scholarly journals The 1930s Horror Adventure Film on Location in Jamaica: ‘Jungle Gods’, ‘Voodoo Drums’ and ‘Mumbo Jumbo’ in the ‘Secret Places of Paradise Island’

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 62
Author(s):  
Emiel Martens

In this article, I consider the representation of African-Caribbean religions in the early horror adventure film from a postcolonial perspective. I do so by zooming in on Ouanga (1935), Obeah (1935), and Devil’s Daughter (1939), three low-budget horror productions filmed on location in Jamaica during the 1930s (and the only films shot on the island throughout that decade). First, I discuss the emergence of depictions of African-Caribbean religious practices of voodoo and obeah in popular Euro-American literature, and show how the zombie figure entered Euro-American empire cinema in the 1930s as a colonial expression of tropical savagery and jungle terror. Then, combining historical newspaper research with content analyses of these films, I present my exploration into the three low-budget horror films in two parts. The first part contains a discussion of Ouanga, the first sound film ever made in Jamaica and allegedly the first zombie film ever shot on location in the Caribbean. In this early horror adventure, which was made in the final year of the U.S. occupation of Haiti, zombies were portrayed as products of evil supernatural powers to be oppressed by colonial rule. In the second part, I review Obeah and The Devil’s Daughter, two horror adventure movies that merely portrayed African-Caribbean religion as primitive superstition. While Obeah was disturbingly set on a tropical island in the South Seas infested by voodoo practices and native cannibals, The Devil’s Daughter was authorized by the British Board of Censors to show black populations in Jamaica and elsewhere in the colonial world that African-Caribbean religions were both fraudulent and dangerous. Taking into account both the production and content of these movies, I show that these 1930s horror adventure films shot on location in Jamaica were rooted in a long colonial tradition of demonizing and terrorizing African-Caribbean religions—a tradition that lasts until today.

Author(s):  
Lisa Williams

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.


Author(s):  
Thomas N. Sherratt ◽  
David M. Wilkinson

Why do we age? Why cooperate? Why do so many species engage in sex? Why do the tropics have so many species? When did humans start to affect world climate? This book provides an introduction to a range of fundamental questions that have taxed evolutionary biologists and ecologists for decades. Some of the phenomena discussed are, on first reflection, simply puzzling to understand from an evolutionary perspective, whilst others have direct implications for the future of the planet. All of the questions posed have at least a partial solution, all have seen exciting breakthroughs in recent years, yet many of the explanations continue to be hotly debated. Big Questions in Ecology and Evolution is a curiosity-driven book, written in an accessible way so as to appeal to a broad audience. It is very deliberately not a formal text book, but something designed to transmit the excitement and breadth of the field by discussing a number of major questions in ecology and evolution and how they have been answered. This is a book aimed at informing and inspiring anybody with an interest in ecology and evolution. It reveals to the reader the immense scope of the field, its fundamental importance, and the exciting breakthroughs that have been made in recent years.


2021 ◽  
Vol 137 (2) ◽  
pp. 344-361
Author(s):  
Philippe Del Giudice

Abstract A new project has just been launched to write a synchronic, descriptive grammar of Niçois, the Occitan dialect of Nice. In this article, I define the corpus of the research. To do so, I first review written production from the Middle Ages to the present. I then analyze the linguistic features of Niçois over time, in order to determine the precise starting point of the current language state. But because of reinforced normativism and the decreasing social use of Niçois among the educated population, written language after WWII became artificial and does not really correspond to recordings made in the field. The corpus will thus be composed of writings from the 1820’s to WWII and recordings from the last few decades.


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.


2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (04) ◽  
pp. 137-139
Author(s):  
Mehdi Elman oğlu Bağırov ◽  

The distribution of the world's hotel chains to more and more countries is also reflected in our country, and the development of this type of chain hotels is growing day by day. Along with the development of technology, the tourism infrastructure and its key element, the hotel industry, is also developing. Today, investments are being made in a planned way to modernize the hotel business, build new hotels, and introduce new technologies and forms of service. Sheraton Hotels and Resorts is an international hotel chain owned by Marriott International. Sheraton has 446 hotels with 155,617 rooms worldwide, including locations in North America, Africa, Asia, Central and South America, Europe, the Middle East and the Caribbean. Key words: hotel chains, investment, technology, hotel business, tourism infrastructure


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-40
Author(s):  
Dagmar Deuber ◽  
Stephanie Hackert ◽  
Eva Canan Hänsel ◽  
Alexander Laube ◽  
Mahyar Hejrani ◽  
...  

