Culture Race And Class In The Commonwealth Caribbean

UNESCO pub. Monograph on interethnic relations and social stratification systems in the Caribbean, in Bolivia, Chile and Mexico - includes bibliographys, diagrams and statistical tables.

"The Roots of Caribbean Identity has as its central elements race, place and language. The book presents a movement from a European construction of Caribbean identity towards a more Caribbean construction. The ways in which the identity of the Caribbean region and the identities of the separate islands within the region were shaped are set out in a chronological sequence, starting from the time of the European encounters with the Amerindians and finishing at the end of the nineteenth century."(extrait de la 4ème de couv.).

Based on historical research and more than thirty years of anthropological fieldwork, this wide-ranging study underlines the importance of Caribbean cultures for anthropology, which has generally marginalized Europe's oldest colonial sphere. Located at

Race, Power and Social Segmentation in Colonial Society (1987) studies Guyanese society after slavery and specifically examines the area of social classes and ethnic groups. It also focuses on the theoretical issues in the debate on pluralism versus stratification and provides a detailed interdisciplinary analysis of the process of structural change in a composite colonial society over a significantly long historical period – over half a century.

Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics offers a critical appraisal of C.L.R. James as a major twentieth-century activist-intellectual, exploring his prolific output spanning decades within genres as diverse as history, philosophy, sociology, literary and cultural criticism, prose fiction, and reportage. The book also analyzes some of the flaws and contradictions that surfaced within James’ writings as a consequence of the difficult circumstances in which he worked and lived as an itinerant migrant intellectual invariably involved with fringe political groups. Assessing James as a lifelong committed Marxist and humanist, the book argues that his core concern with racial, political, and cultural questions as central to human and social understanding led him to develop a distinctive critique of the modern world.

This book is the first collection on Indo-Caribbean women's writing and the first work to offer a sustained analysis of the literature from a range of theoretical and critical perspectives, such as ecocriticism, feminist, queer, post-colonial and Caribbean cultural theories. The essays not only lay the framework of an emerging and growing field, but also critically situate internationally acclaimed writers such as Shani Mootoo, Lakshmi Persaud and Ramabai Espinet within this emerging tradition. Indo-Caribbean women writers provide a fresh new perspective in Caribbean literature, be it in their unique representations of plantation history, anti-colonial movements, diasporic identities, feminisms, ethnicity and race, or contemporary Caribbean societies and culture. The book offers a theoretical reading of the poetics, politics and cultural traditions that inform Indo-Caribbean women's writing, arguing that while women writers work with and through postcolonial and Caribbean cultural theories, they also respond to a distinctive set of influences and realities specific to their positioning within the Indo-Caribbean community and the wider national, regional and global imaginary. Contributors visit the overlap between national and transnational engagements in Indo-Caribbean women's literature, considering the writers' response to local or nationally specific contexts, and the writers' response to the diasporic and transnational modalities of Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean communities.