Search results
the Monday. One black Antiguan-American player from the New York team referred to his first trip to Canada as “such a good party. Could hardly believe we were in Canada. So many other West Indians came [to watch the game]. The music, food, the weather even! I told my boys we gotta come back. We been coming back each year since 1981.” These long-standing travel traditions are central to the making of
an exceptional player by their [Canadian] standards. There were lots of guys at my level back home … I played for the Ontario team and the Canadian national team versus the USA for three to four years, but at that time it was 80–90% West Indian. Even the selectors were West Indian … I was selected to play for Canada in the World
have used the word in the same way. Because much of the discussion concerns communities hailing from the West Indies I have also used the terms West Indian, Afro-Caribbean and Anglo-Caribbean synonymously. Needless to say, I acknowledge the crudity and inadequacy of such vocabulary and rely upon the sagacity of the reader in accepting these conventions for the rough approximations to reality that they represent. Notes 1 The last of the large-scale RAR carnivals was held in July 1981, although small local groups continued operating after this date. Hull RAR was
subsisted behind those policies. For example, back in 1971 Father Bernard Coard’s inflammatory pamphlet, How the West Indian Child is made Educationally Subnormal in the British School System documented failures to accommodate diversity and the resulting exclusion and underachievement experienced by immigrant children. To illustrate, one may recall Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour (1977), which exposed the informal workings and social reproductions in a British school. Take for example the following extract in which a senior teacher describes the organised ‘friendship
by this very aspect of conquest. Portal civilisations create institutions and practices of power capable of extensive contacts and relationships without conquest of vast territories. To be sure, they build empires and extend spheres of commerce, culture and travel in which explicit power is created. My synopses of the Venetian Mediterranean (during the era of Venice’s naval dominance) and the Omani West Indian Ocean (with its flows of slave trading) are indicative of the balance of engagement and explicit power. Nonetheless, they are distinct from oceanic
positions that could not be filled by British workers. Both West Indian immigrants that began arriving in the late 1940s and those from the Indian subcontinent who followed during the 1950s and 1960s played a key role in Britain’s labour market, filling vacancies in numerous sectors including those offered by transport providers, the British Hotels and Restaurants Association, the Ministry of Health and northern textile companies.10 The Second World War acted as a catalyst for immediate post-war migration, with many migrants, especially those of Jamaican origin, migrating
suggests that many of those white people who championed West Indian youth and reggae held attitudes that were themselves mediated through a set of racist stereotypes.30 Sabin’s views echo those of critics of naive multiculturalism, who take issue with the tendency to ‘essentialise’ ‘host’ and immigrant cultures, and thus reduce them to an assemblage of stereotypical and internally homogeneous practices and beliefs. Often characterised as the ‘saris, steel-bands and samosas syndrome’, this strand of multiculturalism stands accused of trivialising and over-simplifying what
, Stone suggests: The development of Saturday schools within the West Indian community mirrors in many respects the Socialist Sunday school movement of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, which offered to workingclass children the means to foster a self-image based, not on therapy or charity, but on hard work, disciplined study and the will to succeed. Just as the Socialist Sunday schools were mainly organised and run by working-class people for working-class children, so also in the West Indian Saturday Schools we find ordinary working-class people, who
the way down to Madagascar are underestimated in the historiography (Paine, 2013: 268–72). Undoubtedly, as Nicolini has argued, they contextualised Swahili integration into Omani commerce. Conjoined circuits of Saharan trade, created by the empires of the Niger Delta and Ethiopia in earlier centuries, formed the backdrop of zones of contact, communication and exchange with Islamic and Christian civilisations. The importance of historical trades for commerce and state formation in the West Indian Ocean has also been underestimated. As elsewhere, cross
their pupils about this British multi-racial society. 65 A few years later, the 1981 Rampton Report explored the causes of educational underachievement amongst West Indian schoolchildren, exposed the prevalence of racism in the education system, and made a series of recommendations pertaining to a range of areas, including the curriculum, teaching materials, and the relationship between schools and the wider community. 66 Yet it was with the publication of the Swann Report in 1985 that a multicultural approach to the education of ethnic minority schoolchildren