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What Do Jamaican Children Speak? A Language Resource presents a profile of aspects of the lexicon and of the morphosyntax of the speech of Jamaican three-year-olds across the island in their first year of entry into the public school system, the basic school. It is intended to serve as a resource for creolists and acquisitionists, for academics in education, for teachers of literacy and language education, as well as for intermediary and advanced tertiary-level linguistics and education students.

The language to which the children are exposed  their model in acquisition  is characterized by extreme variation and viewed as the weaving of features belonging to the two language systems, Jamaican Creole and Jamaican English. This variation is not random or chaotic, however. The patterns of language choice by the children are investigated, showing clearly how it is that features associated with each of the languages are woven in their speech. These findings are used as a basis for recommending an approach grounded in language awareness as the choice pedagogy for the language and literacy classroom in a language environment such as that in Jamaica.

Linguistic analysis, then, is used as a platform, a basis on which to understand the nature of the language that has been acquired by the children and used by them, leading to an informed picture of a possible way forward in English language education, allowing the teacher to transform what are frequently considered hindrances to learning English, into opportunities for learning the language.

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This classic examination of the freedmen in the slave society of Barbados was first published in 1974 and has not been widely available for years. Reissued now with a new introduction by Melanie Newton that places the work in the context of the historiography of studies of Caribbean free-colored populations, this classic is now available to a new generation of scholars and students. The work remains the only treatment of the free people of color of Barbados from the earliest periods of the slave society to emancipation in 1834 and provides the most detailed discussion of the manumission process for any British West Indian society. Allowed certain rights and privileges not extended to slaves but denied others reserved for whites, the social status of the free people was ambiguous. Thus there was wide latitude for varying interpretations of what their position should be, but Handler shows how the freedmen's struggle for civil rights was a collective effort to maximize their free status and to avoid a position of permanent intermediacy between white and enslaved. Using the petitions and addresses written by the freedmen themselves, Handler contends that they neither challenged the notion of a class society nor attempted to deny the upper stratum those privileges commensurate with its rank. They argued that a hierarchically organized society should be based on that set of social and economic criteria that whites used in drawing distinctions among themselves. It was evident, however, that as long as the slave society continued to exist, the freedmen of Barbados would remain an 'unappropriated people', neither enslaved nor entirely free.

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In 1977, Bob Marley composed Exodus, a reggae masterpiece that evokes the return of Rastafari to Africa. Over the past 50 years, Rastafari have made the journey to Ethiopia, settling in the country as repatriates. This little-known history is told in Exodus! Heirs and Pioneers, Rastafari Return to Ethiopia. Giulia Bonacci recounts, with sharpness and rigor, this amazing journey of Rastafari who left the Caribbean, the United States of America and the United Kingdom. Exiting from the Babylon of the West and entering the Zion that is Ethiopia, the exodus has a Pan-African dimension that is significant to the present day. Despite facing complex challenges in their relations with the Ethiopian state and its people, mystical and determined Rastafari keep arriving to Shashemene, their Promised Land.

Revealing personal trajectories, Giulia Bonacci shows that Rastafari were not the first black settlers in Ethiopia. She tracks the history of return over the decades, demonstrating that the utopian idea of return is also a reality. Exodus! is based on in-depth archival and print research, as well as on a wide range of oral histories collected in Ethiopia, Jamaica, Ghana and the USA. Previously unseen photographs illustrate the book.

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Dame Eugenia Charles was the female prime minister in the Caribbean. The nine essays in this book capture critical elements of her life and times and her motivations as prime minister of Dominica. She was at once feared, vilified and admired, even by her friends, yet all she ever did, as considered by her, was to act for her country within the best traditions of a social and political conservatism. The contributors, even when they are at their most critical, reveal a grudging admiration for her as a purpose-driven female leader, who never acted out of malice or vindictiveness. Dame Mary Eugenia Charles is portrayed as an unselfish but strong-willed prime minister, who politically settled her country after a period of difficult internal problems and crises.