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later, a crowd attacked Government House in Bridgetown, Barbados. Four days of unrest followed across the sugar estates of the island, including attacks on shops and lorries and instances of arson, and the Royal Navy were called again. The next year, police fired on a group of protestors at a sugar estate in Frome, Jamaica, leading to a period of violence in the colony. This time the British government responded by appointing a Royal Commission, headed by Lord Moyne, to investigate the conditions that had provoked Caribbean populations to protest on such a scale
better than it is said to be’, while sixty years later, James Murray lamented, ‘I am still alive & that is all – Sickness at home is very bad, but nothing to what a man must expect to suffer here.’ 2 A disease environment like the Caribbean’s called for medical practitioners to attend to the white population. As life-threatening as a sojourn in the Caribbean was for whites, however
colonial and anticolonial politics. Its meanings in any particular historical situation derived from the overall balance of forces between colony and metropolis. By the time independence was in sight ‘West Indian’ had principally come to signify the aspiration of the anglophone peoples of the Caribbean for a future free from colonial rule, in which the deepest instincts of the formerly-colonised would find
) where there were no original indigenes, 2 they changed irrevocably the social vocabulary of the metropole. The role of culture as a means of subverting the dominant order is, arguably, at its most refined in the Caribbean. 3 The long centuries of slavery provided a fitting apprenticeship where the ground rules of alternative, creolised, cultural forms and social practices were laid
Excerpt from ‘Colonisation in Reverse’, Louise Bennett, Jamaican poet and folklorist, 19661 I n 1959 Trinidadian-born Claudia Jones, a communist leader exiled from the United States, formed a partnership with an illustrious band of West Indian artists, to organise the first Caribbean Carnival in Britain. The idea for Carnival sprang from the new West Indian Gazette, which Jones edited, and its supporters. This progressive and farsighted group sought a defiant and unifying response to the racial violence of the Notting Hill and Nottingham riots of the summer of 1958
Bailey’s feminist-nationalist critique of Jamaican national identity, this chapter establishes the context for the origins of a Caribbean beauty competition before the Second World War. Finally it considers the new beauty competitions which emerged immediately after the war j 15 J imagining caribbean womanhood and only for a short time: ‘Miss British Caribbean’, and ‘Miss Kingston’. These new competitions projected modified formulations of femininity, through the performance of cultured, modern beauty by women of colour that would signal the islands’ emergence from
Indian’ flag. Coloured Americans and coloured West Indians in America have their eyes bent on the result of this conference. 1 The start of the Second World War in 1939 turned the attention of the Colonial Office – and the United States – on the Caribbean. The support of West Indians was vital. In the Eastern Caribbean Barbados was
, the transatlantic trade in Africans became very important to the European nations who engaged in it, continuously providing replacement labour for the plantations in the Americas as existing labour forces were eroded by demographic catastrophe. African labour was central to the development and expansion of the sugar industry in the Caribbean, and ultimately to the industrial and economic revolution which took place in Britain in the eighteenth century. The sheer numbers of Africans forcefully relocated to the Caribbean provide an indication of how lucrative, and how
Caribbean histories and identities – and the influence those views have had, as well as the rather wider influence which, one might say, they should have had. If the ‘Jamesian hypothesis’ around which this volume revolves – that in Bill Schwarz’s words ‘it was through the encounter with the formerly colonial peoples of the Caribbean that native white Britons were first able to see themselves in
volume. The figure who came closest to formulating our defining hypothesis was C. L. R. James. 3 James believed that it was through the encounter with the formerly colonial peoples of the Caribbean that native white Britons were first able to see themselves in their true historical light: what previously had happened elsewhere was now happening here . There were many occasions when he hinted at this. It is