Objective: To assess the adequacy of the process of informed consent for surgical patients at the University Hospital of the West Indies. Method: The study is a prospective, cross-sectional, descriptive study. 210 patients at the University Hospital of the West Indies were interviewed using a standardised investigator-administered questionnaire, developed by the authors, after obtaining witnessed, informed consent for participation in the study. Data were analysed using SPSS V.12 for Windows. Results: Of the patients, 39.4% were male. (...) Of the surgical procedures, 68.6% were scheduled, 7.6% urgent and 23.8% emergency, 35.2% were minor and 64.8% major. Information imparted/received was acceptable in 40% of cases, good in 24% and inadequate (unacceptable) in 36% of cases. Almost all (97.6%) patients stated that they understood why an operation was planned and 93.3% thought that they had given informed consent. Most (95.2%) thought that they had free choice and made up their own mind. A quarter (25.2%) of all patients were told that it was mandatory for them to sign the form. There was a discussion of possible side effects and complications in 56.7% of patients. Conclusions: This study clearly indicates that surgical patients at the University Hospital of the West Indies feel that they have given informed consent. However, it also suggests that more information should be given to patients for consent to be truly informed. (shrink)

This paper traces the evolution of a coherent feminist genre in written historical texts during and after slavery, and in relation to contemporary feminist writing in the West Indies. The paper problematizes the category ‘woman’ during slavery, arguing that femininity was itself deeply differentiated by class and race, thus leading to historical disunity in the notion of feminine identity during slavery. This gender neutrality has not been sufficiently appreciated in contemporary feminist thought leading to liberal feminist politics in (...) the region. This has proved counter productive in the attempts of Caribbean feminist theorizing to provide alternative understandings of the construction of the nation-state as it emerged out of slavery and the role of women themselves in the shaping of modern Caribbean society. (shrink)

Sugar, pork, beer, corn, cider, scrapple, and hoppin' John all became staples in the diet of colonial America. The ways Americans cultivated and prepared food and the values they attributed to it played an important role in shaping the identity of the newborn nation. In A Revolution in Eating, James E. McWilliams presents a colorful and spirited tour of culinary attitudes, tastes, and techniques throughout colonial America. Confronted by strange new animals, plants, and landscapes, settlers in the colonies and (...) class='Hi'>West Indies found new ways to produce food. Integrating their British and European tastes with the demands and bounty of the rugged American environment, early Americans developed a range of regional cuisines. From the kitchen tables of typical Puritan families to Iroquois longhouses in the backcountry and slave kitchens on southern plantations, McWilliams portrays the grand variety and inventiveness that characterized colonial cuisine. As colonial America grew, so did its palate, as interactions among European settlers, Native Americans, and African slaves created new dishes and attitudes about food. McWilliams considers how Indian corn, once thought by the colonists as "fit for swine," became a fixture in the colonial diet. He also examines the ways in which African slaves influenced West Indian and American southern cuisine. While a mania for all things British was a unifying feature of eighteenth-century cuisine, the colonies discovered a national beverage in domestically brewed beer, which came to symbolize solidarity and loyalty to the patriotic cause in the Revolutionary era. The beer and alcohol industry also instigated unprecedented trade among the colonies and further integrated colonial habits and tastes. Victory in the American Revolution initiated a "culinary declaration of independence," prompting the antimonarchical habits of simplicity, frugality, and frontier ruggedness to define American cuisine. McWilliams demonstrates that this was a shift not so much in new ingredients or cooking methods, as in the way Americans imbued food and cuisine with values that continue to shape American attitudes to this day. (shrink)

Anton Wilhelm Rudolph Amo (1703–c. 1759 ce), philosopher and physician, was born at Axim, Ghana, and died at Fort Chama, Ghana. When he was four years old, the Dutch West Indies Company's preacher in Ghana sent him to Holland to be baptized and educated in the Bible for future service in Ghana. However, the Company headquarters, undesirous of any interference with its lucrative trade in slaves, turned little Amo over to the German Duke Anton Ulric‐Wolfenbuttel.

A thorough account of Africa's history and its lasting influence on Western culture told from the perspective of the disparate descendants who inherited its legacy. W.E.B. Du Bois highlights the hidden stories that connect these varied communities. Originally published in 1915, The Negro presents an expansive analysis of the African diaspora over the course of history. W.E.B. Du Bois uses a critical eye to survey the early depictions of the continent, debunking stereotypical myths about its social structure. He addresses the (...) generational impact of slavery as well as the capitalistic system that made it possible. It's an honest look at the effects of white supremacy, classism and its place in modern society. From Ethiopia and Egypt to the West Indies and Latin America, Africa's influence is undeniable. The Negro sheds light on the ignored history of the continent and its many descendants. It's a vital piece of literature that acknowledges and celebrates its cultural power. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of The Negro is both modern and readable. (shrink)

The subject of empire has emerged as a central concern in political theory. Edmund Burke and John Stuart Mill have been at the center of much recent scholarship on this topic. A number of depictions of Burke as a critic and Mill as a defender of empire rely largely on their writings about India. This article focuses instead on Burke and Mill's writings on the West Indies and America from the standpoint of both thinkers' connection to Scottish Enlightenment (...) historiography. It argues that Burke 's embrace of the notion of a civilizing process helps explain his dismissive treatment of Africans and Indians in the Americans and makes it clear that he was no simple defender of cultural pluralism and difference. Conversely, it argues that Mill's essay, "The Negro Question," and his public criticism of martial law in Jamaica suggest his doubts about the civilizing effect of British rule. By re-examining their writings from this particular geographical and theoretical perspective, the article challenges the new scholarly orthodoxy surrounding Burke 's and Mill's views of the imperial project. (shrink)

