Afterword: Waging the War from the Outside: The Writers of the West Indian Diaspora and their Role in the Future of the Caribbean

2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 418-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jamie L. Pietruska

This article examines the mutually reinforcing imperatives of government science, capitalism, and American empire through a history of the U.S. Weather Bureau's West Indian weather service at the turn of the twentieth century. The original impetus for expanding American meteorological infrastructure into the Caribbean in 1898 was to protect naval vessels from hurricanes, but what began as a measure of military security became, within a year, an instrument of economic expansion that extracted climatological data and produced agricultural reports for American investors. This article argues that the West Indian weather service was a project of imperial meteorology that sought to impose a rational scientific and bureaucratic order on a region that American officials considered racially and culturally inferior, yet relied on the labor of local observers and Cuban meteorological experts in order to do so. Weather reporting networks are examined as a material and symbolic extension of American technoscientific power into the Caribbean and as a knowledge infrastructure that linked the production of agricultural commodities in Cuba and Puerto Rico to the world of commodity exchange in the United States.


1952 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 136-136

The thirteenth session of the Caribbean Commission was held in the Virgin Islands from October 29 to November 3,1951, with Ward M. Canaday (United States) presiding. Items on the agenda included the budget for 1952, consideration of special reports and recommendations, and preparation for the fifth session of the West Indian Conference scheduled to be held in Jamaica in 1952.


1955 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-41
Author(s):  
Eleanor B. Adams

The island of Trinidad was discovered by Columbus on the third voyage in 1498. One of the largest and most fertile of the West Indian islands, for many years it remained on the fringe of European activity in the Caribbean area and on the coasts of Venezuela and Guiana. A Spanish settlement was founded there in 1532, but apparently it disintegrated within a short time. Toward the end of the sixteenth century Berrio and Raleigh fought for possession of the island, but chiefly as a convenient base for their rival search for El Dorado, or Manoa, the Golden Man and the mythical city of gold. Throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries explorers, corsairs, and contraband traders, Spanish, French, English, and Dutch, passed near its shores, and many of them may well have paused there to refresh themselves and to make necessary repairs to their vessels. But the records are scanty and we know little of such events or of the settlements that existed from time to time.


1949 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 166-166

The third session of the West Indian Conference opened at Guadeloupe, French West Indies on December 1, 1948 and closed on December 14, after considering policy to be followed by the Caribbean Commission for the next two years. The Conference was attended by two delegates from each of the fifteen territories within the jurisdiction of the commission and observers invited by the commission from Haiti, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and the United Nations and its specialized agencies.


Author(s):  
Karen Fog Olwig

Karen Fog Olwig: When culture is to be „preserved“: perspectives from a West Indian research project At the same time as anthropology has begun to apply a more processual perspective to the study of culture as fluid and changing, many of the „fourth world“ peoples studied by anthropologists have become preoccupied with codifying their culture in the form of aboriginal, authentic traditions which can be preserved from change. This concem with cultural traditions is tied to the struggle for human rights by indigenous people. The concept of culture as unchanged traditions is not only in conflict with current anthropological thinking, it is also ill suited to the struggles of peoples who cannot claim this form of ancient indigenous status, but who nevertheless share with „fourth world“ peoples the same need to defend their cultural autonomy. Among this latter group is the people of the Caribbean, who are indigenous to Africa, but came to the islands as part of a process of colonization. This article is based upon a study of the difficulties faced by such a non-indigenous, but nevertheless „native“ community of several centuries standing, in their efforts to defend their cultural and economic autonomy. In the West Indian case modem anthropological theory and the population studied by anthropologists need not be in conflict.


Author(s):  
Amanda Bidnall

“London Calypso” examines the burst of popular enthusiasm for Trinidadian calypso that coincided with the arrival of the first generation of postwar settlers to London from the Caribbean. To explain this phenomenon, Bidnall traces the calypso’s roots as a vehicle of unbridled social commentary and bawdy celebration. The reflections of calypsonians Lord Kitchener, Lord Beginner, Lord Invader and others, captured on records from labels like Melodisc and Parlophone, were therefore a unique barometer of the rewards and frustrations of postwar migration for the West Indian community. “London Is The Place For Me” may be the most celebrated of this oeuvre, but the legacy of the London calypsonians is rawer and more unbridled.


1981 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roland Littlewood ◽  
Maurice Lipsedge

SynopsisVarious studies have shown: (i) increased rates of psychoses in immigrants to Britain, and a particularly high rate of schizophrenia in the West Indian- and West African-born; and (ii) a greater proportion of atypical psychoses in immigrants. A retrospective study of psychotic inpatients from a London psychiatric unit demonstrated increased rates of schizophrenia in patients from the Caribbean and West Africa. These patients included a high proportion of those with paranoid and religious phenomenology, those with frequent changes of diagnosis, formal admissions, and married women. The West Indian-born had been in Britain for nearly 10 years before first seeing a psychiatrist and, if they had an illness with religious symptomatology, were likely to have been in hospital for only 3 weeks. Rates of schizophrenia without paranoid phenomenology were similar in each ethnic group. It is suggested that the increase in the diagnosis of schizophrenia in the West Indian- born, and possibly in the West African-born, may be due in part to the occurrence of acute psychotic reactions which are diagnosed as schizophrenia.


2001 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 347-374 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Beck Ryden

Most historians describe the moral distaste for slavery as the sole reason for the cessation of the British slave trade. Data from the Caribbean, however, along with contemporary commentary, show that an economic crisis faced by sugar planters was critical to the timing of abolition in 1807.


1948 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 380-381

Fifth Meeting of the Caribbean Commission: Resolutions adopted by the Caribbean Commission which met in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, from December 8 to 13, 1947, assigned Guadeloupe and November 1948 as the place and date for the third biennial session of the West Indian Conference, planned the conference agenda, and gave publicity to the recommendations of the Caribbean Research Council which had met in Port-of-Spain the week before. The Commission, under the chairmanship of Governor William H. Hastie (United States) set its budget at $343,537, which represented a reduction of $27,800 from its budget of the previous year. The Commission discussed a reorganization of its machinery and personnel, and suggested that the personnel of the central secretariat be strengthened by gradual addition of scientific and technical staff.


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