Caribbean History

This article addresses some of the opportunities and challenges the Afro-Caribbean American author faced whilst researching Afro-Caribbeans in Britain. Despite perceptual insiderness as an Afro-Caribbean person, the author’s positionality had multiple dimensions, often shifting within complex identity-related contexts. These ideas and concepts will be illuminated through analysing the complexity of transnationalism, class and transcendental identity as they intertwined whilst an oral history project progressed. Positionality is rarely totally binary and this article provides some insight into how perceptions of insiderness and outsiderness can influence oral history in terms of interviewing, analysis and dissemination.

One of the most momentous cross-cultural collisions occurred in the Caribbean in 1492, heralding a period of rapid change in both ‘New’ and ‘Old’ Worlds. During the early years of the colonial period, when new relationships were being established, material objects became active agents in the interactions between the indigenous Taíno and the Spanish. The Taíno gifted the Spanish with objects that had significance in their own world, in an attempt to enmesh the Spanish into Taíno socio-political and economic networks. In turn, Spanish objects entered into Taíno value
systems. Glass and jet beads, mirrors and brass ornaments were integrated into prestigious objects, such as the two surviving Taíno cotton sculptures that form the focus of this paper: a belt in the collections of the Weltmuseum Wien and a composite sculpture in the Museo Nazionale
Preistorico Etnografico ‘Luigi Pigorini’, Rome. These pieces offer a glimpse into how Old World exotics were reinterpreted and integrated into indigenous value systems during a period of cultural transition and change.

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Mostly sugar industry oriented, these details are enumerated to contribute raw data (including 3 camels in 1766 !)  to those researchers for whom they may be useful. There is no attempt to analyse, or to compare with other West Indies “sugar islands”.
The main source is the Registrars’ Books of Deeds which were digitised by the Montserrat National Trust in 2015-17, where the original documents and master images are archived.

Glocal Spirituality:  Consumerism and Heritage in Puerto Rican Brujería
With the recent intensification of the circulation of ritual experts and commodities, folk religions such as Puerto Rican brujería (witch-healing) have entered a transnational arena of ritual experimentation and eclecticism. Concomitantly, the politics of identity, operating at local-political and global-commercial stages, propel the search for origins and the production of essential identities, leading to the revitalization and orthodoxy of folk religions as well as their folklorization, following a local—though globally pervasive—heritage discourse.  Why glocal spirituality? My main argument is that both these forces—the actual insertion into global circulations that promote a high degree of ritual eclecticism and the local demand for an essential Puerto Rican national identity that promote orthodoxy—work in tandem creating a complex set of conditions for ritual practice and meaning.
How can these apparently contradictory processes be theorized within folklore studies? From a historic-pragmatic perspective to ritual and through an intimate ethnographic account that traces the encounters between practitioners, clients and suppliers of ritual goods, I will show how these two processes work in tandem. That is, without an a-priori public recognition of brujos (witch-healers) as repositories of Puerto Rican wisdom (in the context of the unresolved neocolonial political status of the island), the fame and celebrity that enabled the open incorporation of African based rituals, of bureaucratic gestures and interventions, and transnational religious commodities could not have been viable. Critics of the culture industry and consumerism tend to suggest that commercial forces inherently taint the authenticity of culture, and in this case would taint the spiritual effectiveness of brujería. For practitioners and clients, however, material and spiritual progress not only are not at odds but also are intimately connected. Indeed, practitioners are driven by the attainment of “blessings”—defined by material success as well as spiritual power—which presume the spirituality of commodities and the thinghood of spirituality. Especially in a world guided by capitalist modes of production and the sensuous insatiable consumption of life styles and self-images, brujos and their clients take advantage of the opportunities opened up by multiculturalism and identity politics. They openly expand the pantheon of spirits as well as their ritual expertise, protected by the idiom of heritage—yet outside of its constraints, showing that more than endangered species they are active participants in these glocal forces, speaking to them in their own particular modern yet spiritual idiom.

If, according to turn-of-the-twentieth-century observers, black Puerto Ricans were destined to become racially white in a few generations, how did 12.4 per cent of the population manage to remain black in 2010? And how did they survive in the face of both national and everyday forms of racism? How is the persistence and even increase in black identity in Puerto Rico supported? This article argues that there is a covert and largely unexplored social current at work in regard to how black Puerto Ricans live and reproduce their blackness. This is the desire to maintain and celebrate blackness. Using ethnographic data gathered during nearly two decades, the article illustrate that many Puerto Ricans have chosen not to engage in blanqueamiento, instead affirming their blackness, marrying within their communities, and valuing their own cultural practices and beliefs.