This study examines the family environments and hormone profiles of 316 individuals aged 2 months-58 years residing in a rural village on the east coast of Dominica, a former British colony in the West Indies. Fieldwork was conducted over an eight-year period (1988–1995). Research methods and techniques include radioimmunoassay of cortisol and testosterone from saliva samples (N=22,340), residence histories, behavioral observations of family interactions, extensive ethnographic interview and participant observation, psychological questionnaires, and medical examinations.Analyses of data indicate complex, (...) sex-specific effects of family environment on endocrine function. Male endocrine profiles exhibit greater sensitivity to presence of father than do female endocrine profiles. Father-absent males tend to have (a) low cortisol levels during infancy, (b) high or abnormal cortisol profiles during childhood and adolescence, and (c) high cortisol and low testosterone levels during adulthood compared with those of males raised with a resident father. These results indicate that early family environment has significant effects on endocrine response throughout male life histories. (shrink)

: This essay offers a short overview of feminist history of science and introduces a new project into that history, namely feminist history of colonial science. My case study focuses on eighteenth-century voyages of scientific discovery and reveals how gender relations in Europe and the colonies honed selective collecting practices. Cultural, economic, and political trends discouraged the transfer from the New World to the Old of abortifacients (widely used by Amerindian and African women in the West Indies).1.

This article is the keynote address of the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill, Barbados, philosophy symposium in celebration of the 200th Anniversary of the British outlawing the Atlantic Slave Trade. The paper explores questions of enslavement and freedom through challenges of philosophical anthropology, philosophy of social change, and metacritical reflections posed by African Diasporic or Africana philosophy. Such challenges include the relevance and legitimacy of philosophical reflection to the lives of racialized slaves and concludes with (...) a discussion of the implications of the analysis for an understanding of the “face” of political life and the importance of the concept of “home” for a cogent theory of freedom. (shrink)

The book is an intellectual analysis of the political ideas of English radical thinker Thomas Spence (1750-1814), who was renowned for his "Plan", a proposal for the abolition of private landownership and the replacement of state institutions with a decentralized parochial organization. This system would be realized by means of the revolution of the "swinish multitude", the poor labouring class despised by Edmund Burke and adopted by Spence as his privileged political interlocutor. While he has long been considered an eccentric (...) and anachronistic figure, the book sets out to demonstrate that Spence was a deeply original, thoroughly modern thinker, who translated his themes into a popular language addressing the multitude and publicized his Plan through chapbooks, tokens, and songs. The book is therefore a history of Spence's political thought "from below", designed to decode the subtle complexity of his Plan. It also shows that the Plan featured an excoriating critique of colonialism and slavery as well as a project of global emancipation. By virtue of its transnational scope, the Plan made landfall in the British West Indies a few years after Spence's death. Indeed, Spencean ideas were intellectually implicated in the largest slave revolt in the history of Barbados. (shrink)

First, in the section ‘Telling Lies’, this article attempts to illustrate recent everyday racism. Racism has a history and takes many different forms. I describe a particular practice of racism, which relied, for its doctrine, on supposedly scientific assumptions about biology and breeding—and received a confirming fillip through the celebration of monarchy, empire and rose-tinted history. Second, in ‘Telling Tales’, the story of Zacchaeus is taken as exemplifying a form of moral repair in which telling and doing the truth are (...) intimately related. Third, in ‘Telling and Doing the Truth’, I contend that telling and doing the truth in relation to racism requires not only a clear naming of racism’s lies but also the making of reparations, for the reason that the lies of racism subtended manifold injustices, of which Atlantic slavery and the exploitation of colonies are notable instances. I take the history of the West Indies as providing a clear case where moral repair is due, and I consider the form that reparations might take. (shrink)

In order to protect the indigenous population of the Americas from slavery and war, Bartolomé de Las Casas carries out a cultural turn in the understanding of what is considered “natural”. The idea that there are slaves by nature was explained in the colonial period by recourse to Aristotle and in view of the inhabitants of the West Indies. A warlike subjugation of disobedient and rebellious slaves was therefore a “natural” affair - like the entire European expansion. Drawing (...) on Aristotle’s understanding of ethos and Aquinas’ considerations of human beings’ natural knowledge of God, Las Casas initiates a culturalist interpretation of human nature. In this way, the indicators that are supposed to qualify the Indians as homunculi and slaves by nature are re-qualified as indicators of authentic humanity. The article reconstructs Las Casas’ innovative cultural argumentation. (shrink)

Many things have passed as money: salt in Abyssinia, tea-bricks in Asia, sugar in the West Indies, barrels of oil in Texas … and metals everywhere. The list seems endless. However, as transactions increased, wealth accumulated, and states levied taxes, such proto-moneys moved from the simple “double coincidence of wants” into more rational and complex forms. They catered for a market or hierarchy of markets. “Money,” said Carl Menger, “is not a political invention.”.

