Bibliography

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.

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Haiti, its revolution and its culture remain largely unknown or misunderstood in the English-speaking world. This collection of essays seeks to both elucidate aspects of Haitian history and culture and provoke interest in readers and scholars for further research in these fields. Several general guiding questions connect the essays: What were, what are the cultural repercussions of Haiti's revolution, in Haiti and elsewhere? What is the truth of Haiti, its history, its intellectual traditions, its culture? What role has culture played in shaping Haiti's history, and conversely, how has Haiti's history determined, inspired, liberated and restricted Haitian culture and thought? In a land that has constantly relived its past, how can we imagine a Haitian future? Can we rethink history and memory? Can an understanding of post-independence culture and thought point tentatively to a way out of the traps of the past, without effecting a counterproductive forgetting of the revolution? Framed by two essays by Rene Depestre, the chapters offer diverse approaches to these questions: the history of Haitian revolutionary universalism; the idea of the Caribbean's historical lack and its application to Haiti; the relationship between personal and political revolutions in Yanick Lahens's fiction; the attempt to write personal history in Edwidge Danticat's work; the role of Haiti and the revolution in forming ideas of ""race""; the importance of the nineteenth-century Haitian intellectual Antenor Firmin in the development of the discipline of anthropology; the influence of St. Domingue refugees in the genesis of New Orleans jazz; the prevalence of the ""Haytian Fear"" narrative in nineteenth-century Trinidad; and the many and diverse post-independence representations of Toussaint Louverture. This book will be of interest to students and readers of Haitian literature, history and culture, as well as those interested in broader Caribbean studies, postcolonial studies and African-American studies.

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Rihanna is arguably the most commercially successful Caribbean artist in history. She is Barbadian and has been unwavering in publicly articulating her national and regional belongings. Still, there have been varied responses to Rihannas ascendancy, both in the Barbadian public and Caribbean community at large  responses that reveal as much about our own national/regional anxieties as they do about the artist herself. The cutting edge, boundary-transgressing, cultural icon Rihanna is certainly subject to moralistic scrutiny from her global audiences as well; however, the essays in this collection purposely seek to de-centre the dominance of the Euro-American gaze, focusing instead on considerations of the Caribbean artist and her oeuvre from a Caribbean postcolonial corpus of academic inquiry. To this end, Rihanna: Barbados World Gurl in Global Popular Culture brings together U.S. and Caribbean based scholars to discuss issues of class, gender, sexuality, race, culture, and economy.

Using the concept of diasporic citizenship as a central theoretical frame, this book intervenes in current questions of national and transnational circuits of exchange as they pertain to the commoditization and movement of culture, knowledge, values, and identity. The contributors- drawing from literature, history, musicology, sociology, cultural studies, feminist, gender, and queer studies, the creative/cultural industries and political science - approach the subjects of Rihanna, globalization, gender and sexuality, commerce, transnationalism, Caribbean regionalism, and Barbadian national identity and development, from different disciplinary and at times radically divergent perspectives. At the same time, the essays collectively work through the limitations, possibilities and promise of our best Caribbean imaginings.

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Hyacinth Evans' detailed case study of a Jamaican high school, formerly known as a junior secondary high school, breaks new ground. Her research demonstrates the continuing education problem encountered by students and teachers in a two-tiered educational system. The case study is an excellent example of the legacy of colonialism still evident in schooling processes in many of the former British colonies in the south (for example, countries in the Caribbean, Africa and India). Evans provides several solutions for the transformation of schools as places for learning and character development.