Caribbean Biography Series - Böcker

The Grooming of a Chancellor is Sir George Alleyne’s autobiography. He was born in 1932 in St Philip, Barbados, the first of the seven children of Eileen, a homemaker, and Clinton Alleyne, a schoolmaster. With his signature charm, Alleyne recounts his experiences from primary and secondary school in racially divided Barbados to gaining a Barbados Scholarship to study medicine at the fledgling University College of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica. Here he met and married a Jamaican woman, Sylvan Chen, and was socialized permanently as a West Indian. The process of that socialization and the intellectual environment of those early days at Mona would influence the rest of his life. Alleyne enjoyed a stellar academic career with prolific research output, and he remained for many years at the University of the West Indies, where he became a professor of medicine and had an enduring impact on generations of students. He entered the field of international health through the Pan American Health Organization, of which he became director – the first Caribbean national and non-Latin to do so. Alleyne recounts highlights of his management approach and the commitment to equity which characterized his terms of office. The work of international bodies is often bound up in politics, but he navigated these and influenced the discourse at the highest levels. He had a strong commitment to and was active in Caribbean health, especially HIV/AIDS awareness, prevention and control.In 2003, Alleyne returned to the University of the West Indies, his Capistrano in the Caribbean, as chancellor, and for fourteen years he executed the functions of that office in a manner that enhanced the public persona of his alma mater. His has been a remarkable journey, one he shares with readers through his memories and personal reflections.

Determined, imperious, flighty, charming, Beryl McBurnie was born in Trinidad and went to New York in the early 1940s to study dance and drama. She also made a name for herself as a dancer and singer, Belle Rosette. But she turned her back on the bright lights to return to Trinidad. There she continued the work she had begun before World War II, researching and performing the dances of the Caribbean, especially those that drew on African traditions. She was part of an anticolonial movement that recognized the unique culture of the country and the region and eventually led Trinidad and Tobago to independence.Artistically, McBurnie’s work influenced dancers throughout the region and beyond. She also devoted years to building the Little Carib Theatre. Intended as a home for folk dance, it also housed Derek Walcott’s Theatre Workshop and became a crucible for the performing arts.This book portrays the woman, explores the influences that shaped McBurnie and those whom she influenced in turn, and tells of her struggle to realize a vision she nurtured for decades.

Una Marson's work embodied anti-colonialism, anti-racism, feminism, class politics and pan-Africanism in the first half of the twentieth century. Her poetry and dramatic work symbolically ushered in a new era in Jamaica's literary landscape and her efforts in championing early Jamaican literature, as well as her avid support for Caribbean writers in Britain and the region, made her a key proponent of the development of a nationaland West Indian literary canon. She challenged racial inequality, affirmed standards of black beauty and black identity, and explored the complexities of gender, religious discrimination and class/economic exploitation. She did not frame her work around a single cause but, instead, she was mindful of the multiple intersections of oppression. Britain's hold on Jamaica's cultural imagination would finally be challenged by artists like Marson who were eager to free their nation of colonial authority and cultural dominance. In the end, through her advocacy and pioneering work, Marson achieved a voice for the oppressed.

Una Marson's work embodied anti-colonialism, anti-racism, feminism, class politics and pan-Africanism in the first half of the twentieth century. Her poetry and dramatic work symbolically ushered in a new era in Jamaica's literary landscape and her efforts in championing early Jamaican literature, as well as her avid support for Caribbean writers in Britain and the region, made her a key proponent of the development of a national and West Indian literary canon. She challenged racial inequality, affirmed standards of black beauty and black identity, and explored the complexities of gender, religious discrimination and class/economic exploitation. She did not frame her work around a single cause but, instead, she was mindful of the multiple intersections of oppression. Britain's hold on Jamaica's cultural imagination would finally be challenged by artists like Marson who were eager to free their nation of colonial authority and cultural dominance. In the end, through her advocacy and pioneering work, Marson achieved a voice for the oppressed.

Lucille Mathurin Mair (née Walrond) made a mammoth contribution to women in Jamaica and across the world. In this biography, Verene Shepherd traces Mair's evolving ideology through her roles as professional historian, wife, mother, mentor, diplomat, national and international civil servant, legislator, and women's rights activist. Mair's tireless commitment to the principles of justice and equality for women guided her work and she particularly sought to centre women of the Global South in the development agenda.The accounts of Mair's myriad and often uncredited contributions at the University of the West Indies, the United Nations, and as a senator in the Government of Jamaica are enhanced by previously unpublished extracts from her notes and personal papers and interviews with her friends and colleagues. Shepherd weaves these sources together to give us a thought-provoking study of the evolution of a rebel woman.

