Paulette A. Ramsay – författare

Paulette Ramsay’s study analyses cultural and literary material produced by Afro-Mexicans on the Costa Chica de Guerrero y Oaxaca, Mexico, to undermine and overturn claims of mestizaje or Mexican homogeneity.The interdisciplinary research draws on several theoretical constructs: cultural studies, linguistic anthropology, masculinity studies, gender studies, feminist criticisms, and broad postcolonial and postmodernist theories, especially as they relate to issues of belonging, diaspora, cultural identity, gender, marginalization, subjectivity and nationhood. The author points to the need to bring to an end all attempts at extending the discourse, whether for political or other reasons, that there are no identifiable Afro-descendants in Mexico. The undeniable existence of distinctively black Mexicans and their contributions to Mexican multiculturalism is patently recorded in these pages.The analyses also aid the agenda of locating Afro-Mexican literary and cultural production within a broad Caribbean aesthetics, contributing to the expansion of the Caribbean as a broader cultural and historical space which includes Central and Latin America.

El estudio de Paulette Ramsay analiza la producción cultural y literaria de los afromexicanos de Costa Chica de Guerrero y Oaxaca, México, para socavar y subvertir la pretensión de mestizaje u homogeneidad mexicana. Para la investigación interdisciplinaria, la autora se sirve de varios marcos teóricos: los estudios culturales, la antropología lingüística, los estudios sobre masculinidad, los estudios de género, la crítica feminista y amplias teorías poscoloniales y posmodernas, en tanto abordan temas tales como la pertenencia, la diáspora, la identidad cultural, el género, la marginación, la subjetividad y la nacionalidad. Asimismo, la autora señala la necesidad de acabar con todos los intentos de difundir, ya sea por razones políticas o de otro tipo, la idea de que no hay personas de ascendencia notoriamente africana en México. La innegable existencia de mexicanos claramente negros y sus contribuciones al multiculturalismo del país se registran inequívocamente en estas páginas. Los análisis también contribuyen al propósito de ubicar la producción literaria y cultural afromexicana en el marco de una estética caribeña general y a la expansión del Caribe como un espacio histórico y cultural más amplio que incluya América Central y América Latina.

Voluntary migration from Jamaica to Cuba began in 1875 when a small group of Jamaicans went to Cuba to participate in the War of Independence as part of the Cuban Liberation Army. A second wave of migration from Jamaica to Cuba occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when West Indians sought opportunities to work on sugar plantations and in the sugar mills. As the demand for sugar increased worldwide, many West Indians travelled to Cuba between the 1920s and the 1960s, when they started to work on the US naval base in Guantanamo. The chapters of this book speak in different ways to the links, lost and maintained, between West Indian descendants in Cuba and Jamaica. Communities in Guant?ínamo, Banes, Santiago de Cuba and other areas are testimonies of the interest in maintaining connections and sharing their West Indian historical and cultural heritage. This book bears witness to the tremendous contributions of West Indians to the Cuban nation and to nation building worldwide.

This Thing That Is Not a Thing says a lot with little. Economy of words in fine, colourful form, these poems by Paulette A. Ramsay prompt the reader to question human perception ways of seeing the world and ways people view each other. Weaving the everyday with the extraordinary, heaviness of heart with humour, grief and gratitude, This Thing That Is Not a Thing centres absence absence of voice, of persons, of trust and affection showing how silence, in particular, shapes experience and expression.