Caribbean Diaspora in the USA presents a new cultural theory based on an exploration of Caribbean religious communities in New York City. The Caribbean culture of New York demonstrates a cultural dynamism which embraces Spanish speaking, English speaking and French speaking migrants. All cultures are full of breaks and contradictions as Latin American and Caribbean theorists have demonstrated in their ongoing debate. This book combines unique research by the author in Caribbean New York with the theoretical discourse of Latin American and Caribbean scholars.
Caribbean Diaspora in the USA presents a new cultural theory based on an exploration of Caribbean religious communities in New York City. The Caribbean culture of New York demonstrates a cultural dynamism which embraces Spanish speaking, English speaking and French speaking migrants. All cultures are full of breaks and contradictions as Latin American and Caribbean theorists have demonstrated in their ongoing debate. This book combines unique research by the author in Caribbean New York with the theoretical discourse of Latin American and Caribbean scholars. Focusing on Caribbean religious communities, including Cuban/Puerto Rican Santería (Regla de Ocha), Haitian Vodou, Shango (Orisha Baptist) from Trinidad and Tobago, and Brazilian Pentecostal church, Schmidt's observations lead to the construction of a cultural concept that illustrates a culture in an ongoing state of change, with more than one form of expression depending on situation, time and context. Showing the creativity of religions and the way immigrants adapt to their new surroundings, this book fills a gap between Latin American and Caribbean Studies.
Scholars of the African Americas are sometimes segregated from one another by region or period, by language, or by discipline. Bringing together essays on fashion, the visual arts, film, literature, and history, this volume shows how our understanding of the African diaspora in the Americas can be enriched by crossing disciplinary boundaries to recontextualize images, words, and thoughts as part of a much greater whole. Diaspora describes dispersion, but also the seeding, sowing, or scattering of spores that take root and grow, maturing and adapting within new environments. The examples of diasporic cultural production explored in this volume reflect on loss and dispersal, but they also constitute expansive and dynamic intellectual and artistic production, neither wholly African nor wholly American (in the hemispheric sense), whose resonance deeply inflects all of the Americas. African Diaspora in the Cultures of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States represents a call for multidisciplinary, collaborative, and complex approaches to the subject of the African diaspora.
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.
Since 1965, West Indians have been emigrating to the United States in record numbers, and to New York City in particular. Caribbean New York shows how the new immigration is reshaping American race relations and sheds much-needed light on factors that underlie some of the city's explosive racial confrontations. Philip Kasinitz examines how two forces--racial solidarity and ethnic distinctiveness--have helped to shape the identity of New York's West Indian community. He compares "new" (post-1965) immigrants with West Indians who arrived earlier in the century, and looks in detail at the economic, political, and cultural rules that Afro-Caribbean immigrants have played in the city during each period.
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
Product Description: Caribbean Connections: Moving North introduces students to Caribbean life in the United States through oral histories, literature and essays. Moving North features the work of noted authors such as Edwidge Danticat, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Paule Marshall, Julia Alvarez and others who trace their roots to Puerto Rico, the English speaking West Indies, the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Haiti. Part of a highly acclaimed series on the cultures of the Caribbean.
The literature of Caribbean writers living in the United States embodies a duality, an awareness of multiple sites of identity as well as conflict of place and space. Easily grouped with African Americans, Caribbean peoples and other immigrants from the African Diaspora make up the quasi-political face of Black America. But as immigrants from a former colonized community, Caribbean writers carry with them a historical experience that differentiates them from African Americans - they stand on the border of two spaces. What impact does this duality have on Caribbean literature written by writers who have left the «home» space for American soil? As many writers have suggested, Caribbean writers are continuously looking back to home in an attempt to understand who they are and where they belong. This book postulates that it is through nostalgia, or an attempt to renegotiate the past, that the Caribbean writer attempts to reconcile his/her duality. Nostalgia can be directly linked to an understanding of, and by extension a critique of, American social and political practices as well as an appraisal of colonial influences in the Caribbean. Thus the discourse of Caribbean writers living in America operates on different levels: Although Caribbean migratory writers are continuously looking back to «home», this nostalgia is tied to a reevaluation of American and island consciousness. The texts discussed in this work are, in effect, engaged in critical analysis; the texts «perform criticism» of the «home» country and «that man's country» - the United States.
