African-Caribbean Hairdressing


Book Description

African-Caribbean hair, being more delicate, requires different techniques and specialist knowledge and expertise. This text has been written by a team of specialists, and provides illustrated, step-by-step instructions.




Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570-1640


Book Description

This work resituates the Spanish Caribbean as an extension of the Luso-African Atlantic world from the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, when the union of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns facilitated a surge in the transatlantic slave trade. After the catastrophic decline of Amerindian populations on the islands, two major African provenance zones, first Upper Guinea and then Angola, contributed forced migrant populations with distinct experiences to the Caribbean. They played a dynamic role in the social formation of early Spanish colonial society in the fortified port cities of Cartagena de Indias, Havana, Santo Domingo, and Panama City and their semirural hinterlands. David Wheat is the first scholar to establish this early phase of the "Africanization" of the Spanish Caribbean two centuries before the rise of large-scale sugar plantations. With African migrants and their descendants comprising demographic majorities in core areas of Spanish settlement, Luso-Africans, Afro-Iberians, Latinized Africans, and free people of color acted more as colonists or settlers than as plantation slaves. These ethnically mixed and economically diversified societies constituted a region of overlapping Iberian and African worlds, while they made possible Spain's colonization of the Caribbean.




Slavery and Beyond


Book Description

The slave market in Seville, while still relatively small, became one of the most active in Europe. Many called the city the 'New Babylon.' Northern and sub-Saharan Africans comprised more than 50 percent of the inhabitants of several of Seville's neighborhoods. The African populations became so socially and politically important that in 1475 the Crown appointed Juan de Valladolid, its royal servant and mayoral, to represent Seville's Afro-Iberian community. Churches and charities catered to its spiritual and material needs.




African Caribbeans


Book Description

The African Diaspora left an indelible imprint on Caribbean countries and islands. This reference, the only broad historical and cultural survey of the black experience in the Caribbean, celebrates the Afro-Caribbean diversity of the countries it profiles. Each of the 15 chapters introduces a country, island, or group of islands, providing an overview from the arrival of slaves to the current situation. Topics include, history, economy, politics, social stratification, race relations, cultural highlights, religion, and notable figures. Readers will discover the broad range of languages, political systems, racial makeup, historical uniqueness, and cultural offerings that shape the Caribbean. A chronology, glossary, and photos enhance the text.




Caribbean Crossing


Book Description

Shortly after winning its independence in 1804, Haiti’s leaders realized that if their nation was to survive, it needed to build strong diplomatic bonds with other nations. Haiti’s first leaders looked especially hard at the United States, which had a sizeable free black population that included vocal champions of black emigration and colonization. In the 1820s, President Jean-Pierre Boyer helped facilitate a migration of thousands of black Americans to Haiti with promises of ample land, rich commercial prospects, and most importantly, a black state. His ideas struck a chord with both blacks and whites in America. Journalists and black community leaders advertised emigration to Haiti as a way for African Americans to resist discrimination and show the world that the black race could be an equal on the world stage, while antislavery whites sought to support a nation founded by liberated slaves. Black and white businessmen were excited by trade potential, and racist whites viewed Haiti has a way to export the race problem that plagued America. By the end of the decade, black Americans migration to Haiti began to ebb as emigrants realized that the Caribbean republic wasn’t the black Eden they’d anticipated. Caribbean Crossing documents the rise and fall of the campaign for black emigration to Haiti, drawing on a variety of archival sources to share the rich voices of the emigrants themselves. Using letters, diary accounts, travelers’ reports, newspaper articles, and American, British, and French consulate records, Sara Fanning profiles the emigrants and analyzes the diverse motivations that fueled this unique early moment in both American and Haitian history.




Horizon, Sea, Sound


Book Description

In Horizon, Sea, Sound: Caribbean and African Women’s Cultural Critiques of Nation, Andrea Davis imagines new reciprocal relationships beyond the competitive forms of belonging suggested by the nation-state. The book employs the tropes of horizon, sea, and sound as a critique of nation-state discourses and formations, including multicultural citizenship, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and the hierarchical nuclear family. Drawing on Tina Campt’s discussion of Black feminist futurity, Davis offers the concept future now, which is both central to Black freedom and a joint social justice project that rejects existing structures of white supremacy. Calling for new affiliations of community among Black, Indigenous, and other racialized women, and offering new reflections on the relationship between the Caribbean and Canada, she articulates a diaspora poetics that privileges our shared humanity. In advancing these claims, Davis turns to the expressive cultures (novels, poetry, theater, and music) of Caribbean and African women artists in Canada, including work by Dionne Brand, M. NourbeSe Philip, Esi Edugyan, Ramabai Espinet, Nalo Hopkinson, Amai Kuda, and Djanet Sears. Davis considers the ways in which the diasporic characters these artists create redraw the boundaries of their horizons, invoke the fluid histories of the Caribbean Sea to overcome the brutalization of plantation histories, use sound to enter and reenter archives, and shapeshift to survive in the face of conquest. The book will interest readers of literary and cultural studies, critical race theories, and Black diasporic studies.