MARINA PAOLA BANCHETTI-ROBINO is Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Florida Atlantic University. Her areas of research include phenomenology, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, and zoosemiotics. Her publications have appeared in such journals as Synthese, Husserl Studies, Idealistic Studies, Philosophy East and West, and The Review of Metaphysics. She has also contributed essays to The Role of Pragmatics in Contemporary Philosophy (1997), Feminist Phenomenology (2000), and Islamic Philosophy and Occidental Phenomenology on the (...) Perennial Issue of Microcosm and Macrocosm (2006). She co-edited Philosophies of the Environment and Technology (1999) and is currently working on a book-length project entitled The Birth of Science Out of the Spirit of Myth: A Historico-Phenomenological Re-Examination of the Crisis of the European Sciences. BERNARD BOXILL was born in Saint Lucia, West Indies where he received his primary and secondary education. He studied philosophy at the University of New Brunswick, Canada and at the University of California, Los Angeles where he was awarded a doctorate in philosophy in 1971. He has published numerous articles, a book, Blacks and Social Justice (1992), and is professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. ED BRANDON was born and educated in England, studying philosophy and linguistics at The University of York, England, and later philosophy at The University of Oxford with the late John Mackie. After teaching in Sierra Leone and briefly in England, he went to teach philosophy of education at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica in 1978. From 1992 he has been attached to a policy unit of the Vice-Chancellery, based at the Cave Hill campus in Barbados, where he has been assisting since 2000 with a new major in philosophy. His academic work can be accessed from http://cavehill.uwi.edu/bnccde/epb/personalpage.html CAROLYN CUSICK is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. She is a founding member of the Phenomenology Roundtable. Her research focuses on feminist epistemology, Africana philosophy, and phenomenology. LEWIS GORDON is President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. He is Laura H. Carnell Professor, the most distinguished chair, at Temple University, where he holds appointments in philosophy, religion, and Judaic studies and directs the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought and the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies. He is also Ongoing Visiting Professor of Philosophy and Government at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica. He is the author of several books, including the award-winning Her Majesty's Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age (Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (Paradigm, 2006), An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), and co-editor of A Companion to African-American Studies (Blackwell, 2006) and Not Only the Master's Tools: African-American Studies in Theory and Practice (Paradigm, 2005). CLEVIS HEADLEY is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University, director of the Ethnic Studies Certificate Program, as well as director of the Master's in Liberal Studies. Professionally, he serves as the Vice-President and Treasurer of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Professor Headley has published widely in the areas of Critical Race Theory and Africana philosophy. He has also published in Analytic philosophy, focusing specifically on Gottlob Frege. PAGET HENRY is Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Brown University. He is the author of Caliban's Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy, Peripheral Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Antigua, and the co-editor of C. L. R. James' Caribbean. Professor Henry also serves as the editor of the C. L. R. James Journal, and has published numerous articles on the political economy of the Caribbean as well as on African, African-American, and Afro-Caribbean philosophy. ESIABA IROBI is Associate Professor of International Theatre/Performance Studies at Ohio University, Athens. His groundbreaking book: A Theatre for Cannibals: Resisting Globalization on the Continent and Diaspora since 1441 will be published by Palgrave Macmillan, London, in 2007. He has been invited to be an External Resident Fellow at the prestigious Dartmouth College Humanities Institute for the 2007-2008 academic year. CHIKE JEFFERS is a graduate student in the Ph.D. program of the Philosophy Department at Northwestern University. His interests are in Africana philosophy, social and political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of religion and aesthetics. He is originally from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. CATHERINE JOHN is Associate Professor of African Diaspora Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Her book Clear Word and Third Sight: Folk Groundings and Diasporic Consciousness in African Caribbean Writing was co-published by Duke University Press and UWI Press in 2003. She has published several articles on Caribbean literature and culture and her current book project is entitled The Just Society and the Diasporic Imagination. She spends her summer working in Woodside, St. Mary, Jamaica helping with a summer school for children and participating in the community's emancipation celebration. KENNETH KNIES is a doctoral student in philosophy at Stony Brook University. His areas of focus are phenomenology and ancient philosophy. He is also a contributing editor for Political Affairs magazine. EDIZON LEN is a photographer and coordinator of the Fondo Documental Afro-Andino at the Universidad Andina Simòn Bolivar in Quito, Ecuador. In 2006, he was curator of the photo exhibit "The Color of the Diaspora" presented at the Cultural Center of the Catholic University of Ecuador and the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He is currently completing his doctorate at the Universidad Andina Simòn Bolivar with a focus on Maroon thought. REKHA MENON is Associate Professor of Art History at State University of New York, Buffalo State. She is the author of Seductive Aesthetics of Post Colonialism (forthcoming). Her area of research focuses on current philosophical investigations in colonial and neocolonial aspects of Indian art, artistic/cultural practices and philosophies and their relationship to Western arts and philosophies. Her manuscripts under review are: Ashamed of Our Nakedness, Is There Ever a Naked Body? Ambivalence in Contemporary Indian Expressive Aesthetics and Insatiable Desire. MICHAEL R. MICHAU is a Ph.D. candidate in the Philosophy and Literature Program at Purdue University, and during the 2006-2007 school year, a lecturer in the Department of Comparative Studies and Department of Philosophy at Ohio State University. He is the co-founder and co-secretary of the North American Levinas Society. CHARLES W. MILLS is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He works in the general area of oppositional political theory, and is the author of numerous articles and three books: The Racial Contract (Cornell University Press, 1997), Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Cornell University Press, 1998), and From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). MABOGO P. MORE is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. He has published articles on African philosophy and social and political philosophy in a number of academic journals, such as South African Journal of Philosophy, Dialogue and Universalism, Alternation, Theoria, and African Journal of Political Science. MARILYN NISSIM-SABAT, Ph.D., M.S.W. is Professor Emerita and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy, Lewis University. Dr. Nissim-Sabat is also a psychotherapist in private practice. She is the author of numerous book chapters and papers in the fields of philosophy (Husserlian phenomenology), psychoanalysis, feminism, and critical race theory. Citations of her works can be found on her website: marilynnissim-sabat.com. FREDERICK OCHIENG'-ODHIAMBO is a Senior Lecturer of Philosophy and Coordinator of the discipline at The University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados. His major research areas are African philosophy and social philosophy. He has published several articles on philosophic sagacity. IVAN PETRELLA is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Miami. He is author of The Future of Liberation Theology: An Argument and Manifesto (SCM Press, 2006) and editor of Latin American Liberation Theology: The Next Generation (Orbis Books, 2005) as well as co-editor of the series Reclaiming Liberation Theology (SCM Press) RICHARD PITHOUSE is a research fellow at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa. He is editor of Asinamali: University Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Africa World Press, 2006). SATHYA RAO is Assistant Professor in French translation at the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, University of Alberta, Canada. His research fields include: theory of translation, continental philosophy, postcolonial studies, discourses on Africa, and Francophone cinema and literature. He has published articles in various peer-reviewed journals and written chapters in several collective books such as: De l'Ecrit Africain a l'Oral le Phenomene Graphique Africain, Simon Battestini (Ed.) (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2006) and Thèorie-rèbellion. Un Ultimatum, Gilles Grelet (Ed.) (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2005). He has a co-edited a book on Francophone African cinema L'Afrique fait son cinema (Montreal: Memoires d'encrier, forthcoming). Sathya Rao is vice-president of the International Non-Philosophical Organisation (INPhO), member of the Canadian Association of Translatology (CATS), coordinator of the research team Poexil, and Secretary of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. He is co-founder of an online journal Alternative Francophone. CATHERINE WALSH is Professor and Director of the doctoral program in Latin American Cultural Studies at the Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar in Quito, Ecuador. Her research interests include the geopolitics of knowledge, interculturality and concerns related to the Afro-Andean Diaspora and the production of decolonial thought. Among her recent publications are Pensamiento crìtico y matriz colonial (Quito: Abya Yala, 2005), "Interculturality and the Coloniality of Power. An 'Other' Thinking and Positioning from the Colonial Difference," in Coloniality of Power, Transmodernity, and Border Thinking, R. Grosfoguel, J.D. Saldivar, and N. Maldonado-Torres (Eds.) (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming) and "Shifting the Geopolitics of Critical Knowledge: Decolonial Thought and Cultural Studies 'Others' in the Andes," Cultural Studies (forthcoming). KRISTIN WATERS has published widely in the areas of race and gender. Her anthology Enlightened Conversations: Women and Men Political Theorists (Blackwell, 2000) challenges political theorists to be more inclusive of race and gender in their research and teaching. Her book Black Women's Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds, co-edited with Carol Conaway (University of Vermont Press, forthcoming), addresses the varied intellectual traditions of black women's thought that spans more than two hundred years in North America. She is currently Professor of Philosophy at Worcester State College and Visiting Research Associate at Brandeis University. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Josiah Royce's "Enlightened" Antiblack Racism?Dwayne A. TunstallThis article has not been written by some ideal Roycean mediator whose interpretive acts can help heal the deep-seated racial and ethnic divisions of contemporary American society. Nor has it been written by an impartial judge adjudicating a dispute. Rather this article has been written by a Roycean scholar and a philosopher of race who feels compelled to examine Royce's social philosophy in (...) order to determine whether his positions on race in the United States of America and on racialized colonialism in the British Caribbean presuppose the legitimacy of antiblack racism. What has compelled me to examine Royce's social philosophy critically are the presentations made by Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley and Tommy J. Curry at the joint Josiah Royce Society and Personalist Discussion Group session for the 2008 American Philosophical Association (APA) Central Division meeting.For those readers who might be familiar with Royce's philosophy, this entire article may seem pointless. I can imagine quite a few readers asking themselves the following questions: Why should we waste our time reading an article investigating whether Royce's social philosophy presupposes antiblack racism? Do we not already know that Royce's philosophy is an antiracist one? This response has been nurtured by those Roycean scholars who have interpreted his philosophy to be antiracist. Indeed, this has apparently been the standard approach to interpreting Royce's philosophy since the publication of his 1905 address to the Chicago Ethical Society, "Race Questions and Prejudices," in Race Questions, Provincialism and Other American Problems. These scholars have included American pragmatists, African-American philosophers, theologians, ethicists, and philosophers of race. Over the last forty years alone, these scholars have included William T. Fontaine, Cornel West, Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Alain Locke, Shannon Sullivan, and Jacquelyn Kegley. [End Page 39]In this article I argue that the standard antiracist interpretation of Royce's philosophy is a mistaken one. This is an understandable mistake, though, given that many of those who interpret Royce this way presuppose that (1) one can analyze certain concepts and principles from Royce's ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics (e.g., his theory of interpretation) apart from his concrete social philosophy and (2) one can ignore his tacit acceptance of early twentieth-century, British-style racialized colonialism. I think Kegley's writings on Royce and race are paradigmatic examples of this reading of Royce.Kegley's recent APA presentation can be read as a further articulation of one of the central contentions in her 2005 article, "Is a Coherent Racial Identity Essential to Genuine Individuals and Communities?": "… Royce advocates and provides the foundation for an anti-essentialist and nonracialist understanding of race" (216). Following her earlier analysis, Kegley's presentation takes these two contentions for granted: First, when one criticizes an essentialist conception of race (that is, regarding race as a natural kind), that person is not racist. Second, when one regards the concept of race as a social kind, one is antiracist, if not an outright nonracist. However, I think that it is possible for one to criticize an essentialist conception of race and regard race as a social kind and still accept a form of cultural antiblack racism. Moreover, I think that Royce's social philosophy is a paradigmatic example of this phenomenon, with him being a nonessentialist with regards to the concept of race but yet being a cultural antiblack racist.Here, the significance of Curry's presentation for Royce scholars is obvious. In it he asks us Royce scholars if Royce's social philosophy, with regards to race issues, is an accomplice for the cultural perpetuation of white supremacy. I think that the answer to that question hinges on whether Royce's acceptance of British-style racialized colonialism in the West Indies is based on a misguided ethnocentrism or on a form of cultural antiblack racism.I take it for granted that Royce's recommendation that Southern Euro-Americans learn from the British colonial rule of Jamaica and Trinidad in "Race Questions and Prejudices" is evidence that he had accepted the legitimacy of British-style racialized colonialism. What I would like to do now is explain how Royce's... (shrink)