This study examines newspaper writing from ten Caribbean countries as a window on the norm orientation of English in the region. English in the former British colonies of the Caribbean has been assumed to be especially prone to postcolonial linguistic Americanization, on account of not just recent global phenomena such as mass tourism and media exposure but also long-standing personal and sociocultural links. We present a quantitative investigation of variable features comparing our Caribbean results not just to American and British reference corpora but also to newspaper collections from India and Nigeria as representatives of non-Caribbean New Englishes. The amount of American features employed varies by type of feature and country. In all Caribbean corpora, they are more prevalent in the lexicon than in spelling. With regard to grammar, an orientation toward a singular norm cannot be deduced from the data. While Caribbean journalists do partake in worldwide American-led changes such as colloquialization, as evident in the occurrence of contractions or the tendency to prefer that over which, the frequencies with which they do so align neither with American English nor with British English but often resemble those found in the Indian and Nigerian corpora. Contemporary Caribbean newspaper writing, thus, neither follows traditional British norms, nor is it characterized by massive linguistic Americanization; rather, there appears to be a certain conservatism common to New Englishes generally. We discuss these results in light of new considerations on normativity in English in the 21st century.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah R. Schiavone ◽  
Will M Gervais

Atheists represent an inconspicuous minority, identifiable only by their disbelief in God(s). Despite being highly stigmatized and disliked, until recent scientific endeavors, little has been known about this group including why they don’t believe, how many people are atheists, and why they trigger intense reactions. Thus, this paper aims to synthesize what is known about atheists (so far), and to help explain the widespread negative attitudes and prejudice towards atheists; the possible cognitive, motivational, and cultural origins of disbelief; and the unique challenges facing the study of religious disbelievers. To do so, we will explore current findings in psychological research on atheism by considering the complex interactions of cultural learning, motivations, and core cognitive processes. Although significant scientific progress has been made in understanding the factors underlying atheism, there remains much to be explored in the domain of religious disbelief.


Author(s):  
Åse Eriksen
Keyword(s):  
Made In ◽  

Patterned silks came to Scandinavia as small pieces of reused material, but they were still valuable for the Vikings to have been used as trimmings on their garments. In over a millennium, the weave structure of samitum in these fragments was used in all patterned silk. In the medieval it was displaced in favor for other structures. It has lapsed into obscurity for weavers today. For several reasons the study of these silks has been difficult. The fragments are fragile. They were not made in Norway. Few have mastered this weaving technique.  Is it possible to reconstruct these ancient silks, based on the knowledge gained from studying historical silks and experience acquired from using the structure in modern textiles? This article is about my attempt to do so, and also my reflections of the possible longtime impact on these silks on the weaving tradition in Norway.


Visualidades ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 93
Author(s):  
Victor Junger
Keyword(s):  
Made In ◽  

Procuro pensar a multiplicidade de relações estabelecidas entre os praticantes e as imagens fotográficas em meio à ocupação imagética realizada no colégio, no âmbito de minha pesquisa de mestrado, tomando a sua aparição momentânea como acontecimento de criação da escola, assim como das visibilidades presididas em seus contextos. Para tanto, apenas me deterei sobre os deslocamentos e desaparecimentos das fotografias no dispositivo da ocupação, bem como acerca das rasuras e inscrições marcadas na superfície das imagens, como indícios de um território dinâmico, polêmico, e não menos poético, desta visualidade que, incessante, se faz instaurar nos espaços e tempos da escola. AbstractLooking for thinking the multiplicity of relations between practitioners and photographic images through the imagistic occupation held at the college as part of my master's research, taking its momentary appearance as a happening of school creation, as well as chaired the visibilities in their contexts. To do so, just dwell on the displacements and disappearances of the photos in the occupation dispositive, as well as about the erasures and markings to the surface of the images as evidence of a dynamic, controversial territory, and no less poetic, of this visuality that, incessantly, is made in the spaces and times of the school. ResumenBusco pensar la multiplicidad de relaciones establecidas entre los practicantes y las imágenes fotográficas en medio a la ocupación imagética realizada en el colegio, en el ámbito de mi investigación de maestría, tomando su aparición momentánea como acontecimiento de creación de la escuela, así como de las visibilidades presididas en sus contextos. Para ello, sólo me detendré sobre los desplazamientos y desapariciones de las fotografías en el dispositivo de la ocupación, así como sobre las rasuras e inscripciones marcadas en la superficie de las imágenes, como indicios de un territorio dinámico, polémico, y no menos poético, de esta visualidad que, incesante, se hace instaurar en los espacios y tiempos de la escuela.


Author(s):  
Łukasz Łuniewski ◽  
Barbara Gołębiewska

The aim of the research was to evaluate the sources of financing agricultural activities in farms specialized in milk production. The subject of research was a group of family farms located in the Podlaskie and Mazowieckie voivodeships (provinces). The criterion for farm division was the number of cows in the basic herd. There was also an assessment of the most important factors conducive to the development of dairy farms. To do so, the opinions of dairy farmers were used, and their views in this regard were expressed on a five-point Likert scale. The research was conducted on a sample of 100 farms in 2021. The interpretation of the results was made in relation to the criterion adopted in the division of farms into quartiles. It was found that the main source of financing activities in dairy farms was own funds. The highest share of farms using commercial loans was in the group of farms with the largest number of cows. With an increase in the number of cows in a herd, the area of farms increased, which is understandable due to the need to produce roughage. The most important factors influencing the development possibilities of agricultural holdings were the uninterrupted collection of raw material and a stable milk purchase price, which guaranteed the farmers’ financial liquidity.


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