Afro-Caribbean Religions


Book Description

Religion is one of the most important elements of Afro-Caribbean culture linking its people to their African past, from Haitian Vodou and Cuban Santeria—popular religions that have often been demonized in popular culture—to Rastafari in Jamaica and Orisha-Shango of Trinidad and Tobago. In Afro-Caribbean Religions, Nathaniel Samuel Murrell provides a comprehensive study that respectfully traces the social, historical, and political contexts of these religions. And, because Brazil has the largest African population in the world outside of Africa, and has historic ties to the Caribbean, Murrell includes a section on Candomble, Umbanda, Xango, and Batique. This accessibly written introduction to Afro-Caribbean religions examines the cultural traditions and transformations of all of the African-derived religions of the Caribbean along with their cosmology, beliefs, cultic structures, and ritual practices. Ideal for classroom use, Afro-Caribbean Religions also includes a glossary defining unfamiliar terms and identifying key figures.




Working with Families of African Caribbean Origin


Book Description

Many of those who emigrated from the Caribbean to the UK after World War II left behind partners and children, causing the break-up of families who were often not reunited for several years. In this book, Elaine Arnold examines the psychological impact that immigration had on these families, in particular with relation to attachment issues. She demonstrates that the disruption caused by separation from both family and country often had long-term traumatic consequences. The book draws on two studies carried out by the author in 1975 and 2001. In the first, she interviewed mothers who had emigrated without their children, and in the second, children (now adults) who had been left behind and were later reunited with their parents. This insightful book will assist all those working with people of African Caribbean origin in the UK to better understand their experiences and the impact that separation and loss has had on their lives. It is essential reading for social workers, counsellors, therapists and any other professionals working with families of African Caribbean origin.




Strategies for Success among African-Americans and Afro-Caribbeans


Book Description

How can African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans from the former British colonies be so different in their approaches toward social mobility? Chrystal Y. Grey and Thomas Janoski state that this is because native blacks grow up as “strangers” in their own country and immigrants from the English-speaking Caribbean are conversely part of “the dominant group.” Unlike previous research that compares highly educated Afro-Caribbeans to the broad range of African-Americans, this study holds social-class constant by looking only at successful blacks in the upper-middle-class from both groups. This book finds that African-Americans pursue overachievement strategies of working much harder than others do, while Afro-Caribbeans follow an optimistic job strategy expecting promotions and success. However, African-Americans are more likely to use confrontational strategies if their mobility is blocked. The main cause of these differences is that Afro-Caribbeans grow up in a system where they have many examples of black politicians and business leaders (35–90% of their countries are black) and African-Americans have fewer role models (12–14% of the United States are black). Further, the schooling system in Afro-Caribbean countries does not label blacks as underachievers because the schools are almost entirely black. A further problem that African-Americans face is the resentment of a small but significant number of blacks who have little social mobility. They accuse socially mobile African Americans of “acting white,” which is a phenomenon that Afro-Caribbeans almost never face and they call it “an African-American thing.” To demonstrate this difference, Strategies for Success among African-Americans and Afro-Caribbeans does a historical-comparative analysis of the differences between the black experience after slavery in the United States and Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, and St. Kitts-Nevis. The authors interview fifty-seven black people and find consistent differences between the US and Caribbean black citizens. Using theories of symbolic interaction and ressentiment, this work challenges previous studies that either claim that Afro-Caribbeans are more motivated than African-Americans, or studies that show that controlling for class, each group is more or less the same.




African Lace-bark in the Caribbean


Book Description

The creation of lace-bark cloth from the lagetta tree was a practice that enabled African slaves in the Caribbean to fashion their own clothing, an exercise that was both a necessity, as clothing provisions for slaves were poor and empowering, as it allowed women who participated in the industry to achieve some financial independence. Focussing on the time period from the 1660s to the 1920s, this book examines how the industry developed, the types of clothes made, and the people who wore them.