The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?

1974 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Walcott
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Caribbean Culture ◽  
The Caribbean

We live in the shadow of an America that is economically benign yet politically malevolent. That malevolence, because of its size, threatens an eclipse of identity, but the shadow is as inescapable as that of any previous empire. But we were American even while we were British, if only in the geographical sense, and now that the shadow of the British Empire has passed through and over us in the Caribbean, we ask ourselves if, in the spiritual or cultural sense, we must become American. We have broken up the archipelago into nations, and in each nation we attempt to assert characteristics of the national identity. Everyone knows that these are pretexts of power if such power is seen as political. This is what the politician would describe as reality, but the reality is absurd.

African Caribbean Residents of Edinburgh in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Williams
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Caribbean Region ◽  
African Caribbean ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

Scotland is gradually coming to terms with its involvement in slavery and colonialism as part of the British Empire. This article places the spotlight on the lives of African Caribbean people who were residents of Edinburgh during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I discuss their varied experiences and contributions: from runaways and men fighting for their freedom in the Scottish courts to women working as servants in city households or marrying into Edinburgh high society. The nineteenth century saw activism among political radicals from abolitionists to anticolonialists; some of these figures studied and taught at Edinburgh University. Their stories reflect the Scottish capital’s many direct connections with the Caribbean region.

Slavery and Christianity in the British West Indies

1950 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 171-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Worthington Smith
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
British West Indies ◽  
The West ◽  
The Caribbean

Slavery in the British Empire was always centered in the British West Indies. To a greater degree than in the Southern Thirteen Colonies, economic life in the West Indies depended upon Negro slavery, and the population of the islands soon became predominantly Negro. With the loss of the Thirteen Colonies after 1775, slavery within the British Empire became almost entirely confined to the Caribbean colonies. Until the emancipation of the slaves in 1833, British eyes were focused upon the West Indies whenever slavery was mentioned.

Hybridity Sucks

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monika Mueller
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Abuse Of Power ◽  
Caribbean Culture ◽  
Historical Figure ◽  
The Social ◽  
African Caribbean ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Jamaican Creole ◽  
Female Power

This chapter argues that in his 1929 novel The White Witch of Rosehall Herbert G. de Lisser relies on Haitian voodoo combined with European vampirism to present the murderous “white witch” Annie Palmer—who is based on a historical figure—as an emblem of gender transgression and abuse of power. In addition to imbuing her with extraordinary, supernatural female power, de Lisser casts Annie Palmer as a European-Jamaican Creole. She is bolstered in her evil machinations both by the social status bestowed upon her by her white heritage and her acquired knowledge of African Caribbean culture. Thus, she also becomes a larger symbol of the colonial presence in the Caribbean. In the context of the period the novel was written in, Annie Palmer’s fusion of cultural traditions results in an evil hybridity that she cleverly uses to her own murderous advantage.

The Geography of Freedom in the Age of Revolutions

2021 ◽  
pp. 144-188
Author(s):  
Ashley L. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Time Frame ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
Colonial Policy ◽  
Abolitionist Movement ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Story Collection

This chapter explores a contradiction at the heart of the mainstream abolitionist movement: colonialism in India was promoted as a solution to the problem of slavery. It focuses on forms of unfreedom that trouble the geographical divide drawn in abolitionist discourse between slavery and freedom within the British empire. The chapter begins with a brief discussion of Marianna Starke's pro-imperialism/antislavery drama (set in India), The Sword of Peace (1788). It then turns to Maria Edgeworth's anti-Jacobin short-story collection Popular Tales (1804), which features nearly identical scenes of slavery set in Jamaica and India. Edgeworth's fiction might seem worlds away from actual colonial policy; but by contextualizing her writing amid debates about the slave trade and proposals for the cultivation of sugar in Bengal, the chapter shows that her stories were important and highly regarded thought experiments in colonial governance. Finally, the chapter discusses an important historical instantiation of the Indies mentality that falls outside the time frame of this study: the transportation of Indian indentured laborers to the Caribbean in the 1830s.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Brian Cummings
Keyword(s):  
Historical Linguistic ◽  
National Identity ◽  
British Empire ◽  
It Use ◽  
Book Of Common Prayer ◽  
Religious Ritual ◽  
Politics And Religion ◽  
Christian Worship ◽  
Common Prayer

