of Yoruba as it has been used on the island of Trinidad, addressing the experience of Africans in Trinidad and examining the nature of their social and linguistic heritage as it was modified and discarded in the European-dominated island community. Explains linguistic structures, analyzing Trinidad Yoruba as a distinct dialect of African Yoruba, and discusses the creolization process. Includes a Yoruba lexicon. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Caribbean Literature in English
Caribbean Literature in English

Author: Louis James

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-07-30

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1317871227

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Caribbean Literature in English places its subject in its precise regional context. The `Caribbean', generally considered as one area, is highly discrete in its topography, race and languages, including mainland Guyana, the Atlantic island of Barbados, the Lesser Antilles, Trinidad, and Jamaica, whose size and history gave it an early sense of separate nationhood. Beginning with Raleigh's Discoverie of...Guiana (1596), this innovative study traces the sometimes surprising evolution of cultures which shared a common experience of slavery, but were intimately related to individual local areas. The approach is interdisciplinary, examining the heritage of the plantation era, and the issues of language and racial identity it created. From this base, Louis James reassesses the phenomenal expansion of writing in the contemporary period. He traces the influence of pan-Caribbean movements and the creation of an expatriate Caribbean identity in Britain and America: `Brit'n' is considered as a West Indian island, created by `colonization in reverse'. Further sections treat the development of a Caribbean aesthetic, and the repossession of cultural roots from Africa and Asia. Balancing an awareness of the regional identity of Caribbean literature with an exploration of its place in world and postcolonial literatures, this study offers a panoramic view that has become one of the most vital of the `new literatures in English'. This accessible overview of Caribbean writing will appeal to the general reader and student alike, and particularly to all who are interested in or studying Caribbean literatures and culture, postcolonial studies, Commonwealth 'new literatures' and contemporary literature and drama.

Modernity - An Ethnographic Approach
Modernity - An Ethnographic Approach

Author: Daniel Miller

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-08-19

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 1000325105

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From cultural studies, sociology, media studies, gender studies and elsewhere there have been a spate of books recently which have attempted to characterize the state of modernity. Many of these have also argued that what is required is an ethnographic work to determine how far these supposed trends actually apply to a given population. This book explicitly accepts this challenge and, in so doing, demonstrates the potential of modern anthropology studies. It starts by summarizing some debates on modernity and then argues that the Caribbean island of Trinidad is particularly apt for such a study given the origins of its population in slavery and indentured labour, both forms of extreme social rupture. The particular focus of this book is on mass consumption and the way goods and imported images such as soap opera have been used to express and develop a number of key contradictions of modernity. It will be of interest to anthropologists looking for a new potential for the discipline, as well as students in other fields who will be interested in the new contribution of anthropology to their debates.

Experiments with Power
Experiments with Power

Author: J. Brent Crosson

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2020-07-17

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 022670551X

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In 2011, Trinidad declared a state of emergency. This massive state intervention lasted for 108 days and led to the rounding up of over 7,000 people in areas the state deemed “crime hot spots.” The government justified this action and subsequent police violence on the grounds that these measures were restoring “the rule of law.” In this milieu of expanded policing powers, protests occasioned by police violence against lower-class black people have often garnered little sympathy. But in an improbable turn of events, six officers involved in the shooting of three young people were charged with murder at the height of the state of emergency. To explain this, the host of Crime Watch, the nation’s most popular television show, alleged that there must be a special power at work: obeah. From eighteenth-century slave rebellions to contemporary responses to police brutality, Caribbean methods of problem-solving “spiritual work” have been criminalized under the label of “obeah.” Connected to a justice-making force, obeah remains a crime in many parts of the anglophone Caribbean. In Experiments with Power, J. Brent Crosson addresses the complex question of what obeah is. Redescribing obeah as “science” and “experiments,” Caribbean spiritual workers unsettle the moral and racial foundations of Western categories of religion. Based on more than a decade of conversations with spiritual workers during and after the state of emergency, this book shows how the reframing of religious practice as an experiment with power transforms conceptions of religion and law in modern nation-states.