At the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, change was fast and furious: the exploration of coastal Africa by the Portuguese, the exploration of the West Indies by the Spanish, the extermination of the island Indians, the importation of black slaves to the Iberian peninsula, then the expansion of the slave trade to the American colonies - in short, the much-heralded inauguration of European colonization overseas, with all of its attendant horrors. All of this is adequately known, (...) it seems; the purpose of the present article is not to rehearse this history, even in summary. But if chronology has any value here, it is in making clear that, while the massacre of the Arawaks and the Caribbean Indians quickly attracted attention, eliciting protests that were to be renewed in the following centuries, the black slave trade and black slavery began somewhat discreetly, as if it took quite some time for the esprits libres in Europe to take notice of it. Over the three centuries leading up to the French revolution, blacks were transferred from their native countries to the American colonies. In Europe, these three centuries saw the development of Enlightenment thought, the revolt against domination by the Church, the call for human rights, and the will to democracy. The parallel is superficial, but troubling nevertheless: four facts appear to be linked together, and not merely chronologically: the massacre or de facto subjugation of the Indians, the trade and enslavement of blacks, and colonization. Is the last of these not the cause of and the key to understanding the other three - as well as a number of other phenomena? (shrink)

In traditional ethnographies, it is customarily assumed that the field researcher is an outsider who seeks to acquire an insider’s understanding of the social world being investigated. While conducting field research projects on education and tourism in Trinidad (West Indies) we found that the standard distinction between insider and outsider became problematic for us. Our experiences can be understood in terms of two competing conceptions of fieldwork. One, rooted in classical ethnography, views fieldwork as a process whereby the (...) researcher learns to translate the cultural practices of a little-known or misunderstood group into terms understandable to the ethnographic audience. The other, growing out of the institutional ethnography approach pioneered by Dorothy E. Smith, views fieldwork as a process of mapping the relations that govern an institutional complex. In the latter approach, local experiences provide the point of departure for exploring a wider set of social arrangements. In this article, we treat our own fieldwork experiences as points of departure for a reflexive examination of this alternative ethnographic strategy. (shrink)

Sixty years after the famous ‘Conférence des écrivains et artistes noirs at the Sorbonne’, and sixty years after Black-Label, the third collection of poetry by French Guianese Leon-Gontran Damas, the word “nègre” and “nigger” remain offensive words all too much used in postcolonial Europe today. Even after the short lived Obamamania, Damas’s poetry remains actual as it expresses the censorship all too many times endured by the lyrical voice who cannot speak out loud against those violent verbal, physical, and thus (...) psychological assaults. Consequently, his “mors dans la bouche”, or “bit in the mouth” is incoporated in his less wellknown work which testifies to the “mort dans l’âme”, it is the constant feeling of depression and blues lurking on the Black or coloured citizen of France and the West Indies. Standing in the shadow of the cofounders, and quite neglected by the leading Martinicans of the post-Négritude era, Damas nevertheless understood the urgency of transcontinental and transcultural solidarities in this battle and wrote against the dichotomies of race, class, and gender. Damas and James knew each other for over forty years. Damas read James’s novel, Minty Alley before they met in Paris when James was doing the research for The Black Jacobins, his landmark history of Tousssaint L’Ouverture and the revolution in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. Damas helped James with translations and discovering documents at the Bibliothèque Nationale. On one occasion, Damas brought James to the home of Robert Desnos. Both lived in Washington, DC, in the 1970s when Damas was at Howard University and James taught at Federal City College/University of the District of Columbia. (shrink)

This paper examines the critique of capitalism provided by the New World Group. Emerging from the West Indian Society for the Study of Social Issues at The University of The West Indies, Mona, the Group was formed in 1963 specifically to address the reconfiguration of social and political forces in the wake of Caribbean territories gaining formal independence from European colonial powers. This reconfiguration went beyond matters of political economy, and included psychological and ideological reworkings, all items (...) necessary to evaluate the kinds of societies West Indians could strive for. Set within intra-Marxist debates on early capitalist development, this paper focuses on the collaboration and creative tensions between Norman Girvan, George Beckford, and Lloyd Best as they helped one another construct their respective political philosophy, social theory, and economic analysis of the logic of plantation societies, which while incomplete from our vantage point, did mostly capture the historical dynamics found in the Caribbean. (shrink)

The presence of Indians fundamentally altered the political, social and economic landscape of sugar producing nations. In most cases, race, which was used as an important signifier of difference by the colonising power, left these states with a colonial legacy of division and derision which they continue to endure and navigate in such diverse locations as the Caribbean, the West Indies, Fiji, Mauritius and parts of Africa. In the quest for recognition, equality and political status that allows the (...) girmitiyas to celebrate their past, embrace their present and imagine a future where they are enmeshed in the fabric of a new Fiji entail understanding why the declaration of girmit day on May 15th is such a powerful symbolic gesture on the part of the new coalition government. (shrink)

In terms of its impact on Britain, historians have long treated the American Revolution as the poor cousin of the French Revolution. Following E P Thompson's Marxist emphasis on the 1790s as the start of The making of the English working class (1963), scholars have devoted enormous amounts of time and energy to studying British popular politics and intellectual developments in the last decade of the eighteenth century. The American Revolution has traditionally attracted less attention outside American national historiography.

