Rethinking Caribbean Difference

Rethinking Caribbean Differenceexplores the effects of race and ethnicity, class and linguistic variation on gender issues and gender ideologies in the Caribbean. The papers in this issue include: Women's Organizations and Movements in Commonwealth Caribbean; InSearch of our Memory: Gender in the Netherlands Antilles; Gendered Testimonies: Autobiographies, Diaries and Letters by Women in Caribbean History; Gender Systems and the Project of Modernity in the Post-colonial Caribbean; Is There an International Feminism?; Shattering DevelopmentalistIllusions: Challenges for the Feminist Movement in Puerto Rico; Gender and International Relations: Issues for the Caribbean; Masculinity and the Dance of the Dragon: Reading Lovelace Discursively.

Drawing on rich empirical research, this book examines the evolution and success of feminist strategies to promote democratic governance, women’s rights and gender equality in the Caribbean.

In the global South there is potential for politics to marginalize the diverse perspectives of subaltern communities. Exploring ongoing and new feminist dialogues in the global South, this book examines the ways in which dominant epistemologies are challenged, unique identities formed, and the implications for the global feminist agenda.

This book provides a space in which struggles for indigenous knowledge within communities are articulated, valued, heard, and responded to. The volume takes change as its focus, yet acknowledges that the origins and significance of change are frequently found to be unsettling. Contributors explore different understandings of change that forge sustainable, inclusive and just communities and examine issues related to citizenship, resistance, peacemaking, critical literacies, and second chance opportunities. The authors seek to promote advocacy of change that recognises the importance of an informed engagement with cross-cultural issues in order to foreground those missing perspectives that are often marginalised, silenced, ignored or denied. All contributors are concerned with how the process of change can bridge the gap between social justice and exclusion and develop critical understandings of the implications of changing policy and practice for those within and working with the educational organisations and communities.

Fifth Edition The true story of Blood, Bullets and Bodies: a critical multimedia exposé about the factors subverting the political will to act in the best interest of the poor, even when explicit just cause exists for such altruistic action to take place… Blood, Bullets and Bodies is a strange and paradoxical story that needs to be read as much as it needs to be told. It is a riveting story of sex, violence, political intrigue and survival by any means necessary. The book is a literary mirror that provides a revealing and frightening reflection for a self-destructing society to see itself profiled in the throes of its own possible demise. Sure to stir controversy, the new book contains a compelling rendition of the historical circumstances that have made crime and violence – bullets, blood and dead bodies – the number one problem in late 20th and early 21st century Jamaica. Despite the historic One Love Peace Concert and the Peace Truce in 1978, young gunmen seem to have gone wild ever since. Using a variety of sophisticated methodological tools including literary sources, oral interviews, ethnographic studies and the lyrics of popular Reggae songs, Imani Tafari-Ama details the influences and implications of this violent social discourse for everyday performances of femininity and masculinity in Kingston’s inner-city environment as well as in the wider Jamaican society. Tafari-Ama’s stated objective in publishing her thesis as a book is to separate fact from fiction in order to find real and enduring solutions that will reduce the distressing flood of blood, bullets and bodies that is overflowing the streets of Kingston. She hopes that by highlighting some of the facts and exposing much of the fiction about life below the poverty line, her provocative book will be a catalyst in motivating the political and community willpower necessary to find and implement the real-time solutions that she proposes in her suggested Options for Development.

The past decade has witnessed a paradigm shift at the World Bank from a focus on structural adjustment to a focus on poverty reduction. As evidenced by the Bank’s 2001 report, Engendering Development: Through Rights, Resource and Voice, an increased attention to gender issues has been an important part of this process. This book brings together a range of responses from feminist economists and other social researchers on the issues raised in this report. With contributions from highly esteemed scholars such as Eudine Barriteau, Diane Elson, Gale Summerfield, and Zafiris Tzannatos, this anthology critically examines the relationships between gender, growth, development, and the World Bank by: developing a history of the World Bank’s perspectives on gender empirically evaluating the impacts of the Banks’ policies on three different regions of the world exploring the ideological and methodological commitments of the report from a variety of feminist and interdisciplinary social science perspectives enquiring into future directions for feminist economics research. Highlighting the importance and challenge of taking gender into account in development theory and policy, this book’s complex and nuanced analyses of the social relations of gender in a global context make it an important resource for policymakers, activists and scholars alike.

From nineteenth-century black nationalist writer Martin Delany through the rise of Jim Crow, the 1937 riots in Trinidad, and the achievement of Independence in the West Indies, up to the present era of globalization, Black Nationalism in the New World explores the paths taken by black nationalism in the United States and the Caribbean. Bringing to bear a comparative, diasporic perspective, Robert Carr examines the complex roles race, gender, sexuality, and history have played in the formation of black national identities in the U. S. and Caribbean—particularly in Jamaica, Trinidad, and Guyana—over the past two centuries. He shows how nationalism begins as an impulse emanating "upwards" from the bottom of the social and economic spectrum and discusses the implications of this phenomenon for understanding democracy and nationalism. Black Nationalism in the New World combines geography, political economy, and subaltern studies in readings of noncanonical literary works, which in turn illuminate debates over African-American and West Indian culture, identity, and politics. In addition to Martin Delany’s Blake, or the Huts of America, Carr focuses on Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces; Crown Jewel, R. A. C. de Boissière’s novel of the Trinidadian revolt against British rule; Wilson Harris’s Guyana Quartet; the writings of the Oakland Black Panthers—particularly Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver; the gay novella Just Being Guys Together; and Lionheart Gal, a collection of patois testimonials assembled by Sistren, a radical Jamaican women’s theater group active in the ‘80s. With its comparative approach, broad historical sweep, and use of texts not well known in the United States, Black Nationalism in the New World extends the work of such theorists as Homi Bhabha, Paul Gilroy, and Nell Irwin Painter. It will be necessary reading for those interested in African American studies, Caribbean studies, cultural studies, women’s studies, and American studies.

This bold study traces the processes by which a ‘history’ and canon of Caribbean literature and criticism have been constructed. It offers a supplement to that history by presenting new writers, texts and critical moments that help to reconfigure the Caribbean tradition. Focusing on Anglophone or Anglocreole writings from across the twentieth century, Alison Donnell asks what it is that we read when we approach ‘Caribbean Literature’, how it is that we read it and what critical, ideological and historical pressures may have influenced our choices and approaches. In particular, the book: * addresses the exclusions that have resulted from the construction of a Caribbean canon * rethinks the dominant paradigms of Caribbean literary criticism, which have brought issues of anti-colonialism and nationalism, migration and diaspora, ‘double-colonised’ women, and the marginalization of sexuality and homosexuality to the foreground * seeks to put new issues and writings into critical circulation by exploring lesser-known authors and texts, including Indian Caribbean women’s writings and Caribbean queer writings. Identifying alternative critical approaches and critical moments, Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature allows us to re-examine the way in which we read not only Caribbean writings, but also the literary history and criticism that surround them.