Description

This is a report of the West Indian Commission.

Bibliography

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.

Description

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Description

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The essays in this volume consider various literary and linguistic aspects of the Francophone Caribbean at the beginning of the twenty-first century, focusing particularly on the French Overseas Departments of Martinique and Guadeloupe, and the independent islands of Haiti and Dominica. The literary chapters are devoted to new voices in the region and the Caribbean diaspora, or to recent works by established authors. Contributors offer fresh interpretations of Caribbean literary movements, and explore relevant non-literary issues such as socio-political developments which have influenced the writers of today. The linguistic chapters examine the dynamics of the respective roles of Creole and the European standard language, and consider the present viability of Creole as a literary medium. This collection will be of interest to specialists in Caribbean culture, to university students of Francophone literature, cultural studies and Creole, and to the general reader with some knowledge of the Caribbean.

Bibliography

This interdisciplinary study examines the cultural and historical significance of the Jamaican Anansi folktales.

Anansi the spider is the trickster folk hero West African slaves transported to the Caribbean, who symbolises key aspects of Afro-Caribbean culture and is celebrated as a vital link with an African past. Anansi stories, in which the small spider turns the tables on his powerful enemies through cunning and trickery, are now told and published worldwide.

Anansi survived a cultural metamorphosis and came to symbolise the resistance of the Jamaican people. This original book examines Anansis roots in Ghana, details the changes Anansi underwent during the Middle Passage and his potential for inspiring tactics of resistance in a plantation context, and analyses Anansis role in postcolonial Jamaica, illustrating how he is interpreted as a symbol of individualism and celebrated as an emblem of resistance.

With its broad historical sweep, tracing Anansi from Ghana through to his contested position in contemporary Jamaica, this book makes an important contribution to the ongoing debate about whether the slave trade transmitted or destroyed the culture of the enslaved.