For Puerto Ricans, World War I provided the opportunity to test and challenge the linkages between military service, manhood, citizenship and decolonization.  During the war Puerto Rican political leaders, elected officials, and opinion makers sought to advance the socio-economic and political standing of their communities by demanding access to, and encouraging participation in the U.S. military.  In particular, Puerto Rican elites were interested in mobilizing the Puerto Rican peasantry thinking that training would transform them into modern men worthy of self-determination in the eyes of the metropolis.

"Vienna’s Museum für Vökerkunde holds in its collections a rare sixteenth-century Taíno cotton
belt from Hispaniola (today’s Dominican Republic/Haiti) – one of only two surviving Taíno
cotton artefacts to feature European ‘exotics’, including mirrors, jet beads and brass. This complex
woven structure – a wearable work of art – offers a rare window on to one of the most prestigious
of Taı´no valuables, a personal ornament that literally wrapped the wearer in wealth, status and
spiritual power. The paper charts the original context and use of Taı´no belts, and provides a
detailed account of the Vienna belt’s collection history, its construction and its chronological
placement (radiocarbon-dated using accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) to AD 1475–1635). The
question of how and when the European materials were incorporated into the belt is explored,
critically engaging the entangled histories of association between the two."

The document here presented is one of the first accounts made by Europeans about the Indians in the New World, just a few years after the arrival of Christopher Columbus. The author, Ramón Pané, was a hieronymite friar and stayed for a couple of
years among the Taino Indians, producing the first account made by a religious writer about these people. Besides presenting some notices about the author and his work, we
offer a key to the reading of the document.

In a place like the Caribbean, we cannot take the agency of portraiture for granted in the aftermath of a much longer history of topographical and anthro-pological representations. .. In the pictorial domain, we are still anthropological, cultural, national, ethnic or electoral commodities and signifiers. We remain labelled but nameless images. The moment of encounter and of exchange is what is at stake. Christopher Cozier, Notes on Wrestling with the Image Cummins / Thompson

This study describes the archaeological investigations that have taken place at the wreck site of the English slave ship Henrietta Marie (1700) since its location in 1972. Information is provided on the methodology utilized during on-site archaeological data recovery, and the artifacts retrieved from the wreck site are described in detail. An account of complimentary documentary research on this wrecked slaver is also presented. Contemporary historical data gleaned from shipping lists, slaver’s logs, seamen’s wills and other sources are utilized to place Henrietta Marie within her proper context as a vehicle involved in the notorious transatlantic slave trade.

This newspaper column from 2003 examines how Indians in Trinidad and Tobago are misled, guided by so many fears, the encouragement of feelings of victimhood, and smallness of vision. There is an important contribution for Indians to make to the building of this New World civilisation, which is still in its infancy and only half-made. What is needed is a vision, mission and leadership not griping about “discrimination”, but looking fearlessly to the future.

У статті вперше в українській історіографії аналізується етнічний аспект британської колоніальної політики в Карибському басейні у XVII–XVIII ст. Етнічний розвиток британських карибських колоній є малодослідженою темою в новітній історіографії. Охарактеризовано становище рабів, привезених з Африки. Визначено основні етнічні групи, що сформувалися в Британській Вест-Індії.
Ключові слова: колонія, Карибський басейн, етнос, мулат, креол.

В статье впервые в украинской историографии анализируется этнический аспект британской колониальной политики в Карибском бассейне в XVII–XVIII вв. Этническое развитие британских карибских колоний является малоисследованной темой в новейшей историографии. Охарактеризовано положение рабов, привезенных из Африки. Определены основные этнические группы, сформировавшиеся в Британской Вест-Индии.
Ключевые слова: колония, Карибский бассейн, этнос, мулат, креол.

For the first time in Ukrainian historiography ethnic aspect of British colonial policy in the Caribbean in XVII–XVIII centuries is analyzed in the article. Ethnic development of British Caribbean colonies is insufficiently investigated in modern historiography. Status of slaves brought from Africa is characterized. Main ethnic groups which were formed in the British West Indies are defined.
Keywords: colony, Caribbean, ethnicity, mulatto, Creole.

This article considers British efforts to pacify Caribbean subjects through improvements in health and sanitation during the interwar period. When Barbadians mobilized against poor working and living conditions in the 1920s, the Colonial Office, under a renewed commitment to " trusteeship, " urged the Barbadian government to improve health and sanitary conditions to prevent further unrest. However, the White creole elites who controlled the local state used eugenic arguments to challenge reforms that would benefit poor Black subjects. Rather than improve colonial relations, metropolitan efforts to reform public health in Barbados instead revealed the limitations at the heart of imperial rule.

