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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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The book presents a representative selection of the papers presented at the second Conference on Caribbean Culture in honour of Kamau Brathwaite. It offers an interdisciplinary range of studies that range from analyses of Braithwaithe's creative and critical work to interventions in the fields of social history, cultural studies, gender studies, linguistics and sociology, that have been either directly or indirectly influenced by Braithwaite's own pioneering work in Caribbean social history and cultural studies. The manuscript offers the most current critical commentary on the work and ideas of Kamau Brathwaite, and it also provides an extremely useful range of analyses of contemporary Caribbean culture and social history. The primary target audience is academics and students working in the field of Caribbean and cultural studies, while the secondary audience includes researchers working on Kamau Brathwaite's creative and critical work.

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In The Child and the Caribbean Imagination, twelve emerging and established scholars in the fields of literature, linguistics and education examine and interrogate the representations, roles and realities of Caribbean children. This multidisciplinary volume explores the experiential, discursive and fictive worlds of the child portrayed and treated variously as subject and object in the regions oral and scribal literatures, formal classroom settings, and other socio-cultural contexts. Divided into four sections  Discourse and Representation, Unstable Identities, Language Development, and Pedagogy  The Child and the Caribbean Imagination offers breadth and depth in its contribution to much-needed academic scholarship aimed at impacting the lives of and paying homage to children in the Caribbean.

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First published in 1976, work is a masterful analysis of the dynamics of slave labor in the economic growth of early-19th-century Jamaica.

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The Empowering Impulse is a significant contribution to the historiography of Barbados and will inform discourses on Barbadian nationalism. In Barbados, as elsewhere in the Caribbean, national identity historically emerged in response to economic, political and cultural forms of domination. The authors of these chapters proffer comments on how Barbadian attitudes and modes of behaviour have been shaped by class rule and hegemony, state policy, public institutions, and class resistance. The book makes available data on the Barbadian nationalist enterprise, with the hope that it will stimulate more research by other historians, social scientists and social commentators on the issues addressed in the work.

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This work discusses the effectiveness of the sets of policies employed by the government over a fifty-year period spanning 1958 to 2008 in the effort to foster the growth and development of the economy. It concludes that Trinidad and Tobago has underperformed in respect of its growth and development. Compared with other countries more or less similarly placed around 1960, Trinidad and Tobago has not achieved in key areas of health-care delivery, education access, and income and wealth, notwithstanding its substantial resources of oil and gas.

Historically, Trinidad and Tobagos economy cycles from boom to bust depending on what happens to the price of oil. The carefree, undisciplined lifestyle of most of the population is occasionally perturbed by a paroxysm of social unrest. Downturns are accompanied by ritual incantations by government officials of the need for diversification to reduce the countrys dependence on oil and the energy-based industries, the formation of new committees, task forces and boards, and considerable hand-wringing and angst about the sustainability of government fiscal operations. Seemingly bold new initiatives and projects are announced, and all the while people wait and secretly hope for a quick turnaround in the price of oil, ammonia, methanol and natural gas so that rents will again begin to accrue, government spending programmes can restart and the fête can resume. Trinidad and Tobago will not achieve its potential for development unless and until this cycle is broken.