Understanding the Book of Common Prayer requires many approaches: historical, linguistic, theological, ethical, political, literary. Apart from two brief interludes, it was England’s official book of Christian worship from 1549 to 2000. The British Empire imposed it use on peoples all over the globe, and it became translated into nearly 200 languages and dialects. The Introduction explains that one way of understanding the Book of Common Prayer is as an example of liturgy—a set form of words and gestures in a religious ritual. However, it is also a carrier of national identity, bringing politics and religion together. It also considers whether the Book of Common Prayer at heart is Catholic or Protestant.

Exhibiting Culture: Museums and National Identity in the Caribbean

1992 ◽  
Vol 38 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 33-53
Author(s):  
Alissandra Cummins
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
The Caribbean

Shiny Black and Layers of White: Japanned Papier Mâché, Race and the British Empire

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gavi Levy Haskell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
British Empire ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Nineteenth Century Literature ◽  
British Industry ◽  
Black Surface ◽  
Century Literature ◽  
Great Exhibition

Abstract Race, class and empire in nineteenth-century England inflected understandings of japanned papier mâché, influencing both its brief popularity and its abrupt demise in the 1860s. Although the material was rarely used as an explicit signifier in nineteenth-century literature or theory, or indeed mentioned at all, its inclusion in the Great Exhibition suggests its cultural and industrial centrality. This article proposes that this disparity results not from an absence of meaning, but from too great a complexity and too clear a set of implications. As an imitation of an East Asian form, japanned papier mâché represented an Orientalizing fantasy; as a shiny black surface, japanned papier mâché tapped into both desires and anxieties surrounding racial Blackness; as a backdrop for depictions of recognizably British landscapes and architecture; and as a distinctively British industry, japanned papier mâché offered a kind of national identity-fashioning. Tying a ubiquitous but understudied material of the English mid-nineteenth century to broader histories of the British empire, this article demonstrates the tidy encapsulation of the fraught and complex 1850s and 1860s into the materiality, forms and failure of japanned papier mâché.

The politics of representing the African diaspora in the Caribbean

1994 ◽  
Vol 68 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 301-308
Author(s):  
Kevin A. Yelvington
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Recent Trend ◽  
Defining Moment ◽  
Caribbean Culture ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Jamaican Culture ◽  
The Way

[First paragraph]Roots of Jamaican Culture. MERVYN C. ALLEYNE. London: Pluto Press, 1988. xii + 186 pp. (Paper US$ 15.95)Guinea's Other Suns: The African Dynamic in Trinidad Culture. MAUREEN WARNER-LEWIS. Foreword by Rex Nettleford. Dover MA: The Majority Press, 1991. xxii + 207 pp. (Paper US$ 9.95)A recent trend in anthropology is defined by the interest in the role of historical and political configurations in the constitution of local cultural practices. Unfortunately, with some notable individual exceptions, this is the same anthropology which has largely ignored the Caribbean and its "Islands of History."1 Of course, this says much, much more about the way in which anthropology constructs its subject than it says about the merits of the Caribbean case and the fundamental essence of these societies, born as they were in the unforgiving and defining moment of pervasive, persuasive, and pernicious European construction of "Otherness." As Trouillot (1992:22) writes, "Whereas anthropology prefers 'pre-contact' situations - or creates 'no-contact' situations - the Caribbean is nothing but contact." If the anthropological fiction of pristine societies, uninfluenced and uncontaminated by "outside" and more powerful structures and cultures cannot be supported for the Caribbean, then many anthropologists do one or both of the two anthropologically next best things: they take us on a journey that finds us exploding the "no-contact" myth over and over (I think it is called "strawpersonism"), suddenly discovering political economy, history, and colonialism, and/or they end up constructing the "pristine" anyway by emphasizing those parts of a diaspora group's pre-Caribbean culture that are thought to remain as cultural "survivals."

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document