To truly comprehend the Statehood Movement in Puerto Rico (1967-present), we must examine a complicated timeline from Spanish colonization (1493-1898) through American occupation (1898-present) and modern Puerto Rican Nationalist/ Socialist Party (1922-present) ideologies. This analysis includes focusing on the difficulties of cultural reclamation and political independence after centuries of cultural appropriation and indoctrination through political imagery and actions. The modern Borikén faces monumental roadblocks when attempting to grasp a concrete independence plan after centuries of subjugation. The argument is that this hesitancy is built on a complex foundation of generational trauma and desensitization. With cultural reclamation is at the forefront of American political discourse, the goal is to examine if it is responsible to pursue an anti-colonial movement without quantifiable accountability from the American government. Furthermore, should this reckoning be under the guide of an independent Puerto Rico, focused on reclaiming its cultural and political identities, or under the eye of a government that has fostered their subjugation for centuries.

Barbados as a British colony in the eighteenth century relied heavily upon enslaved labour to operate the sugar industry which was the predominant source of income for the island. This plantation system in the countryside differed from the urban environment of the island. The dominant white patriarchy was still in place in the urban environments but there were ways in which the oppressed people of colour managed to create a living within a society that treated them as inferiors. However, there is a great deal of ambiguity in what counts as a success for people of colour, in part caused by the definitions used at the time to differentiate the populations based upon skin colour. The population was broken down into three categories, the enslaved black population, the white population and the numerically small population of freed persons of African descent, referred to as the "free coloured" population. It was predominantly this population that benefitted in the urban environment of Barbados although they still faced many of the same struggles as the enslaved blacks and free black population. Karl Watson points out that that there was 'no deliberate attempt by the white population to create a free coloured group. On the contrary, such a development was not welcomed'1. Segregation was not legally enforced but the social structure relegated poor whites and free coloureds to the fringes of society. Yet, a number of free coloureds and freed blacks were able to assert themselves as entrepreneurs in the economic sector that was managed by the white population. A further threat was the increase in economically successful free coloured women in the latter half of the eighteenth century who also gained social connection across the island and with the white elite. However, these women threatened the economic and social power dynamic that the white population benefited from and thus were still subjected to discrimination and dehumanisation, particularly the women who managed to establish themselves as businesswomen earning a substantial living. As such, thanks to their economic success, it could be said that these people, especially the women, thrived in this economic environment.

Chapel Hill, NC: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture by University of North Carolina Press, 2016 (cloth) and 2018 (paperback). Preview: https://flexpub.com/preview/atlantic-africa-and-the-spanish-caribbean

Women and Resistance in the Early Rastafari Movement is a pioneering study of women’s resistance in the emergent Rastafari movement in colonial Jamaica. As D. A. Dunkley demonstrates, Rastafari women had to contend not only with the various attempts made by the government and nonmembers to suppress the movement, but also with oppression and silencing from among their own ranks. Dunkley examines the lives and experiences of a group of Rastafari women between the movement’s inception in the 1930s and Jamaica’s independence from Britain in the 1960s, uncovering their sense of agency and resistance against both male domination and societal opposition to their Rastafari identity. Countering many years of scholarship that privilege the stories of Rastafari men, Women and Resistance in the Early Rastafari Movement reclaims the voices and narratives of early Rastafari women in the history of the Black liberation struggle.

Between 1826 and 1843 the medical practitioners of Jamaica engaged in a long and fraught campaign to create a College of Physicians and Surgeons.  This campaign linked the island with the global processes of medical and political reform, especially in Britain, and numerous studies have revealed the political barriers that faced efforts to reshape medical practices in this period.  Yet the metropole was also in a continuous dialogue with its colonial periphery.  Existing work has looked at what this dialogue meant for the circulation of medical theories and practices, but equally important was the transmission of medical institutions, which provided structures for their development and application.  The campaign in Jamaica offers an important case study of the complex process by which medical institutions spread in this period and reveals both the imperial aspects of medical and social reform in Jamaica and the colonial aspects of medical reform in Britain.

The language of love in John Agard’s English Girl Eats Her First Mango explores the delicate areas and ideas of history, culture, sin and love. The use of language in the poem provides the reader with explicit imagery of sin, love and desire by combing sexuality and eroticism with politics and culture.

The purpose of the language of love in English Girl Eats Her First Mango is to offer the reader three different levels of interpretation and explores the dynamics of politics, sexuality and culture through an encounter between two young people. The manner in which the language of love in English Girl Eats Her First Mango is used to evoke the three levels of interpretation will be discussed through the analysis of the first ten stanzas, the use of ambiguous language to create a sexual and political context, the result of eating the mango and the use of language to contrast and oppose the two cultures.

Las memorias de su gobernación de Puerto Rico del almirante William D. Leahy durante los años de 1939-1940. Incluye dos versiones del manuscrito inéditos hasta esta edición y otros documentos del período incluidos informes de inteligencia sobre las cruciales elecciones de 1940. También un análisis del editor de los textos y el significado histórico de la gobernación en el momento en que comenzaba la Segunda Guerra Mundial.