Beyond the Blood, the Beach and the Banana emphasises the significance of the Caribbean in an increasingly globalised social world and draws attention to the contribution that scholarship in Caribbean Studies makes in coming to terms with a multi-cultural heritage. The compilation deliberately ranges in focus across periods, geographies, linguistic divisions and subject matter to present the fruition of significant research projects by 25 researchers from the Caribbean, North America and Europe. Contributors on the Hispanic, Dutch, African, Indian and Anglophone Caribbean juxtaposed with work on the Caribbean diasporas of the USA, UK, Canada and the Netherlands enrich the text with multiple perspectives.
This fully revised and updated textbook focuses on the major topics of globalization today. These include the impact of migration, relations between the northern and southern hemispheres, how gender and power plays into the globalization process, and the politics and economics of freedom of movement in the world. Two new chapters on the impact of technology on global communications and the effect of the emerging economies of India and China bring the book fully up to date. Further current issues such as the debate concerning environmental security, natural disasters, the broad spectrum between women's empowering impact in the marketplace and the continued exploitation of women in the sex and service trade are also examined. Eleanor Kofman and Gillian Youngs have edited an excellent and comprehensive collection essential for both undergraduate and graduate students trying to gain an understanding of theories and practices driving globalization as we enter into the twenty-first century.
In 1962 Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago became independent countries; Barbados followed in 1966. In the years leading up to these events, the history of the British West Indies was written largely by the British, the colonial power, who focused on the process of decolonization and the key local players involved. After independence, local scholars also focused on the role of political leaders in the newly independent countries. To date, scholars have paid little attention to the impact of these events on the local populations of these islands. Decolonization and the Other: The Case of the British West Indies explores the local perspectives on, and reactions to, events by using West Indian literature to supplement the historical record. Beginning in the 1930s when local demands for political participation increased, through the process of decolonization, and into the early years of independence, West Indian writers used their life experiences to document local reaction. West Indian literature first appeared in 1950, when British publishers became interested in island authors and their novels. By using the novels to supplement the historical record, we can gain a better understanding of the process of decolonization and the early years of independence in the British West Indies.
The last decade has seen a growing body of research about globalization and climate change in the Caribbean. This collection is a significant addition to the literature on a topic that is of critical importance to the region. It explores research from a number of Caribbean islands dealing with a range of issues related to agriculture and food in the context of globalization and climate change. Using a broad livelihoods perspective, the impacts on rural livelihoods are explored as well as issues related to community level resilience, adaptability and adaptations. The volume is strengthened by gendered analyses of issues and discussions informed by a diverse range of research methods and methodologies. Scholars of Caribbean studies and studies pertaining to social, cultural, economic and environmental issues facing Small Island Developing States (SIDS) will greatly benefit from this book.
The abrupt loss of Soviet financial support in 1989 resulted in the near-collapse of the Cuban economy, ushering in the almost two decades of austerity measures and severe shortages of food and basic consumer goods referred to as the Special Period. Through the innovative framework of individual and collective memory, Daliany Jerónimo Kersh brings together analysis of press sources and oral histories to offer a compelling portrait of how Cuban women cleverly combined various forms of paid work to make ends meet. Disproportionately impacted by the economic crisis given their role as primary caregivers and household managers and unable to survive on devalued state salaries alone, women often employed informal and illegal earning strategies. As she argues, this regression into gendered work such as cooking, sewing, cleaning, reselling, and providing sexual services precipitated by the post-Soviet crisis to a large extent marked a return to pre-revolutionary gendered divisions of labor.
Studies of the global political economy have rarely engaged with development in the Caribbean, the thought of its indigenous intellectuals, or the non-sovereign territories of the region. Matthew Bishop compares the development of the independent English-speaking islands of St Lucia and St Vincent and their non-sovereign French neighbours, Martinique and Guadeloupe. By explaining how distinctive patterns of British and French colonialism and decolonisation came to bear on them, he investigates how very different patterns of development have subsequently ensued, often with startling consequences in this era of globalization and crisis. By engaging with the empirical reality of the Caribbean, his study sheds light on a range of wider debates relating to development, indigenous thought, post-colonial sovereignty, small states, and the contemporary evolution of the global political economy.
Across Colonial Lines takes a multi-perspective approach to the study of empire and commodities, and encourages readers to look at commodity histories in alternative spatial and temporal contexts. It offers a comparative understanding of commodities in the Venetian, Portuguese, Dutch, French and British Empires. Highlighting the interwoven character of multiple commodity networks, this book situates commodities like gold, coffee, tea and indigo, to name a few, within pre-existing networks of labour, consumption and knowledge production. It explores the nexus between the local and the global, and highlights the role played by individual producers, petty traders, sailors and even consumers in creating regional circulations within a global political economy. In this volume, commodity networks are not just sites of production and trade, but also of political control, social organisation and consumption choices. They provide the impetus for globalisation from as early as the thirteenth century. Each chapter takes an individual commodity to illustrate the history of commodity transmission within imperial contexts. From early modern Venetian commerce to the trade networks of the Eurasian world; from the trading ambitions of British sailors to Portuguese global imperial ambitions; from the cross-imperial knowledge networks of indigo to the assertion of indigenous agency in Angola; and from the commodification of labour to the experience of tourism in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean World, Across Colonial Lines uses commodity networks as a lens to study empire building across varied yet connected geographies and chronologies.
In this book, Amy K. King examines how violence between women in contemporary Caribbean and American texts is rooted in plantation slavery. Analyzing films, television shows, novels, short stories, poems, book covers, and paintings, King shows how contemporary media reuse salacious and stereotypical depictions of relationships between women living within the plantation system to confront its legacy in the present. The vestiges of these relationships--enslavers and enslaved women, employers and domestic servants, lovers and rivals--negate characters' efforts to imagine non-abusive approaches to power and agency. King's work goes beyond any other study to date to examine the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, ability, and nationality in U.S. and Caribbean depictions of violence between women in the wake of slavery.
Configuring Masculinity in Theory and Literary Practice combines a critical survey of the most important concepts in Masculinity Studies with a historical overview of how masculinity has been constructed within British Literature and a special focus on developments in the 20th and 21st centuries.