In (...) British history, the American war has been studied mostly as a problem of high politics. British historians have written many fine studies of the complex politics of the 1760s through to the war of 1775-83. While American historians have searched long and hard for long term social and economic causes of their revolution, British historians have tended to view the war as primarily a failure of politics. Ian Christie argued that 'the Revolution was a human tragedy, for which certain men were responsible, more particularly because, in Great Britain, the politicians who had the common sense and vision were out of power (owing to their own weakness and limitations) and those who were in power lacked the vision'. John Cannon has argued that Britain was little affected by the loss of America. Economic ties reconnected after 1783 and Britons moved on with their lives at the centre of an empire that was still strong in the West Indies and Canada, and expanding in the eastern hemisphere.

There have been some impressive studies of the impact of the American Revolution on British popular politics. H T Dickinson has written a number of influential studies of popular politics in the eighteenth century and edited an important volume of essays on _Britain and the American Revolution_ (1988). James E Bradley has analysed a wealth of empirical detail on Dissenting religion and political agitation during the American crisis. Eliga H Gould's _The persistence of empire: British political culture in the age of the American Revolution_ (2000) has provided an insightful study of the strength of loyalism. While of high quality, however, the quantity of such studies has long been dwarfed by the 1790s industry.

In recent years, however, scholars have begun to emphasise the importance of the period before the French Revolution. The impact of war on the development of state and society in the middle decades of the eighteenth century is now attracting attention. In _The British Isles and the War of American Independence_ (2000) Stephen Conway has detailed the significant impact the war had on state and society in Britain. In British history, according to Sarah Knott, 'where once the French Revolution, and its ricochets, was the fin-de-siècle story of transformation, now the years of the American war are the location of all manner of historical change.'. (shrink)

By the late 18th century, the Moravian mission project had grown into a global enterprise. Moravian missionaries’ personal and emotional engagements with the people they sought to convert impacted not only on their understanding of Christianity, but also caused them to rethink the nature of civilization and humanity in light of their frontier experiences. In this article I discuss the construction of ‘savagery’ in the mission ethnography of C. G. A. Oldendorp (1721–87). Oldendorp’s journey to slave-holding societies in the Danish (...) West Indies, where Moravian missions had been established in the 1730s, and his own experiences of the violence of these societies had such an impact on him that his proto-ethnographic descriptions of all the inhabitants of the Danish West Indies – from slaves to slaveholders – broke with traditional representations of savagery. He suggested two different paths for emotional transformation: one for slaves, and another for slaveholders. His views aligned with those of the later abolitionists, yet he was writing sixty years before those movements first gained public momentum in Great Britain. In many ways, therefore, this early mission ethnography reshaped contemporary understandings of ‘savagery’. I consider how Oldendorp did this in relation to a Moravian theology of the heart and love of Christ, the emerging Scottish Enlightenment philosophy of ‘love of humanity’ and its use in colonial encounters between missionaries and local people, and especially the emotions that were provoked by the extreme violence of the slavery system in this colonial contact zone. (shrink)

For more than half a century, C. L. R. James (1901–1989)—"the Black Plato," as coined by the London _Times_—has been an internationally renowned revolutionary thinker, writer, and activist. Born in Trinidad, his lifelong work was devoted to understanding and transforming race and class exploitation in his native West Indies, as well as in Britain and the United States. In _C. L. R. James's Caribbean_, noted scholars examine the roots of both James's life and oeuvre in connection with the (...) economic, social, and political environment of the West Indies. Drawing upon James's observations of his own life as revealed to interviewers and close friends, this volume provides an examination of James's childhood and early years as colonial literatteur and his massive contribution to West Indian political-cultural understanding. Moving beyond previous biographical interpretations, the contributors here take up the problem of reading James's texts in light of poststructuralist criticism, the implications of his texts for Marxist discourse, and for problems of Caribbean development. (shrink)

