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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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The Earliest Inhabitants"" aims to promote Jamaican Tainan archaeology and highlight the diverse research conducted on the island's prehistoric sites and artefacts. Of the fourteen papers in this volume, six are reprints of seminal articles that are not widely available and eight are based on recent archaeological research. The chapters are organized by thematic divisions that reflect the most important areas of research: Assessment and Excavations of Taino Sites looks at the various archaeological investigations across the island; Taino Exploitation of the Natural Resources examines how the Tainos took advantage of the natural environment to fulfil their needs; Analysis of Taino Archaeological Data highlights research conducted on various artefacts; and Taino Art Forms focuses specifically on evidence of Taino cave art and its impact on the interpretation of the Jamaican Taino livelihood. In her introduction, Lesley-Gail Atkinson explains, ""Jamaican prehistory is regarded as one of the least studied Caribbean disciplines. That is not necessarily the case; the fact is that published Jamaican archaeological research has not had sufficient international circulation. This has resulted in misconceptions about lack of scope, research activities and information on the Jamaican Tainos."" This volume seeks to redress this lack: invaluable in its own right as a collection of distinguished scholarship, ""The Earliest Inhabitants"" is remarkable, too, for being the first compilation on the Jamaican Tainos since 1897. This collection will appeal to a wide audience of archaeologists, historians, students of archaeology and anyone interested in Jamaica's history and archaeology.

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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.

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Citizenship Under Pressure: The 1970s in Jamaican Literature and Culture is the first book-length study of the interaction of culture, politics and society in Jamaicas formative postcolonial moment, the years between 1972 and 1980.

Through examining literary and other texts from and about the period, Rachel Mordecai argues that the 1970s were defined by the explosion into the public sphere of a long-simmering dispute over the substance and limits of Jamaican citizenship, in which citizenship claims and counter-claims were advanced and contested via the symbolic deployment and re-configuration of race, class, and gender identities.

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From modest origins in Grenada, Sir Alister McIntyre went on to hold a variety of high-profile positions in the international community. An academic by background, he became an international statesman, occupying senior roles within the United Nations, as well as at the highest levels of Caribbean regional government.

In 1974, McIntyre temporarily left behind his academic career as a developmental economist at the University of the West Indies to take up an appointment as secretary-general of CARICOM (the Caribbean Community and Common Market). He went on to hold positions as the director of the Commodities Division of UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) and then deputy secretary-general of UNCTAD in Geneva and subsequently a post of equivalent rank in the office of the secretary-general of the United Nations in New York. In 1988 McIntyre returned to the Caribbean as vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies and, on his retirement in 1998, he assumed the post of chief technical advisor at the Caribbean Regional Negotiating Machinery.

This book outlines McIntyres extraordinary life and wide-ranging international career in diplomacy, politics and academia. It provides key perspectives on the development of Caribbean regional government and international institutions in the twentieth century.

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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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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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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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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.