A pioneer in the field of cultural studies, Stuart Hall produced an impressive body of work on the relationship between culture and power. His contributions to critical theory and the study of politics, culture, communication, media, race, diaspora and postcolonialism made him one of the great public intellectuals of the late twentieth century. For much of his career, Hall was better known outside the Caribbean than in the region. He made his mark most notably in the United Kingdom as head of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and at the Open University, where his popular lecture series was broadcast on BBC2. His influence expanded from the late 1980s onwards as the field of cultural studies gained traction in universities worldwide. Hall's middle-class upbringing in colonial Jamaica and his subsequent experience of immigrant life in the United Kingdom afforded him a unique perspective that informed his groundbreaking work on the complex power dynamics of race, class and empire.This accessible, lively biography provides glimpses into Hall's formative Jamaican years and includes segments from his hitherto unpublished early writing. Annie Paul gives us an engaging introduction to a globally renowned Caribbean intellectual.

This brief biography looks at one of the most influential writers from the francophone Caribbean. Aimé Césaire was a poet, playwright and politician, who, along with Léon-Gontran Damas from French Guiana and Léopold Senghor of Senegal, founded the Negritude movement in the 1930s. The men had come together as young black students in Paris at a time when the French capital had become the locus of ideas on black identity and pan-Africanism. The Negritude movement called for a cultural awakening of African heritage, a rejection of Western ideology that inherently saw blacks as inferior to whites, and a reclamation of what it meant to be black. Césaire's first major and most famous poetic work, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to My Native Land), explored the contours of this African heritage and his complex identity as a black man born under French rule on the Caribbean island of Martinique. Throughout his long political career, which lasted for most of his life, Césaire fought not only for his own people but for those who had been wronged by vestiges of colonial regimes. This book is an exploration of Césaire's life in his never-ending decolonizing battle.

Among the critical questions that Rodney dealt with whether he was in Tanzania, Jamaica or his native Guyana (formerly British Guiana) was the character of the postcolonial state and its relationship with the working people. It is his engagement with politics that guided his research into African and Caribbean history. In the post-World War II era the colonial powers had regrouped and were rebuilding Europe with the strong financial and political support of the capitalist United States. The Soviet Union, one of the victors over German fascism, was the other power on the world scene. It was communist, and engaged in a Cold War with the United States, the dominant global power. China under Mao Tse Tung was the other communist state that had emerged after the 1949 revolution with a huge rural population, much poverty and a low level of industrialization. Capitalist and socialist powers vied for the hearts and minds of the peoples of Asia, Africa and the Caribbean that were shaking off the shackles of colonialism. Latin American countries which had achieved their political independence in the nineteenth century were caught up in this nationalist surge as they battled with neo-colonialism. They battled with Spain their colonial overlord, but also with the United States which regarded Latin America and the Caribbean as its backyard and intervened as it saw fit to pursue its strategic military, political and economic goals. The Garvey and labor movements of the 1920s and 1930s in the Caribbean as well as communist and national liberation movements in the twentieth century helped to shape Walter Rodney’s political awareness. His parents’ generation was actively involved in the anti-colonial movement in British Guiana in the 1940s and 1950s, and in the 1960s and 1970s Rodney himself helped to shape the ideas around African and Caribbean decolonization, Pan-Africanism, and Marxism.

Sir Richard Benjamin Richardson, aka Richie Richardson, is a new addition to the University of the West Indies Press’s Caribbean Biography Series. The Series is uniquely placed to provide readers with an insight into the life and works of Caribbean icons who have profoundly shaped our culture and history.This volume in the series provides a rich account of the life and work of one of the Caribbean’s sporting icons who has contributed to shaping a generation of athletes who are now considered to be global sporting icons. Among those who grew up under Sir Richie’s leadership as a captain of the West Indies Team is the iconic batsman, Brian Lara who himself went on to lead the team as well.It also showcases Richie’s thoughts on topical issues such as climate change, for which he is a passionate advocate, and his views on politics and political parties in his native land, Antigua and Barbuda. He also has wise counsel for the youths he mentored and provides his thoughts about the future of West Indies cricket, in his unfiltered way.Densil Williams traces how Richardson has made a significant impact as an international sportsman, philanthropist, mentor, and ambassador at large for his country, Antigua and Barbuda, the Caribbean, and the wider world.