Their Modernity Matters Too: The Invisible Links Between Black Atlantic Identity Formations in the Caribbean and Consumer Capitalism

2009 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 271-292
Author(s):  
Francio Guadeloupe
Keyword(s):  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Consumer Capitalism ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Identity Formations ◽  
The Invisible

scholarly journals Middle Passage to Freedom: Black Atlantic Consciousness in Charles Johnson's Middle Passage and S. I. Martin's Incomparable World

2003 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Nowatzki
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Cultural Hybridity ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Physical Mobility ◽  
The Caribbean

Charles Johnson's novel, Middle Passage, and S.I. Martin's novel, Incomparable World, illustrate through mobile, culturally hybrid protagonists Paul Gilroy's notion of Black Atlantic consciousness, which is based on cultural hybridity and physical mobility across the Atlantic between Europe and Africa, America and the Caribbean. I argue that both novels blur the line between freedom and slavery, between oppressed and oppressor, and disrupt the links between blackness and slavery, between mobility and freedom. In both novels the diasporic Black Atlantic experiences privilege masculinity, since neither novel includes black women who can experience the mobility that the male protagonists do.

THE BLACK ATLANTIC MISSIONARY MOVEMENT AND AFRICA, 1780s-1920s

2003 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Killingray
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Black American ◽  
Atlantic Region ◽  
American Missionaries ◽  
Mission Agencies ◽  
Missionary Movement ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
American Mission ◽  
Mission Field

AbstractOver a period of 150 years African American missionaries sought to spread the Christian Gospel in the 'Black Atlantic' region formed by the Americas, Africa and Britain. Relatively few in number, they have been largely ignored by most historians of mission. As blacks in a world dominated by persistent slavery, ideas of scientific racism and also by colonialism, their lot was rarely a comfortable one. Often called, by a belief in 'divine providence', to the Caribbean and Africa, when employed by white mission agencies they were invariably treated as second-class colleagues. From the late 1870s new African American mission bodies sent men and women to the mission field. However, by the 1920s, black American missionaries were viewed with alarm by the colonial authorities as challenging prevailing racial ideas and they were effectively excluded from most of Africa.

The Caribbean in an International and Regional Context

2017 ◽  
pp. 332-350
Author(s):  
Spencer Mawby
Keyword(s):  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Regional Context ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The 1950S

In terms of demography, ecology, culture, and politics, the modern Caribbean is rooted in a hybrid/creole past. This is significant because many theorists have identified the local as the antithesis of the global and parochial sentiment as a key motive for resistance to globalization. The destruction of the indigenous Caribbean society and the repopulation of the islands in the aftermath of the European conquests made the notion of a Black Atlantic diaspora a feature of Caribbean life in the colonial period; Caribbean anticolonialism had a similarly globalist orientation. Caribbean territories witnessed some of the most imaginative (but least successful) schemes for regional federation and inter-island co-operation devised in the 1950s and 1960s. The region was also the site of multiple imperial interests and foreign interventions, which, as this chapter demonstrates, contributed to the ways in which decolonization unfolded.

Making modernity in the hinterlands: new Maroon musics in the Black Atlantic

Popular Music ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 265-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Bilby
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Caribbean Region ◽  
Primary Role ◽  
New Era ◽  
Anglophone Caribbean ◽  
Plantation Slavery ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Caribbean Writers

IntroductionBorn in mortal opposition to the peculiarly modern forms of slavery that helped to usher in a new era of European world domination, the Maroon societies of the Americas have long provided theorists of identity operating in the realm that has come to be known as the Black Atlantic with a potent symbolic currency. Nowhere has this currency acquired higher value than in the Caribbean region, where questions of identity are so fundamentally bound up with histories of plantation slavery.The runaway slave has had a special place in the literature of the anglophone Caribbean; and francophone, hispanophone and Dutch-speaking Caribbean writers have all displayed a similar fascination with the Maroon epic. In more recent times, popular music – a medium that has played a primary role in the constitution of a truly diasporic sense of identity spanning the Black Atlantic – has helped to carry consciousness of a heroic Maroon past across the globe. Both practitioners of Caribbean (or other Afro-American) popular musics and those who write about them continue to reference the Maroons of yore, often tracing the rebellious thrust of much of today's music to these original Black warriors, whose defiant spirit, it is felt, continues to inhabit and motivate the collective memory (Aly 1988, pp. 55–7, 65; Zips 1993, 1994; Leymarie 1994).

