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In a small, locally owned Trinidadian factory that produces household goods, 80 percent of the line workers are women, almost all black or East Indian. The supervisors are all men, either white or East Indian. Kevin Yelvington worked for a year in this factory to study how ethnicity and gender are integral elements of the class structure, a social and economic structure that permeates all relations between men and women in the factory. These primary divisions determine the way the production process is ordered and labor divided. Unlike women in other industries in "underdeveloped" parts of the world who are recruited by foreign firms, Caribbean women have always contributed to the local economy. Within this historical context, Yelvington outlines the development of the state, and addresses exploitation and domination in the labor process. Yelvington also documents the sexually charged interactions between workers and managers and explores how both use flirting and innuendo to their advantage. Weddings and other social events outside the factory provide insightful details about how the creation of social identities carries over to all aspects of the local culture.
In Light of Africa explores how the idea of Africa as a real place, an imagined homeland, and a metaphor for Black identity is used in the cultural politics of the Brazilian state of Bahia. In the book, Allan Charles Dawson argues that Africa, as both a symbol and a geographical and historical place, is vital to understanding the wide range of identities and ideas about racial consciousness that exist in Bahia's Afro-Brazilian communities. In his ethnographic research Dawson follows the idea of Africa from the city of Salvador to the West African coast and back to the hinterlands of the Bahian interior. Along the way, he encounters West African entrepreneurs, Afrobeat musicians, devotees of the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé, professors of the Yoruba language, and hardscrabble farmers and ranchers, each of whom engages with the idea of Africa in their own personal way.
A striking new interpretation of colonial policing and political violence in three empires between the two world wars.
Who was Tertullian, and what can we know about him? This work explores his social identities, focusing on his North African milieu. Theories from the discipline of social/cultural anthropology, including kinship, class and ethnicity, are accommodated and applied to selections of Tertullian’s writings. In light of postcolonial concerns, this study utilizes the categories of Roman colonizers, indigenous Africans and new elites. The third category, new elites, is actually intended to destabilize the other two, denying any “essential” Roman or African identity. Thereafter, samples from Tertullian’s writings serve to illustrate comparisons of his own identities and the identities of his rhetorical opponents. The overall study finds Tertullian’s identities to be manifold, complex and discursive. Additionally, his writings are understood to reflect antagonism toward Romans, including Christian Romans (which is significant for his so-called Montanism), and Romanized Africans. While Tertullian accommodates much from Graeco-Roman literature, laws and customs, he nevertheless retains a strongly stated non-Roman-ness and an African-ity, which is highlighted in the present monograph.
This book breaks new theoretical and methodological ground in the study of the African diaspora in the Atlantic world. Leading scholars of archaeology, linguistics, and socio-cultural anthropology draw upon extensive field experiences and archival investigations of black communities in North America, the Caribbean, South America, and Africa to challenge received paradigms in Afro-American anthropology. They employ dialogic approaches that demand both an awareness of the historical fashioning of anthropology's categories and selfreflexive, critical research and define a new agenda for the field. Paying close attention to power, politics, and the dynamism of never-finished, open-ended behavioral forms and symbolic repertoires, the contributors address colonialism, the slave trade, racism, ethnogenesis, New World nationalism, urban identity politics, the development of artworlds, musics and their publics, the emergence of new religious and ritual forms, speech genres, and contested historical representations. The authors offer sophisticated interpretations of cultural change, exchange, appropriation, and re-appropriation that challenge simplistic notions of culture.
The nation-state of Trinidad and Tobago offers a unique case for the study of the forces and ideologies of nationalism. This book reveals how this ethnically diverse nation (40% African origin, 40-45% East Indian origin, plus those of Syrian, Chinese, Portuguese, French and English descent), independent for less than forty years, has provided fertile ground for the creative tension between the imagination of the writer in his or her search for a habitable text of identity and the official discourse on nationalism in Trinidad and Tobago. This discourse has in turn been embedded in a struggle that propels the nation's story. Following on from this background, the study examines the changes and influences on the sense of nationalism and peoplehood caused by migration and the ethnicization of migrant communities in the metropoles.
In an age of rampant xenophobia and the nativist imperative to undo globalization for a return to a bygone, “purer” age, can patently modern identities indefinitely sustain their messages of inclusion and equality? This volume serves to answer this and other pressing existential questions by tracing the development of the Caymanian people from the colonial era into our modern globalized, multicultural age. The emergence of Caymanian nationalism is extensively analyzed and confirmed as a phenomenon that was preceded by fragmented Caymanian identities informed by issues of race and class. Despite this, the native Caymanian people were able to successfully jettison their race-thinking, and in so doing, began to see themselves as members of a singular nationality. This notion of national and cultural solidarity, as this book details, has become a vexing issue, and is now being duly tested given the astonishing numbers of immigrants in Cayman, many of whom are keen to become Caymanians themselves.
Languaging Diversity: Identities, Genres, Discourses is a suggestive title for ‘another’ book in the field of linguistics, but what does it actually mean? By choosing to speak of Languaging Diversity and not just of difference, otherness, varieties, multiplicity, hybridity or alterity, the editors cover the whole range of meanings in the entire field of diversity. They do not wish to limit themselves by using such specific words with increasingly specialised connotations as Alterity or Other, but rather to allow an eclectic range of perspectives and issues to come to the fore. This volume brings together some of the manifold discourses emerging as bearers of the values of alterity, by ex...
Afro-Caribbean personalities coupled with trade unions and organizations provided the ideology and leadership to empower the working class and also hastened the end of colonialism in the Anglophone Caribbean.
Activating the Past explores critical historical events and transformations associated with embodied memories in the Black Atlantic world. The assembled case-studies disclose hidden historical references to local and regional encounters with Atlantic modernity, focusing on religious festivals that represent political and economic relationships in “fetishized” forms of power and value. Although memories of the slave trade are rarely acknowledged in West Africa and the Americas, they have retreated, so to speak, within ritual associations as restricted, repressed, even secret histories that are activated during public festivals and through different styles of spirit possession. In West Afr...