Caribbean Middlebrow

Caribbean Middlebrow PDF

Author: Belinda Edmondson

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9780801448140

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It is commonly assumed that Caribbean culture is split into elite highbrow culture--which is considered derivative of Europe--and authentic working-class culture, which is often identified with such iconic island activities as salsa, carnival, calypso, and reggae. This book recovers a middle ground, a genuine popular culture in the English-speaking Caribbean that stretches back into the nineteenth century. It shows that popular novels, beauty pageants, and music festivals are examples of Caribbean culture that are mostly created, maintained, and consumed by the Anglophone middle class. Much of middle-class culture is further gendered as "female": women are more apt to be considered recreational readers of fiction, for example, and women's behavior outside the home is often taken as a measure of their community's respectability. The book also highlights the influence of American popular culture, especially African American popular culture, as early as the nineteenth century.

Martha Brae's Two Histories

Martha Brae's Two Histories PDF

Author: Jean Besson

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 9780807854099

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Based on historical research and more than thirty years of anthropological fieldwork, this wide-ranging study underlines the importance of Caribbean cultures for anthropology, which has generally marginalized Europe's oldest colonial sphere. Located at

Caribbean Culture

Caribbean Culture PDF

Author: Kamau Brathwaite

Publisher:

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13:

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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.

Resisting Paradise

Resisting Paradise PDF

Author: Angelique V. Nixon

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2015-09-25

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1626745994

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Winner of the Caribbean Studies Association's 2016 Barbara T. Christian Award Tourists flock to the Caribbean for its beaches and spread more than just blankets and dollars. Indeed tourism has overly affected the culture there. Resisting Paradise explores the import of both tourism and diaspora in shaping Caribbean identity. It examines Caribbean writers and others who confront the region's overdependence on the tourist industry and the many ways that tourism continues the legacy of colonialism. Angelique V. Nixon interrogates the relationship between culture and sex within the production of "paradise" and investigates the ways in which Caribbean writers, artists, and activists respond to and powerfully resist this production. Forms of resistance include critiquing exploitation, challenging dominant historical narratives, exposing tourism's influence on cultural and sexual identity in the Caribbean and its diaspora, and offering alternative models of tourism and travel. Resisting Paradise places emphasis on the Caribbean people and its diasporic subjects as travelers and as cultural workers contributing to alternate and defiant understandings of tourism in the region. Through a unique multidisciplinary approach to comparative literary analysis, interviews, and participant observation, Nixon analyzes the ways Caribbean cultural producers are taking control of representation. While focused mainly on the Anglophone Caribbean, the study covers a range of territories including Antigua, the Bahamas, Grenada, Haiti, Jamaica, as well as Trinidad and Tobago, to deliver a potent critique.

High Mas

High Mas PDF

Author: Kevin Adonis Browne

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2018-09-26

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 1496819411

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High Mas: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Culture explores Caribbean identity through photography, criticism, and personal narrative. Taking a sophisticated and unapologetically subjective Caribbean point of view, the author delves into Mas--a key feature of Trinidad performance--as an emancipatory practice. The photographs and essays here immerse the viewer in carnival experience as never before. Kevin Adonis Browne divulges how performers are or wish to be perceived, along with how, as the photographer, he is implicated in that dynamic. The resulting interplay encourages an informed, nuanced approach to the imaging of contemporary Caribbeanness. The first series, "Seeing Blue," features Blue Devils from the village of Paramin, whose performances signify an important revision of the post-emancipation tradition of Jab Molassie (Molasses Devil) in Trinidad. The second series, "La Femme des Revenants," chronicles the debut performance of Tracey Sankar's La Diablesse, which reintroduced the "Caribbean femme fatale" to a new audience. The third series, "Moko Jumbies of the South," looks at Stephanie Kanhai and Jonadiah Gonzales, a pair of stilt-walkers from the performance group Touch de Sky from San Fernando in southern Trinidad. "Jouvay Reprised," the fourth series, follows the political activist group Jouvay Ayiti performing a Mas in the streets of Port of Spain on Emancipation Day in 2015. Troubling the borders that persist between performer and audience, embodiment and spirituality, culture and self-consciousness, the book interrogates what audiences understand about the role of the participant-observer in public contexts. Representing the uneasy embrace of tradition in Trinidad and the Caribbean at large, the book probes the multiple dimensions of vernacular experience and their complementary cultural expressions. For Browne, Mas performance is an exquisite refusal to fully submit to the lingering traumas of slavery, the tyrannies of colonialism, and the myths of independence.

Food Culture in the Caribbean

Food Culture in the Caribbean PDF

Author: Lynn M. Houston

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2005-06-30

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 0313062277

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Food in the Caribbean reflects both the best and worst of the Caribbean's history. On the positive side, Caribbean culture has been compared with a popular stew there called callaloo. The stew analogy comes from the many different ethic groups peacefully maintaining their traditions and customs while blending together, creating a distinct new flavor. On the negative side, many foods and cooking techniques derive from a history of violent European conquest, the importation of slaves from Africa, and the indentured servitude of immigrants in the plantation system. Within this context, students and other readers will understand the diverse island societies and ethnicities through their food cultures. Some highlights include the discussion of the Caribbean concept of making do—using whatever is on hand or can be found—the unique fruits and starches, the one-pot meal, the technique of jerking meat, and the preference for cooking outdoors. The Caribbean is known as the cradle of the Americas. The Columbian food exchange, which brought products from the Caribbean and the Americas to the rest of the world, transformed global food culture. Caribbean food culture has wider resonance to North, Central, and South America as well. The parallels in the food-related evolution in the Americas include the early indigenous foods and agriculture; the import and export of foods; the imported food culture of colonizers, settlers, and immigrants; the intricacies of defining an independent national food culture; the loss of the traditional agricultural system; the trade issues sparked by globalization; and the health crises prompted by the growing fast-food industry. This thorough overview of island food culture is an essential component in understanding the Caribbean past and present.

Origins of the Tainan Culture, West Indies

Origins of the Tainan Culture, West Indies PDF

Author: Sven Loven

Publisher: University of Alabama Press

Published: 2010-06-27

Total Pages: 731

ISBN-13: 0817356371

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When originally published in German in 1924, this volume was hailed as the first modern, comprehensive archaeological overview of an emerging area of the world, now known as the Caribbean islands. Sven Loven decided to update and reissue the work in English, which he thought to be the future international language of scholarship. This work is a classic, with enduring interpretations, broad geographic range, and an eager audience.

Imaging the Caribbean

Imaging the Caribbean PDF

Author: P. Mohammed

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 2010-05-15

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780230104495

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This ground-breaking study of the Caribbean's iconography traces the history of visual representations of the region,as perceived by outsider and insider alike, over the last five hundred years. It circles the Caribbean while focusing on Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad, and Barbados, tracing the parameters drawn on each society by the colonial encounter and drawing from the methodologies and material of history, literature, art, gender, and cultural studies.

Caribbean Literature and the Environment

Caribbean Literature and the Environment PDF

Author: Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780813923727

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Examines the literatures of the Caribbean from an ecocritical perspective in all language areas of the region. This book explores the ways in which the history of transplantation and settlement has provided unique challenges and opportunities for establishing a sense of place and an environmental ethic in the Caribbean.