Worldmaking after Empire

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adom Getachew
Keyword(s):  
International Economic Order ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
International Order ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
Kwame Nkrumah ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
New Perspective

Decolonization revolutionized the international order during the twentieth century. Yet standard histories that present the end of colonialism as an inevitable transition from a world of empires to one of nations—a world in which self-determination was synonymous with nation-building—obscure just how radical this change was. Drawing on the political thought of anticolonial intellectuals and statesmen such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, W. E. B Du Bois, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Eric Williams, Michael Manley, and Julius Nyerere, this book reveals the full extent of their unprecedented ambition to remake not only nations but the world. The book shows that African, African American, and Caribbean anticolonial nationalists were not solely or even primarily nation-builders. Responding to the experience of racialized sovereign inequality, dramatized by interwar Ethiopia and Liberia, Black Atlantic thinkers and politicians challenged international racial hierarchy and articulated alternative visions of worldmaking. Seeking to create an egalitarian postimperial world, they attempted to transcend legal, political, and economic hierarchies by securing a right to self-determination within the newly founded United Nations, constituting regional federations in Africa and the Caribbean, and creating the New International Economic Order. Using archival sources from Barbados, Trinidad, Ghana, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, this book recasts the history of decolonization, reconsiders the failure of anticolonial nationalism, and offers a new perspective on debates about today's international order.

scholarly journals Kinship Across the Black Atlantic

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gigi Adair
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
First Century ◽  
Diaspora Studies ◽  
Contemporary Novels ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
And Migration

This book considers the meaning of kinship across black Atlantic diasporas in the Caribbean, Western Europe and North America via readings of six contemporary novels. It draws upon and combines insights from postcolonial studies, queer theory and black Atlantic diaspora studies in novel ways to examine the ways in which contemporary writers engage with the legacy of anthropological discourses of kinship, interrogate the connections between kinship and historiography, and imagine new forms of diasporic relationality and subjectivity. The novels considered here offer sustained meditations on the meaning of kinship and its role in diasporic cultures and communities; they represent diasporic kinship in the context and crosscurrents of both historical and contemporary forces, such as slavery, colonialism, migration, political struggles and artistic creation. They show how displacement and migration require and generate new forms and understandings of kinship, and how kinship may be used as an instrument of both political oppression and resistance. Finally, they demonstrate the importance of literature in imagining possibilities for alternative forms of relationality and in finding a language to express the meaning of those relations. This book thus suggests that an analysis of discourses and practices of kinship is essential to understanding diasporic modernity at the turn of the twenty-first century.

scholarly journals Lowering the Gaze

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 37-45
Author(s):  
La Vaughn Belle
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Embodied Knowledge ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The Invisible ◽  
Public Sculpture

This article is written by one of the co-creators of the monumental public sculpture entitled I Am Queen Mary that was done in collaboration with Jeannette Ehlers. Inaugurated on March 31, 2018 the project is the first collaborative sculpture to memorialize Denmark’s colonial impact in the Caribbean and those who fought against it. The essay traces the beginning of the collaboration as a transatlantic conversation that prompted the development of two separate ideas and articulates how the monument represents a point of convergence of the artistic practices of both Belle and Ehlers. Moreover, the essay highlights how the conjoining of the original monument projects created various conversations and tensions around colonial structures and visibility. By entering the work through its coral stone base, it uses the acropodia as a conceptual framework to discuss the hidden infrastructures of coloniality and how - through lowering the gaze and other sensorial shifts - a new kind of embodied knowledge can be gained. The article employs Kevin Quashie’s ideas around the aesthetics of quiet as a way to not only think differently about resistance and blackness as only exterior phenomena, but to consider the power and complexity of interiority. By extension, offering up a similar lense to view the inner life of coloniality, the article discusses how through the acropodia in I Am Queen Mary the invisible structures and labor of not only colonial systems, but the monument itself, can be made transparent.

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