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Gendered Realities is an interdisciplinary reader that situates the present understanding of Caribbean feminist scholarship after fifteen years of indepth and increasingly sophisticated research. The book provides a space for scholars to put forward new and challenging ideas and attempts to encourage new contributors to intellectual thought in the Caribbean. The essays deal with diverse and rich topics including the role of women in Caribbean art and the visual grammars of gender in early Caribbean painting as well as the development of women's history and gendered history in relation to the historiography of the English-speaking Caribbean. Other essays probe the representation of masculinity in Caribbean feminist thought, gender and adult sexuality, and symbols of masculinity in visual art. Of interest to scholars in gender studies, women's studies, minority studies, and Caribbean history and culture.

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This volume is an account of the development and destruction of slavery in St Thomas, St John and St Croix, the Caribbean islands which today comprise the US Virgin Islands. The book sees slavery as fundamental to the entire fabric of colonial society, and pays particular attention to the social and political life of the whites and freedmen in interaction with the slaves. The Danish West Indian colonies contained a small but significant part of the slave population of the Caribbean. Each of the islands had a distinct history during the period of slavery: St Croix was the scene of a full-blown sugar plantation economy; St Thomas served as a major entrepot, with a small plantation sector and a large role in the transatlantic slave trade; St John developed as a plantation economy, but for various reasons the slaves came to engage in relatively independent economic activity. Resistance to slavery was persistent, with important rebellions occurring in St John and St Croix. Although Denmark was the first European nation to abolish the slave trade, emancipation did not come until 1848, so that the gap between abolition and emancipation was longer than in most territories. Thus, the study of slave society in the Danish West Indies has much to tell about the nature of Caribbean history generally. Based on extensive research in the Copenhagen archives, this book makes an original contribution to the understanding of slave societies throughout the Americas.

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These plenary lectures from the Global Reggae conference convened at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica in 2008 eloquently exemplify the breadth and depth of current scholarship on Jamaican popular music. Radiating from the Jamaican centre, these illuminating essays highlight the glocalization of reggae  its global dispersal and adaptation in diverse local contexts of consumption and transformation.

The languages of Jamaican popular music, both literal and metaphorical, are first imitated in pursuit of an undeniable originality. Over time, as the music is indigenized, the Jamaican model loses its authority to varying degrees. The revolutionary ethos of reggae music is translated into local languages that articulate the particular politics of new cultural contexts. Echoes of the Jamaican source gradually fade. But new hybrid sounds return to their Jamaican origins, engendering polyvocal, cross-cultural dialogue.

From the inter/disciplinary perspectives of historical sociology, musicology, history, media studies, literature, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, the creative/cultural industries and, above all, the metaphorical life sciences, the contributors to this definitive volume lucidly articulate a cultural politics that acknowledges the far-reaching creativity of small-islanders with ancestral memories of continents of origin.

The globalisation of reggae music and its wild child dancehall is, indeed, an affirmation of the unquantifiable potential of the Jamaican people to reclaim identities and establish ties of affiliation that are not circumscribed by the Caribbean Sea: To the world!

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Claude McKay remains one of the most influential intellectuals of the African Diaspora. Best remembered for his extraordinary poetry, his achievement in verse has been widely analyzed and praised. Yet in the welter of discussion about McKay, little has been said about his early writing in Jamaican. Two collections from the period, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads, are more known about than known, and his poems for the Jamaican press, most of which have never been anthologized, are rarely studied.
In A Fierce Hatred of Injustice, Winston James elegantly redresses this omission. Through a subtle and detailed consideration of McKay's formative years on the island, James reviews the themes and politics of poetry which McKay began writing at the age of ten. Above all he focuses on the poet's pioneering use of Jamaican creole revealing the way in which this laid a foundation for subsequent work by writers such as Louise Bennett, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Michael Smith. The volume concludes with a comprehensive anthology of the early poems together with a comic sketch about Jamaican peasant life by McKay and an autobiographical essay on his experiences in the Kingston police force.

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Police and Crime Control in Jamaica is a valuable addition to the sparse literature on policing in developing states, and is the first study of its kind on a police force in a Caribbean territory. The work examines the extent and sources of police ineffectiveness in controlling crime. It assesses the quality of justice and declining public confidence in the criminal justice system. Police reform efforts, as well as sources of cynicism among members of the force, are analysed. This study of policing and citizen-state relations is especially relevant to the tourism-dependent countries of the Caribbean amid growing recognition of the negative impact of high rates of violent crime on these economies. This book will be much valued by students of criminology and criminal justice, especially those with an interest in the Caribbean, as well as the general reader who is concerned with issues of crime and policing.