scholarly journals West Indian Literature and Federation: Imaginative Accord and Uneven Realities

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-86
Author(s):  
Alison Donnell
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
Community Building ◽  
West Indian ◽  
The Political ◽  
Indian Literature ◽  
Political Consciousness ◽  
The West ◽  
Literary Expression ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Economic Markets

This essay explores the particular importance conferred on literary expression within a wide range of writings dedicated to understanding and responding to the project of the West Indies Federation. Although federation was conceived, and briefly achieved, as a political expression of community building and people making, the consistent practice of referencing and invoking literary works across these writings reveals the project’s central and necessary investment in the reimagination of identities and belongings. Yet while the literary expression of a West Indian sensibility helped to articulate the political consciousness necessary for change, it could not finally overcome the sources of tension in the region. Importantly, too, the same West Indian writers who symbolized the collective belonging to the region, so cherished by federation, were themselves embroiled in the discordant realities of economic markets and measures and caught between national and international belongings.

The Origins of the Commission System in the West India Trade The Alexander Prize Essay

1952 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 89-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. G. Davies
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
West Indian ◽  
The Political ◽  
The West ◽  
Half Century ◽  
Political Sphere ◽  
Direct Administration ◽  
Series Of Experiments ◽  
The Government ◽  
Prize Essay

The half-century which followed the capture of Jamaica in 1655 was characterized by the consolidation rather than by the expansion of the English interest in the West Indies. In the political sphere this consolidation took several forms. The acquisition of Jamaica, by far the largest English West Indian colony, and the termination of proprietary rule in, the Caribee Islands in 1663 brought the greater part of the English West Indian empire under the direct administration of the Crown. As a corollary to this extension of Crown rule, the creation of effective institutions for the government of these and other colonies became a matter of urgent necessity. After a series of experiments in the decade following the Restoration, the constitution in 1672 of the Council of Trade and Plantations inaugurated 'a more thorough system of colonial control than had been established by any of its predecessors'. The sum effect of these developments was that London became, in a way that it had never been before, the place where all the major decisions affecting the destinies of the West Indies were taken. From London there issued not only Crown-appointed governors and a stream of Orders-in-Council, but also declarations of the King's pleasure on such minor questions as appointments to colonial judgeships and seats in colonial councils.1 To London there flowed, besides acts of colonial legislatures for approval or rejection, a torrent of complaints and petitions for redress.

Caribbean Voices and the Communicative Failure of the West Indies Federation

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-95
Author(s):  
Glyne Griffith
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
West Indian ◽  
Indian Literature ◽  
The West ◽  
Editorial Commentary ◽  
Radio Program ◽  
Critical Commentary

This essay argues that the short-lived West Indies Federation (1958–62) was not only undermined by the failure of the regional intelligentsia to comprehensively communicate a narrative of regionalism to the majority of the archipelago’s peoples but also further compromised by the BBC Caribbean Voices literary radio program broadcast to the region between 1943 and 1958. During this fifteen-year period leading up to federation, Caribbean Voices broadcast West Indian literature, as well as critical commentary by the program’s longest serving editor, Henry Swanzy, that generally emphasized territorial rather than regional nationalism. Consequently, the program’s content had the inadvertent effect of undermining the narrative of regionalism, at the popular level, that BBC officialdom and the region’s intelligentsia seemed to have taken for granted. The essay therefore concludes that the narrative failure of federation was prefigured in the widely and more persuasively articulated story of territorial nationalism that was presented in much of the literature and editorial commentary broadcast to the region via Caribbean Voices in the decade and a half leading up to federation.

A Caribbean Visionary and His Literary Collection, Karlene Saundria Nelson

2022 ◽  
pp. 095574902110604
Author(s):  
Karlene Saundria Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Political History ◽  
West Indian ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Indian Literature ◽  
The West ◽  
Social Fabric ◽  
Indian History

The voices of West Indian writers in the 1950s changed the landscape for Literature emerging out of the West Indies. These powerful literary voices were a means of creating and recording a facet of West Indian history and cultural heritage. West Indian writers wrote their stories through their own eyes. John Hearne was one of the most eloquent voices among them. He became a known voice in the West Indian literary world, using his recognition to facilitate the indigenous West Indian Literature genre’s development. He was also a prominent Jamaican political and social commentator. The John Hearne archive not only produced an important historical picture of the development of the West Indian Literature genre, but West Indian political history, and changes in the cultural and social fabric of the West Indian society, with special emphasis on Jamaica. This paper aims to present this archive as a fundamental body of primary resources for historical research.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
P. J. Marshall
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
West Indian ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
The Political ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Management

