Bibliography

In From Plantations to University Campus, Woodville Marshall examines the evolution in the use of the space that surrounds the campus of the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill, Barbados, and identifies some of the individuals who played pivotal roles at different junctures. Based primarily on deeds and wills, this story reveals serial transformation while providing some clear indications of varied entrepreneurial activity in a physical environment that was not ideally suited to intensive agricultural activity.

Several small plantations co-existed with one large plantation during the first century of English settlement. However, by the 1740s, the space was entirely dominated by small plantations and by medium-sized farms; and it was evident that occupancy of the land was as much tied to residence and to various types of business activity (including land speculation) as it was to cultivation of the soil. Not surprisingly, by the 1850s and 1860s, many of the farms on the marginal land had been succeeded by villages that were created by some of the formerly enslaved population, and both proximity to Bridgetown and internal migration ensured that those villages by the early twentieth century were less farming settlements than residential districts, barely distinguishable from non-plantation tenantries.

In a final twist, an urban development programme of the 1960s ensured the continuation of hybrid characteristics in the use of the space. Middle-income housing estates were built and a university campus was established, and that development co-exists with the remnants of the earlier post-slavery villages.

Description

06

Bibliography

The bicentenary of Haitian independence in 2004 triggered a renewed interest in Haitian history and culture. In many ways, however, much work is still required in this fertile field. Reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution and Its Cultural Aftershocks, the first collection of essays edited by Martin Munro and Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, addressed the repercussions of the Haitian Revolution in Haiti, the Caribbean, North America and Europe. This present volume develops and complements the previous collection to meet the growing demand for original scholarly work on Haiti. Widening the cultural lens to include diasporic studies, art, and questions of race and gender, Echoes of the Haitian Revolution exposes how the history of Haiti has shaped our ideas of race, nation and civilization in ways that we are often unaware of. Haiti's lessons continue to engage us in a dynamic dialog that compels us to question and revisit received arguments. The essays collected here provoke and stimulate these necessary conversations by approaching the legacies and repercussions of the revolution from a cultural perspective.

Description

02

Bibliography

In Political Communication Strategies in Post-independence Jamaica, 1972-2006, Floyd E. Morris analyses some of the factors that contribute to apathy among citizens towards the political process by focusing on the communication strategies used by leaders and their administrations. He examines the relationship between leaders and the wider society they seek to influence, the communication methods and techniques that have been deployed in the exercise of power, and how change is effected or stymied by political communication. The central argument of the book is that the success or failure of leaders and their administrations in modern Jamaica is closely linked to an effective communication strategy to support their programmes and policies.

Morris examines the campaigns and tenure of three of Jamaica's longest-serving prime ministers and assesses the communication strategies used to market their government's programmes and policies. By analysing the successes and failures of administrations between 1972 and 2006, he offers insight on the best approaches for connecting with and engaging citizens through effective communication.

Description

06

Bibliography

This book brings together contributions from a broad spectrum of authors on the most challenging issue for the Caribbean - against the dominating efforts of European colonizers and their descendants, the long-standing struggle of Caribbean people to fashion a culture and society that would give full space to the African heritage of the majority while accommodating their new and evolving circumstances. The book presents contemporary readings that contestation in the areas of Caribbean religion, education, language, music, race, sexual behavior in a time of the AIDS pandemic, and the economy. It grew out of a conference held in 2006 in honor of the scholarship of internationally acclaimed Professor Alston Barrington Chevannes, professor of social anthropology at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica. This book is unique, therefore, in both the breadth of its focus and range of topics as well as the specific issues considered, most essays being useful case studies in particular fields. The geographical span includes Jamaica, Martinique, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, indeed the Caribbean as a whole. There is perhaps no other publication with such an aim, range and relevance. The theme of a Caribbean world view makes this book a pioneering contribution to Caribbean studies. The collection also contains an autobiographical essay by Professor Chevannes.

Bibliography

In this remarkable exploration of the brutal course of Barbadoss history, Hilary McD. Beckles details the systematic barbarism of the British colonial project. Trade in enslaved Africans was not new in the Americas in the seventeenth century  the Portuguese and Spanish had commercialized chattel slavery in Brazil and Cuba in the 1500s  but in Barbados, the practice of slavery reached its apotheosis.

Barbados was the birthplace of British slave society and the most ruthlessly colonized. The geography of Barbados was ideally suited to sugar plantations and there were enormous fortunes to be made for British royalty and ruling elites from sugar produced by an enslaved, disposable workforce, fortunes that secured Britains place as an imperial superpower. The inhumane legacy of plantation society has shaped modern Barbados and this history must be fully understood by the inheritors on both sides of the power dynamic before real change and reparatory justice can take place.

A prequel to Beckless equally compelling Britains Black Debt, The First Black Slave Society: Britains Barbarity Time in Barbados, 16361876 is essential reading for anyone interested in Atlantic history, slavery and the plantation system, and modern race relations.