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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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This book is the first comprehensive treatment of gender in the works of Samuel Selvon and George Lamming, two important West Indian writers who are rarely analysed together. It demystifies nationalist discourses and discourses of creolization showing that these have masked gender inequalities and complexities in West Indian society, and that the maskings are in turn part of a larger masking of neocolonial threads within nationalism. Forbes situates the fictions of Selvon and Lamming within the wider field of West Indian social thought and practice, and she demonstrates that gender is foundational within West Indian revolutionary action - a fact consistently ignored in mainstream discourses, including feminist ones. These two West Indians' treatments of gender belong to a revolutionary poetics of liberation in West Indian culture but are deeply compromised by the nationalist engagements and the nationalist context of the 1950s-1970s. The unorthodox character of West Indian gender, as seen in Selvon's and Lamming's treatment of it, anticipates and problematizes the concepts of ""postmodernity"" and ""postmodernism"", which have entered West Indian discourse via postcolonial discourse and the work of migration on West Indian theory and criticism. The book concludes by looking towards these discourses that are now playing major roles in West Indian thought. Forbes links West Indian nationalism and the fictions of Selvon and Lamming into a dialogue with the concepts of diasproa, postmodernity and postmodernism, raising the issue of how the latter have impacted on the representation and formation of West Indian gender identities. She then considers the implications of these discourses for West Indian writing, West Indian theory and, above all, West Indian survival and identity in a postmodern, essentially neocolonized world.

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First published in 1961, Jamaica Talk is a thorough study of the English spoken in Jamaica and, although intended for the general educated reader rather than the linguistic specialist, has a foundation of sound scholarship, which makes it an authoritative classic. The late Professor Cassidy was born and reared in Jamaica and collected most of the material for his book when he was attached to the University College of the West Indies as Fulbright research fellow. There are chapters on the composition of ""Jamaica talk"", on pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary. The book is an invaluable reference in all institutions that have language departments, and as a handbook for Jamaicans and for interested visitors to the island.

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The definition and evolution of the categories of race and ethnicity have long been topics of debate among historians and scholars of social anthropology. This book examines how the meanings and values of race and ethnicity have been constructed historically and how they are represented symbolically, with particular focus on the Caribbean. Alleyne examines the historical development of these categories in Europe, in Asia and in Africa and then proceeds to an in-depth analysis of the Caribbean, with a focus on Puerto Rico, Martinique and Jamaica as three different modalities of race and ethnicity and three different colonial systems. Through a unique approach grounded in linguistic, ethnographic and historic analysis, Alleyne draws on a wide array of evidence and ultimately opposes the widely held notion that racial antagonism against black people is the consequence of New World slavery in the period following the ""discovery"" of the Americas in the late fifteenth century. Of particular interest to the academic audience in the fields of history, linguistics, African American and ethnic studies, sociology, and anthropology, this book also appeals to general readers interested in issues of race, ethnicity and the historical experience of African and African-descended peoples.