Roots, Cogwheels and Clouds: A Tale of Encounters In her first book The Illusion of Freedom published in 2006 and in The Age of Gluttony published in 2010 Yıldız Silier focused on the notions of freedom and happiness respectively. This last book on justice completes her trilogy. Instead of taking injustices as a discourse on victimization, she focuses on the life experiences of resisting subjects and collates them through semi fictional tales, letters and diaries. The concrete, material foundations of injustices (...) are exposed in the Roots. The Cogwheels, puts forward what happens when the rebellions fail and the Clouds predict what would have happened if the rebellions had succeeded. Through these three axes, the past (the lost possibilities), the present (dystopia) and the future (utopia) are merged. -/- Those that resist the dictator in the country of animals, peasant risings in the 14th century England, women’s rebellion during the witch hunts in the 16th century Italy, 18th century slave riots in the plantations of West Indies and in workers’ rebellion in the 21st century in a Chinese factory that produces tablets and mobile phones; these are the main subjects of these semi fictional tales. In the second part of the book on “the meeting of old class mates” five friends having different political views discuss “what will happen to our country?” and uncompromising conflicts appear. The last part of the book includes three essays on the Gezi rebellion, Pontecorvo’s film Burn and Calvino’s book Invisible Cities. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer substantial philosophical and pragmatic analyses of slavery, apprenticeships, and segregation in the United States and British West Indies. I do so to illustrate the extent to which American and British philosophy, politics, law, and economics were entwined with the oppression of African-Americans and African-Caribbeans. I argue that, as the institution of slavery collapsed and abolitionists began calling for reparations, judges and politicians ignored the claims of abolitionists and thereby perverted justice. As a result, (...) we now have the debts of slavery, apprenticeships, and segregation to settle. I conclude that as long as we fail to settle these debts we are complicit in allowing their perversions of justice to continue. For this reason, I argue in favor of granting reparations to African-Americans and African-Caribbeans. (shrink)

The early abolition of serfdom in England, the early growth of relatively free institutions, and the greater recognition of popular claims after the decay of feudalism had divorced the masses from the soil, were traits of English life which may be looked back upon with pride. When it was decided that any slave who set foot in England became free; when the importation of slaves into the Colonies was stopped; when twenty millions were paid for the emancipation of slaves in (...) the West Indies; and when, however unadvisedly, a fleet was maintained to stop the slave trade; our countrymen did things worthy to be admired. And when England gave a home to political refugees and took up the causes of small states struggling for freedom, it again exhibited noble traits which excite affection. But there are traits, unhappily of late more frequently displayed, which do the reverse. Contemplation of the acts by which England has acquired over eighty possessions – settlements, colonies, protectorates, &c. – does not arouse feelings of satisfaction. The transitions from missionaries to resident agents, then to officials having armed forces, then to punishments of those who resist their rule, ending in so called “pacification” – these processes of annexation, now gradual and now sudden, as that of the new Indian province and that of Barotziland, which was declared a British colony with no more regard for the wills of the inhabiting people than for those of the inhabiting beasts – do not excite sympathy with their perpetrators. Love of country is not fostered in me on remembering that when, after our Prime Minister had declared that we were bound in honour to the Khedive to reconquer the Soudan, we, after the re conquest, forthwith began to administer it in the name of the Queen and the Khedive – practically annexing it; nor when, after promising through the mouths of two Colonial Ministers not to interfere in the internal affairs of the Transvaal, we proceeded to insist on certain electoral arrangements, and made resistance the excuse for a desolating war.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Intersection of Medicine and ReligionJohn C. DormoisThe practice of medicine offers a host of rewards to the practitioner. Besides the obvious intellectual satisfaction of solving a difficult diagnostic problem or the ability to make a comfortable living, I have found the greatest personal sense of moral gratification when helping [End Page 196] families negotiate the most challenging event in life: making decisions at end of life. Whether the (...) condition was a ruptured intracranial aneurysm with brain death or a patient with far advanced cancer struggling with the choice between experimental chemotherapy or choosing comfort therapy at home surrounded by family for the remaining days of life, the moral courage required to provide the best guidance was considerable. In my early years of practice I didn’t call my actions in these situations “courageous” nor were there moral “guidelines” providing a blueprint. I knew I responded with empathy and compassion and that this ability had a lot to do with being raised in a religious or spiritual home. At the same time, I suspected that some of the lack of empathy and compassion I witnessed in some of my colleagues was related to the very training programs of physicians. This essay traces the origin of my moral and ethical concerns about medical education and my intention to reinvigorate the spiritual or existential voice in medicine.An early life experience had a great deal to do with shaping my moral development. At age seven my family traveled through the West Indies. My father’s amateur radio hobby meant that at every stop we would be greeted by one of his radio contacts. One stop in particular was life changing.Port au Prince, Haiti was an unknown place to this seven year–old, but to say it was a culture shock to a boy from Kansas would be an understatement of epic proportions. It was during this visit that I experienced true poverty in its most blatant form. In downtown Port au Prince I saw limbless beggars and the deformed from polio and malnutrition. But it was the sight of the garbage dump near the center of town that changed my world forever. There, among piles of detritus, I saw children and families making their home in the dump. They had hollowed out a sort of cavern in the piles of trash that served as a place of refuge from both the rain and the sun.This experience in many ways has served as a framework and background for my life. Although seen through the eyes of a seven year–old, the picture can only be adequately understood within the context of being raised by religiously faithful parents, parents free of hypocrisy whose lives personified the best in Christian virtues and practices. These early experiences planted the seeds that would only fully blossom some 60 years later.Medical school was a demanding but exhilarating experience. Each day was a day of discovery … anatomy, physiology, pathology … all subjects opening up a whole new world to explore. Internal medicine suited me best since it was the specialty that most closely integrated all the basic sciences necessary to arrive at a diagnosis. I loved the elegance of endocrinology in particular where a given hormone mediator could cause widely different effects if present in excess or completely absent. But I was in the end drawn to cardiology since it combined complex physiology with my avocation, the love of running.There was, however, a disturbing aspect of medicine education that I observed affecting many of my classmates. Although I can vividly recall the enthusiasm that all of us shared as we donned our white coats for the first time and envisioned a future of caring for our patients, things gradually and insidiously changed over the next four years. The altruism and empathy that was so evident in the early years gradually lessened as graduation approached. I could not help being struck by this change and wondered at the time why that should happen. I had no insight then that what I had observed was a well recognized consequence of the medical school experience. I’m sure that the passage from professional training to practice in... (shrink)