Burke’s involvement with the West Indies has attracted little attention. Yet it is a topic that throws important light on his views on the British Empire as a whole and on his work as a political ‘man of business’, as well as raising questions about the extent of his humanitarian sympathies, in this case for enslaved Africans. Burke could be a fierce critic of imperial abuses, but he had high ideals for what the empire ought to be and was willing to take a full part both in shaping policy for the empire and in seeking imperial opportunities for advancement for his family and friends. The Introduction outlines the development of Burke’s concern for the West Indies from the pursuit of personal advantage for his connections, to the political management of West Indian interests, and ultimately to participating in the great public debate on slavery and the slave trade.

THE (SLAVE) NARRATIVE OF JANE EYRE

2008 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 317-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Sun-Joo Lee
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
West Indian ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
The West ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
Indian Slavery ◽  
At Home

InImperialism at Home, Susan Meyer explores Charlotte Brontë's metaphorical use of race and empire in Jane Eyre. In particular, she is struck by Brontë's repeated allusions to bondage and slavery and wonders, “Why would Brontë write a novel permeated with the imagery of slavery, and suggesting the possibility of a slave uprising, in 1846, after the emancipation of the British slaves had already taken place?” (71). Meyer speculates, “Perhaps the eight years since emancipation provided enough historical distance for Brontë to make a serious and public, although implicit, critique of British slavery and British imperialism in the West Indies” (71). Perhaps. More likely, I would argue, is the possibility that Brontë was thinking not of West Indian slavery, but of American slavery.

Caribbean Commission

1949 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 166-166
Keyword(s):  
Dominican Republic ◽  
United Nations ◽  
West Indies ◽  
West Indian ◽  
The West ◽  
French West Indies ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The United Nations

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.

The high frequency P and S phases from the West Indies

1962 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 957-962
Author(s):  
D. H. Shurbet
Keyword(s):  
High Frequency ◽  
West Indies ◽  
West Indian ◽  
The West ◽  
Long Duration ◽  
Probable Presence ◽  
Minimum Velocity ◽  
Velocity Channel

abstract The long duration and high frequency of P and S phases from earthquakes along the West Indian island are are deseribed. These phases have been described previously in the literature without explanation. It is shown that the long duration, high frequency, and velocity of both phases can be explained as due to a minimum velocity channel slightly below the M-discontinuity. Other observations are shown to indicate the probable presence of the minimum velocity channel.

III. Fowell Buxton and the New African Policy, 1838–1842

1950 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
West Indian ◽  
The Gambia ◽  
Sugar Production ◽  
The West ◽  
British Caribbean ◽  
Long Run

‘The Black in the West Indies will.… receive his Emancipation at the expense of his Brethren in Africa.’ So the Lieutenant-Governor of the Gambia had forecast before the 1833 Act, and he was right, although for the wrong reasons. Emancipation cramped the sugar production of the British Caribbean, but it did not affect the sweet tooth of the sugar consumer, and as West Indian output fell, sugar production in Cuba and (less noticeably) in Brazil rose sharply. Outproduced, undersold and overcultivated, the West Indian plantations began to lag as competitors, a result inevitable in the long run, but accelerated by the freeing of the slaves.

Antislavery

2018 ◽  
pp. 187-208
Author(s):  
Deirdre Coleman
Keyword(s):  
American Revolution ◽  
West Indies ◽  
White Woman ◽  
African State ◽  
West Indian ◽  
The West ◽  
Public Places ◽  
Plantation Slavery

Smeathman arrives in the West Indies mid-1775, just as the American revolution begins. He makes numerous comparisons between tropical nature in its ‘rude’ (African) state and its ‘cultivated’ (West Indian) version, He also observes the various societies of the different islands and, appalled by the cruelty of plantation slavery, starts to reconsider Quaker Fothergill’s plans for ‘legitimate’ African commerce. The flogging of slaves in public places shocks him into sketching two of these scenes, one of which is particularly chilling because it is conducted by a white woman. Smeathman decides to return to England and compile his ‘Voyages and Travels’, a book which would reveal the truth about ‘those little known and much misrepresented people the Negroes’.

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