This essay collection addresses past and current debates surrounding colonial relics and monuments, colonial vestiges, heritage, gender, narratives of independence, nationhood and national identity. Caribbean enthusiasts, scholars and students will appreciate the diversity of views of these academic post-colonial narratives.
Independence, Colonial Relics, and Monuments in the Caribbean is a collection of critical perspectives on independence and the legacies of colonialism in the post-colonial Caribbean. The contributors examine themes relating to culture, identity, gender, nationhood, heritage and historic preservation in the post-independent Caribbean. In a twenty-first century context where calls for reparatory justice for the people of the Caribbean who have been disadvantaged by the effects of colonialism have intensified, this book is quite relevant as some chapters examine colonialism through relics, laws, statues and monuments, while other chapters explore the implications of African enslavement, the role of Indian indentureship, the Federation of the West Indies and the effect of the American based Black Lives Movement on the Caribbean.
Engaging the past, the present, and the future, The Workings of Diaspora: Jamaican Maroons and the Claims to Sovereignty shows how the lived experience of Jamaican Maroons is linked to the African Diaspora. In so doing, this interdisciplinary undertaking interrogates the definition of Diaspora but mainly emphasizes the term’s use. Mario Nisbett demonstrates that an examination of Jamaican Maroon communities, particularly their socio-political development, can further highlight the significance of the African Diaspora as an analytical tool. He shows how Jamaican Maroons inform resistance to abjection, a denial of full humanity, through claiming their African origin and developing solidarity and consciousness in order to affirm black humanity. This book establishes that present-day Jamaican Maroons remain relevant and engage the African Diaspora to improve black standing and bolster assertions of sovereignty.
Introductory surveys cover topics of regional importance; individual country chapters include analysis, statistics and directory information; plus information on regional organizations
Throughout the world, policy makers argue that they develop and implement policies to benefit all members of their society. Marginalized Groups in the Caribbean argues that the policies introduced by several governments in the Caribbean lead to the exclusion of groups within these societies. Using both research and interviews, the authors explore how certain groups are excluded from the policy-making process and do not have a voice. The groups highlighted in this book include criminal deportees, women, children, first peoples, refugees, and victims of floods. The three authors in this book are experts in separate disciplines: policy making, social work, as well as gender and development. They bring their respective experiences to bear in their arguments, showing many sides to the exclusionary effects of laws and promoting strategies for change.
This volume originated in a conference on 'Capitalist Plantations in Colonial Asia', held at the Centre for Asian Studies of the University of Amsterdam and Free University of Amsterdam in September 1990. The contributions to this collection focus on the production of rubber, sugar, tea, and several less strategic plantation crops, in colonial Indochina, Java, Malaya, the Philippines, India, Ceylon, Mauritius and Fiji (although geographically anomalous, both the latter are included because of the centrality to their sugar plantations of indentured labour from India).
This book examines how Mexican artisans and diverse actors participate in translations of aesthetics, politics, and history through the field of craft.
With extensive ethnographic and archival work, this book analyzes the works of Carlos Vives and La Provincia, the most influential artists of Colombia's music scene in the last twenty-five years, to uncover the basis of the Land of Oblivion, a musical and literary metaphor for Colombia's national identity.
In Communes and the Venezuelan State: The Struggle for Participatory Democracy in a Time of Crisis, Anderson Bean examines the communal movement in Venezuela, its origins, contradictory relationship to the state, and the challenges it faces amid Venezuela's largest economic and political crisis.
Kaiowcide: Living through the Guarani-Kaiowa Genocide is an analysis of the genocidal violence perpetrated against indigenous peoples in Brazil and towards the Guarani-Kaiowa. The ongoing indigenous genocide is defined as “Kaiowcide,” in place since the 1970s, when the Guarani-Kaiowa mobilized a reaction to land grabbing and oppression in the final years of the military dictatorship. The book is based on years of research on the agribusiness frontiers, on the indigenous geography of the Guarani-Kaiowa, and on sustained engagement with indigenous communities. Instead of merely describing the genocidal tragedy, the focus is on the life through genocide and trying to collectively go beyond it. One of the main contributions is to provide a robust interpretative analysis of the causes and the ramifications of the genocidal experience lived by the Guarani-Kaiowa. Rather than focusing on formalist notions of “direct intent” by settlers and governments, as a prerequisite for the tagging as genocide, this book emphasizes the destructive potential of the actors actively involved in agrarian capitalist transformations promoted by the national state in socio-economic frontiers.