Caribbean Passages

This text offers a critical perspective on fiction from the West Indies. The writers are from diverse backgrounds with differing artistic perspectives, but share a commitment to a repossession of Caribbean life and consciousness. The writers are Senior, Edgell, Phillips, Naipul, and Antoni.

Tobias Döring uses Postcolonialism as a backdrop to examine and question the traditional genres of travel writing, nature poetry, adventure tales, autobiography and the epic, assessing their relevance to, and modification by, the Caribbean experience. Caribbean-English Passages opens an innovative and cross-cultural perspective, in which familiar oppositions of colonial/white versus postcolonial/black writing are deconstructed. English identity is thereby questioned by this colonial contact, and Caribbean-English writing radically redraws the map of world literature. This book is essential reading for students of Postcolonial Literature at both undergraduate and postgraduate level.

This comprehensive work on security in the English-speaking Caribbean, offers a wealth of information about the history, politics, economics and geography of the entire region. The author examines security problems in the region as a geopolitical unit, not on a selective case-study basis, as is usually done. He assesses Caribbean security within a theoretical framework where four factors are critical: perceptions of the political elites; capabilities of the states; the geopolitics of the area; and the ideological orientations of the parties in power. Political and economic issues are judged to be as relevant to security as military factors. The author identifies safeguards which countries in the region may take in the coming decade.

New Caribbean Junior English has been fully revised and updated to provide an integrated approach to language arts. The new edition of this popular and well established course retains well-loved material from the previous edition and * has clearly laid out pages to make the books more accessible and easy to use, * is colourful, lively and attractive to appeal to children of all abilities, * includes new material reflecting life in the Caribbean to stimulate and engage children, * features vibrant and appealing illustrations by Caribbean artists, * contains cross-curricular content to provide a truly integrated course that reinforces learning in other curriculum areas, such as social studies and science, * offers a wide range of activities to help children develop their reading and writing skills. Further support for teachers is provided at the end of each book and our website at www.caribbeanschools.co.uk

“Portrays the vitality and dynamism of indigenous actors in what is arguably one of the most foundational and central zones in the making of modern world history: the Caribbean.”—Maximilian C. Forte, author of Ruins of Absence, Presence of Caribs “Brings together historical analysis and the compelling stories of individuals and families that labored in the island economies of the Caribbean.”—Cynthia Radding, coeditor of Borderlands in World History, 1700–1914 During the colonial period, thousands of North American native peoples traveled to Cuba independently as traders, diplomats, missionary candidates, immigrants, or refugees; others were forcibly transported as captives, slaves, indentured laborers, or prisoners of war. Over the half millennium after Spanish contact, Cuba also served as the principal destination and residence of peoples as diverse as the Yucatec Mayas of Mexico; the Calusa, Timucua, Creek, and Seminole peoples of Florida; and the Apache and Puebloan cultures of the northern provinces of New Spain. Many settled in pueblos or villages in Cuba that endured and evolved into the nineteenth century as urban centers, later populated by indigenous and immigrant Amerindian descendants and even their mestizo, or mixed-blood, progeny. In this first comprehensive history of the Amerindian diaspora in Cuba, Jason Yaremko presents the dynamics of indigenous movements and migrations from several regions of North America from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. In addition to detailing the various motives influencing aboriginal migratory processes, Yaremko uses these case studies to argue that Amerindians—whether voluntary or involuntary migrants—become diasporic through common experiences of dispossession, displacement, and alienation within Cuban colonial society. Yet, far from being merely passive victims acted upon, he argues that indigenous peoples were cognizant agents still capable of exercising power and influence to act in the interests of their communities. His narrative of their multifaceted and dynamic experiences of survival, adaptation, resistance, and negotiation within Cuban colonial society adds deeply to the history of transculturation in Cuba, and to our understanding of indigenous peoples, migration, and diaspora in the wider Caribbean world.

This book examines the representation of community in contemporary Anglophone Caribbean short stories, focusing on the most recent wave of Anglophone Caribbean short story writers following the genre's revival in the mid-1980s. The first extended study of Caribbean short stories, it presents the phenomenon of interconnected stories as a significant feature of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Anglophone Caribbean literary cultures. Lucy Evans contends that the short story collection and cycle, literary forms regarded by genre theorists as necessarily concerned with representations of community, are particularly appropriate and enabling as a vehicle through which to conceptualise Caribbean communities. The book covers short story collections and cycles by Olive Senior, Earl Lovelace, Kwame Dawes, Alecia Mckenzie, Lawrence Scott, Mark McWatt, Robert Antoni and Dionne Brand, and argues that the form of interconnected stories is a crucial part of these writers' imagining of communities, which may be fractured, plural and fraught with tensions, but which nevertheless hold together. The book takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of community, bringing literary representations of community into dialogue with models of community developed in the field of Caribbean anthropology. The works analysed are set in Trinidad, Jamaica and Guyana, and in several cases the setting extends to the Caribbean diaspora in Europe and North America. Looking in turn at rural, urban, national and global communities, the book draws attention to changing conceptions of community around the turn of the millennium.

The contributors to Passages and Afterworlds explore death and its rituals across the Caribbean, drawing on ethnographic theories shaped by a deep understanding of the region's long history of violent encounters, exploitation, and cultural diversity. Examining the relationship between living bodies and the spirits of the dead, the contributors investigate the changes in cosmologies and rituals in the cultural sphere of death in relation to political developments, state violence, legislation, policing, and identity politics. Contributors address topics that range from the ever-evolving role of divinized spirits in Haiti and the contemporary mortuary practice of Indo-Trinidadians to funerary ceremonies in rural Jamaica and ancestor cults in Maroon culture in Suriname. Questions of alterity, difference, and hierarchy underlie these discussions of how racial, cultural, and class differences have been deployed in ritual practice and how such rituals have been governed in the colonial and postcolonial Caribbean. Contributors. Donald Cosentino, Maarit Forde, Yanique Hume, Paul Christopher Johnson, Aisha Khan, Keith E. McNeal, George Mentore, Richard Price, Karen Richman, Ineke (Wilhelmina) van Wetering, Bonno (H.U.E.) Thoden van Velzen