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On 1 January 1804, the revolutionary slaves of Saint Domingue established the first independent black state in the Americas and proclaimed their break with the French Republic. After more than a decade of protracted bloody battles, the only successful slave revolution in world history ended. The richest sugar colony of the New World was reduced to ashes, and of the troops Napoleon had sent with genocidal intent only very few made it back home. But while the bicentennial of the French Revolution in 1989 and quincentennial of the ""discovery"" of America in 1992 were lavishly celebrated with acts of State, monuments, conferences, and polemics, the Haitian Revolution's anniversary is bound to be passed over in silence in both the halls of power and metropolitan academies. Although few would doubt the profound effect the slave revolution had on the Western Hemisphere, there has until now been no extended study of it, and some describe Haiti as unrelated to any of the worlds' major civilizations. Modernity Disavowed tells a very different story: the Haitian Revolution is at the core of Western modernity in the Age of Revolution, and one of the reasons for subsequent denial or silencing is that Haiti forced the recognition of this fact on slaveholders and imperial powers. At a time when racial taxonomies were beginning to mutate into scientific racism and racist biology, the Haitian revolutionaries recognized the question of colour and race as a political one and placed claims of racial equality squarely on the agenda. Yet, as the cultural records of neighboring Cuba and the Dominican Republic show, the story of the Haitian Revolution has been framed in terms of barbarism unspeakable violence, outside civilization, outside politics, and beyond human language. From the time of the revolution onwards the story has been relegated to the margins of history; to rumors, oral histories confidential letters and secret trials. Focusing on Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Haiti itself in the context of the African Diaspora, Modernity Disavowed argues that we cannot even begin to understand Creole cultures in the Americas unless we understand how they took shape around various forms of denial of the Haitian Revolution.

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The historic Hope lands located on the Liguanea Plain in the southeastern parish of St Andrew, Jamaica, and once the site of one of the islands earliest sugar estates, has had a long history of human settlements dating back to approximately 600 CE, the era of the indigenous Tainos. It was not until 1655, however, with the English invasion and seizure of Jamaica from the Spanish, that the Hope landscape developed into a thriving rural agrarian settlement. Generous land grants were made to the invading officers and later to immigrants from Britain and North America and from other Caribbean islands. Major Richard Hope came in possession of over 2,600 acres in the Liguanea Plain. Major Hope, unlike many of his counterparts by the 1660s, managed to establish a small sugar plantation, which developed by the mid-1700s into one of the islands largest, most productive and technologically advanced slave sugar estates. In the 1770s the estate became the property of the Duke of Chandos and his family until 1848, when the estate was dismantled. Over 600 acres were sold to the Kingston and Liguanea Water Works Company and the remaining 1,700 acres were leased to the owner of the adjoining Papine and Mona estates. Poor accounting and border surveillance enabled several persons to possess the land, which was later sanctioned by the Limitations of Actions Law. With the governments acquisition of the entire property in 1909, the Hope estate underwent remarkable changes in the twentieth century. By 1960 the Hope landscape was radically transformed from a sugar estate worked by hundreds of enslaved black people to a premiere urban centre of commercial, residential and educational land use.

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This book chronicles the Tobago movement for autonomy from Trinidad from the time of the union of these two Caribbean islands from 1889 to 1980 when Tobago gained internal self-government. It argues that the problems Tobagonians complained about in the few years before internal self-government were longstanding and can be traced throughout the history of the union. The work puts the several calls for separation within the theoretical framework of identity. It posits that identity was the major buttress in the movement for autonomy. The manuscript's unique contribution is its ""integrationist-separatist continuum"" by which the author assesses the responses of British, colonial and local officials.The work adds to the historiography of the Caribbean and Trinidad and Tobago in particular, and is a useful case study of the issue of secession in the Caribbean. It serves as a comparison for the St Kitts - Nevis situation.The author uses primary sources from the Public Records Office and the Newspaper Library in London, the National Archives of Trinidad and Tobago, the Tobago Archives, the Registry Section of the Central Administrative Services, Tobago, the Heritage Library in Trinidad as well as oral history sources.

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The book presents a representative selection of the papers presented at the second Conference on Caribbean Culture in honour of Kamau Brathwaite. It offers an interdisciplinary range of studies that range from analyses of Braithwaithe's creative and critical work to interventions in the fields of social history, cultural studies, gender studies, linguistics and sociology, that have been either directly or indirectly influenced by Braithwaite's own pioneering work in Caribbean social history and cultural studies. The manuscript offers the most current critical commentary on the work and ideas of Kamau Brathwaite, and it also provides an extremely useful range of analyses of contemporary Caribbean culture and social history. The primary target audience is academics and students working in the field of Caribbean and cultural studies, while the secondary audience includes researchers working on Kamau Brathwaite's creative and critical work.