During the century of colonial expansion by the Iberian monarchies, the presence of the Church alongside the colonizers was not just a logical continuation of the medieval idea of the good prince who was advised and accompanied by men of faith. It also underlined the political dimension of the ‘spiritual conquest’ and the equally political dimension of the cultural practices accompanying it. There are numerous works that have emphasized this with regard to the American continents in particular, where the connection (...) between the forces present, which quickly led to the destruction and subjugation of the local populations, brought about Spanish colonial domination over large swathes of the ‘West Indies’. Those scholars who have concentrated on the ‘East Indies’, and China in particular, have emphasized acculturation or accommodation, highlighting the cultural rather than the political dimension of contact. This article explores the significant asymmetries in the understanding of humankind developed by the missionaries in their analyses of the Americas and the East Indies. These asymmetries stemmed largely from their distinct roles and functions in the process of colonial or imperial contact. I argue that these asymmetries obscure our understanding of what missionaries contributed to the global circulation of knowledge of lands and peoples new to Europeans in the 16th and 17th centuries, in part by defining ‘savagery’ and locating it mostly in the ‘West Indies’. (shrink)

Marjorie Lewis draws on her own experience of breaking through the glass ceiling to become the first woman President of the United Theological College of the West Indies. Through this, she considers the theological and biblical perspectives on gender equality, internalized and unrecognized inequality, naming and exorcising abuse in institutional relationships and strategies to survive and thrive. At the heart is a rejection of the notion that all suffering is to be embraced unchallenged as part of the Christian (...) experience and that it is the particular calling of women. This can lead to overwork, burn out and a lack of self care. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Petrification of Cleopatra in Nineteenth Century Art MARGARET MALAMUD MARTHA MALAMUD What did Cleopatra look like? Was she a Roman, a Ptolemaic Greek, an Egyptian, an African? Was she a precocious child, a devastatingly beautiful seductress, an astute practitioner of imperial politics, a murderess, a longnosed blue-stocking? [Figure 1] Cleopatra is dead, but “Cleopatra ” exists in the eye of the beholder. What other human being has been (...) portrayed in such “infinite variety”? In her life, and even more in her afterlife, the protean queen of the Nile has, like a shaft of sunlight focused through a magnifying glass, clarified and set ablaze underlying ideologies and overt assertions of race and gender, manifested differently in disparate times and places. Here we consider two case studies of nineteenth century representations of Cleopatra in stone: William Wetmore Story’s Cleopatra (1860) and Edmonia Lewis’s The Death of Cleopatra (1876). [Figarion 28.1 spring/summer 2020 Figure 1: Bust of Cleopatra VII, 40–30 bce, Altes Museum, Berlin. 32 the petrification of cleopatra ure 2] Story, a wealthy and well-connected white expatriate living in Rome, gave the famous queen features that deviated from classicizing portrayals of the queen and struck critics as startling and original. American artist Edmonia Lewis, of Black West Indies / Ojibwa Native American descent, lived and worked in Rome, but as a poor, racially-mixed female artist she moved in quite different social circles than Story. Her decision to sculpt the Egyptian queen as a white woman Figure 2: William Wetmore Story, Cleopatra, 1858; this carving 1869, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Margaret Malamud, Martha Malamud 33 dying in agony during the last moments of her suicide shocked and fascinated critics. Both works display a very different understanding of women, the Orient, the Classical past, and the exotic Black other. We understand and contextualize these strikingly different representations of Cleopatra by looking at the comments of contemporary writers and critics. Lewis and her Death of Cleopatra inspired the twenty-first century Black poet Tyehimba Jess, with whose poetic evocation of Lewis and her work we conclude. In the middle of the nineteenth century, when most portrayals were of Cleopatra as a classical Greek beauty, William Wetmore Story boldly gave the famous queen African features. Story, an American emigré artist and “cultural influencer,” was living in Rome on the eve of the American Civil War. While there, he sculpted Cleopatra, which he began in 1858, completed in 1860, and exhibited to great acclaim at the 1862 World Exposition in London. Story was from Boston, where abolitionist sentiments were prominent, and was well aware of racial politics in the United States. Concerned by British support for the American South, he wrote a series of letters from Rome to the British Daily News in December of 1861 in which he denounced the institution of slavery, explained why he was devoted to the Union, and urged British neutrality in the Civil War. His Cleopatra was a provocative abolitionist statement. From the late eighteenth century on, free African Americans faced two pressing tasks: to refute charges that they were racially inferior to white people and to insert themselves into the historical record. ManyAfrican Americans and their supporters argued that there was a clear connection between ancient Africa (Ethiopia and Egypt) and the classical world based on their reading of classical texts and late eighteenth and early nineteenth century world histories. Educated African Americans documented the debt of Greece and Rome to Egyptian civilization, and repeatedly pointed out that Egypt was a major source of the cultural achievements of Greco-Roman an- 34 the petrification of cleopatra tiquity.It was conventional wisdom that Egyptian civilization influenced Greece. What was new and controversial was the assertion of a racial connection between ancient Egyptians and modern African Americans. Abolitionists used this constructed racial history to argue that the magnificent civilization of ancient Egypt and its influences on Greek and Roman culture were proof that African Americans were not racially inferior and therefore fully worthy to be citizens with equal rights in the American Republic.1 By the 1860s it had become a commonplace in American abolitionist circles that antiquity ’s most famous queen was... (shrink)