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From its first appearance in 1939 with a group of men knocking on pots and pans to the 1951 Trinidad All-Steel Percussion Orchestra (TASPO), steelband has fascinated the world. Relying largely on oral histories, this work investigates and documents the different technical, musical and organisational steps by which the steelband movement was born and grew to maturity.

This study is a radical break with the approach to cultural creativity in general and music of the African diaspora in particular, emphasising the role of individual agency, microsociology and aesthetic values. This contrasts with the resistance school of thought, which views music as an automatic reaction to oppression rather than a deliberate attempt to satisfy aesthetic needs and impulses.

The minute biographical and psychological details provide a unique theory of creolisation and chart its relationship to African retentions, based on empirical data. This authoritative study will appeal to both the general reader interested in the origins of steelband and to scholars concerned with the creolisation of African and European cultures and Caribbean creativity.

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The Terror and the Time contributes to the ongoing project of mapping the myriad ways in which contemporary individual and social scenarios and suffering are rooted in unresolved traumas bequeathed by the origins of the New World societies of the Caribbean. This study traces legacies of enforced and voluntary migrations: subjugation of language, custom and being, and violent rupture of ancestry and community, nation and ethnicity, family and sexuality. It draws its raw material from literature, personal narratives, print media and popular culture discourses to explore the interface between the psychological condition of having been colonized and the surviving cultural and material practices.

Part 1 deals with traumas of being and becoming; part 2 focuses on social suffering that results from state torture, aging and Alzheimers, child shifting, alcoholism and poverty. Morgan argues that modern Caribbean societies have been indelibly imprinted by the cataclysmic encounter between worlds and that substantial cross-sections of Caribbean populations are still reeling from the force of that wounding. This study probes the impulse of creative authors and cultural practitioners to revisit the seedbed of traumas and to variously respond with aesthetics of amnesia and negation, and/or to fashion therapeutic interventions through empowering narratives of resistance, self-fashioning, creativity and wholeness.

Description

Shared Visions Contains fifty high-quality color reproductions of Caribbean art and sculpture housed at the three campuses of the University of the West Indies in Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago. The book is a magnificent and rich celebration of heterogeneity, of unity in diversity, and of the creativity of Caribbean society, particularly in the visual arts. The book contains works by thirty-three Caribbean artists, including Edna Manley, Albert Huie, Gloria Escoffrey, Roger Mais, Rex Dixon, David Pottinger, and Barrington Watson.

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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.

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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.