Caribbean Freedom


Book Description

This text contains a collection of nearly 60 articles, covering major events of the Caribbean struggle f or freedom from the Emancipation to the present, from Trouss ant''s Haiti to the more recent revolutions in Cuba, Granada & the Dominican Republic. '




Freedom Roots


Book Description

To tell the history of the Caribbean is to tell the history of the world," write Laurent Dubois and Richard Lee Turits. In this powerful and expansive story of the vast archipelago, Dubois and Turits chronicle how the Caribbean has been at the heart of modern contests between slavery and freedom, racism and equality, and empire and independence. From the emergence of racial slavery and European colonialism in the early sixteenth century to U.S. annexations and military occupations in the twentieth, systems of exploitation and imperial control have haunted the region. Yet the Caribbean is also where empires have been overthrown, slavery was first defeated, and the most dramatic revolutions triumphed. Caribbean peoples have never stopped imagining and pursuing new forms of liberty. Dubois and Turits reveal how the region's most vital transformations have been ignited in the conflicts over competing visions of land. While the powerful sought a Caribbean awash in plantations for the benefit of the few, countless others anchored their quest for freedom in small-farming and counter-plantation economies, at times succeeding against all odds. Caribbean realities to this day are rooted in this long and illuminating history of struggle.




Beyond Coloniality


Book Description

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.




Citizenship from Below


Book Description

Citizenship from Below boldly revises the history of the struggles for freedom by emancipated peoples in post-slavery Jamaica, post-independence Haiti, and the wider Caribbean by focusing on the interplay between the state, the body, race, and sexuality. Mimi Sheller offers a new theory of "citizenship from below" to describe the contest between "proper" spaces of legitimate high politics and the disavowed politics of lived embodiment. While acknowledging the internal contradictions and damaging exclusions of subaltern self-empowerment, Sheller roots out from beneath the historical archive traces of a deeper freedom, one expressed through bodily performances, familial relationships, cultivation of the land, and sacred worship. Attending to the hidden linkages among intimate realms and the public sphere, Sheller explores specific struggles for freedom, including women's political activism in Jamaica; the role of discourses of "manhood" in the making of free subjects, soldiers, and citizens; the fiercely ethnonationalist discourses that excluded South Asian and African indentured workers; the sexual politics of the low-bass beats and "bottoms up" moves in the dancehall; and the struggle for reproductive and LGBT rights and against homophobia in the contemporary Caribbean. Through her creative use of archival sources and emphasis on the connections between intimacy, violence, and citizenship, Sheller enriches critical theories of embodied freedom, sexual citizenship, and erotic agency in all post-slavery societies.




Pirates of the Caribbean: The Price of Freedom


Book Description

Twenty-five-year-old Jack Sparrow is a clean-cut merchant seaman pursuing a legitimate career as a first mate for the East India Trading Company. He sometimes thinks back to his boyhood pirating days, but he doesn't miss Teague's scrutiny or the constant threat of the noose. Besides, he doesn't have much choice—he broke the Code when he freed a friend who had been accused of rogue piracy, and he can no longer show his face in Shipwreck Cove. When Jack's ship is attacked by pirates and his captain dies in the altercation, he suddenly finds himself in command.




We Dream Together


Book Description

In We Dream Together Anne Eller breaks with dominant narratives of conflict between the Dominican Republic and Haiti by tracing the complicated history of Dominican emancipation and independence between 1822 and 1865. Eller moves beyond the small body of writing by Dominican elites that often narrates Dominican nationhood to craft inclusive, popular histories of identity, community, and freedom, summoning sources that range from trial records and consul reports to poetry and song. Rethinking Dominican relationships with their communities, the national project, and the greater Caribbean, Eller shows how popular anticolonial resistance was anchored in a rich and complex political culture. Haitians and Dominicans fostered a common commitment to Caribbean freedom, the abolition of slavery, and popular democracy, often well beyond the reach of the state. By showing how the island's political roots are deeply entwined, and by contextualizing this history within the wider Atlantic world, Eller demonstrates the centrality of Dominican anticolonial struggles for understanding independence and emancipation throughout the Caribbean and the Americas.




Negotiating Caribbean Freedom


Book Description

Michaeline A. Crichlow extends the contemporary critique of development projects by examining the political and discursive relationship of the state to the land-based working people, or 'smallholders, ' in modern Jamaica. The first book of its kind, Negotiating Caribbean Freedom does for Jamaican historiography and sociology what Akhil Gupta's PostColonial Developments did for studies of India. Michaeline A. Crichlow gives us an incredibly nuanced discussion of how development dominates the lives of the subsistance peasantry, not through force, but through the instrumentalization of social relationships that were once ends in themselves. For example, what were once effective agricultural practices--embedded in the every day lives of smallholders all over the island--have, in the interest of serving international captial, been bureaucratized to the point that they are untenable to support the livelihoods of smallholders. Not content to measure the success or failure of development to deliver on its promises, she discloses both the continuities and differences between development projects of very different political regimes and helps to establish why smallholders support development projects even when those projects fail to address their needs.




The Freedom of Speech


Book Description

The institution of slavery has always depended on enforcing the boundaries between slaveholders and the enslaved. As historical geographer Miles Ogborn reveals in The Freedom of Speech, across the Anglo-Caribbean world the fundamental distinction between freedom and bondage relied upon the violent policing of the spoken word. Offering a compelling new lens on transatlantic slavery, this book gathers rich historical data from Barbados, Jamaica, and Britain to delve into the complex relationships between voice, slavery, and empire. From the most quotidian encounters to formal rules of what counted as evidence in court, the battleground of slavery lay in who could speak and under what conditions. But, as Ogborn shows through keen attention to both the traces of talk and the silences in the archives, if enslavement as a legal status could be made by words, it could be unmade by them as well. A deft interrogation of the duality of domination, The Freedom of Speech offers a rich interpretation of oral cultures that both supported and constantly threatened to undermine the slave system.




Slavery, Freedom and Gender


Book Description

A collection of lectures delivered between 1987 and 1998. The book is divided into two sections: slavery and freedom, which features critical research on slavery and post-emancipation society, and gender.




The Black Carib Wars


Book Description

In The Black Carib Wars, Christopher Taylor offers the most thoroughly researched history of the struggle of the Garifuna people to preserve their freedom on the island of St. Vincent. Today, thousands of Garifuna people live in Honduras, Belize, Guatemala, Nicaragua and the United States, preserving their unique culture and speaking a language that directly descends from that spoken in the Caribbean at the time of Columbus. All trace their origins back to St. Vincent where their ancestors were native Carib Indians and shipwrecked or runaway West African slaves—hence the name by which they were known to French and British colonialists: Black Caribs. In the 1600s they encountered Europeans as adversaries and allies. But from the early 1700s, white people, particularly the French, began to settle on St. Vincent. The treaty of Paris in 1763 handed the island to the British who wanted the Black Caribs' land to grow sugar. Conflict was inevitable, and in a series of bloody wars punctuated by uneasy peace the Black Caribs took on the might of the British Empire. Over decades leaders such as Tourouya, Bigot, and Chatoyer organized the resistance of a society which had no central authority but united against the external threat. Finally, abandoned by their French allies, they were defeated, and the survivors deported to Central America in 1797. The Black Carib Wars draws on extensive research in Britain, France, and St. Vincent to offer a compelling narrative of the formative years of the Garifuna people.