Caribbean Series – serie

In 2011 verscheen Een zwarte vrijstaat in Suriname; De Okaanse samenleving in de 18e eeuw. Het vertelt de geschiedenis van slaven die in de achttiende eeuw de plantages ontvluchtten om diep in het regenwoud, in het zuidoosten van Suriname, een nieuwe samenleving op te bouwen. Deze Marrons, zoals de ontsnapte slaven werden genoemd, sloten in 1760 een vredesverdrag met de planters. Zij noemden zich Okanisi. Hier, in dit tweede deel van deze historie, wordt verslag gedaan van de gebeurtenissen zoals die zich na 1800 afspeelden in de onafhankelijke gemeenschappen van Okaanse Marrons. Het is een bewogen geschiedenis van profetische bewegingen, heksenvervolgingen, en de opkomst van een eigen, inheemse, kerk. Al deze voor buitenstaanders exotische gebeurtenissen speelden zich af in een samenleving die hecht was geïntegreerd in het economische leven van de Guiana’s. In de twintigste eeuw vinden de eerste grote botsingen plaats tussen de Okanisi en het koloniale en postkoloniale bestuur van Suriname. Soms ging het om een staking die het economische leven van de kolonie dreigde te verlammen; later, eind jaren tachtig, toen Suriname onafhankelijk was, zorgde de opstand van enkele honderden Okaanse jongeren, en de gedoogsteun van de bevolking, voor een kritieke situatie in de jonge republiek. In deze eeuw zijn het voornamelijk conflicten over het behoud van het oude grondgebied, en zijn natuurlijke hulpbronnen, die de oude vrijstaat bedreigen.In Een zwarte vrijstaat in Suriname, deel 2, Van Wetering and Thoden van Velzen relate the history of the Okanisi after their successful escape into the South American rainforest and the signing of a peace treaty with Dutch planters in 1760. Following Part 1, which deals with their struggle for freedom, this volume describes the emergence of an autonomous Okanisi Maroon state; its integration into the economic life of the Guiana’s, but also its internal development, as it manifested itself through prophetic movements, anti-witchcraft purges and the rise of a native church. Predominantly based on oral sources, this book charts a previously undocumented history and provides a unique insight into a culture emerging from the roots of slavery.

In Geweld in de West bieden tien auteurs onder redactie van Victor Enthoven, Henk den Heijer en Han Jordaan een overzicht van het Nederlandse militaire optreden in het Atlantische gebied tussen 1600 en 1800. De verovering van Indiaanse gebieden, de strijd tussen rivaliserende Europese machten en de gewelddadige slavenhandel zijn diep verankerd in de Atlantische geschiedenis. Ook Nederland heeft daaraan zijn steentje bijgedragen, maar daar is weinig over bekend. In dit boek worden diverse aspecten van die militaire aanwezigheid belicht. Zo wordt de inzet van niet-Nederlandse strijdkrachten overzee beschreven en wordt ingegaan op gewelddadige excessen die zich hebben afgespeeld. De thema’s militaire organisaties, militaire expedities en militaire cultuur vormen het hart van deze Atlantische studie.

In and Out of Suriname: Language, Mobility and Identity offers a unique multidisciplinary perspective on a multilingual society in the Caribbean and Guianan sphere. Breaking away from the view of bounded ethnicity, the authors address central theoretical issues of multilingual and multicultural societies including ethnicity as a social distinction, identity as the shifting construction of the self and others, and the role of language therein. They discuss the impact of contact and mobilities on language maintenance, expansion and change. Language, mobility and identity in Suriname are observed through the lens of the actors themselves, from the ever-mobile Amerindians and Maroons on the periphery of land and society through expanding urban societies enhanced by recent migration from Haiti, Brazil and China.

Marie Vieux Chauvet’s Theatres: Thought, Form, and Performance of Revolt at once reflects and acts upon the praxis of theatre that inspired Haitian writer Marie Vieux Chauvet, while at the same time provides incisively new cultural studies readings about revolt in her theatre and prose. Chauvet – like many free-minded women of the Caribbean and the African diaspora – was banned from the public sphere, leaving her work largely ignored for decades. Following on a renewed interest in Chauvet, this collection makes essential contributions to Africana Studies, Theatre Studies, Performance Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Global South Feminisms.Contributors are: Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken, Stéphanie Bérard, Christian Flaugh, Gabrielle Gallo, Jeremy Matthew Glick, Kaiama L. Glover, Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, Cae Joseph-Massena, Nehanda Loiseau, Judith G. Miller, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Anthony Phelps, Ioana Pribiag, Charlee M. Redman Bezilla, Guy Régis Jr, and Lena Taub Robles.This collection is a beautiful gathering of voices exploring Chauvet’s theatrical work, along with the role of theatre in her novels. The richly textured and evocatively written essays offer many new and necessary insights into the work of one of Haiti’s greatest writers.— Laurent Dubois, Marcello Lotti Professor of Romance Studies and History, Duke University. Author of Haiti: The Aftershocks of History This collection draws necessary critical attention to how theatre and performance animate the work of a key figure in Caribbean fiction and drama. Using an innovative scholarly and artistic approach, the collection incorporates leading and new voices in Haitian studies and Francophone studies on Chauvet’s depictions of revolt.— Soyica Diggs Colbert, Professor of African American Studies and Theater & Performance Studies, Georgetown University. Author of Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics

In Beyond the Legacy of the Missionaries and East Indians, Jerome Teelucksingh offers a revisionist perspective of the role of the Presbyterian Church in Trinidad. He is particularly interested in social mobility as regards the Indo-Caribbean diaspora in the era following the First World War. He argues that the Presbyterian Church in the Caribbean was particularly interested in women’s rights. As such, he examines the dynamic between local expertise and Canadian missionary work in such social uplift processes.

Thanks to Renzo Duin's annotated translation, the voice of Lodewijk Schmidt—an Afrodiasporic Saramaka Maroon from Suriname—is finally available for Anglophone audiences worldwide. More than anything else, Schmidt's journals constitute meticulous ethnographic accounts telling the tragic story of the Indigenous Peoples of the Eastern Guiana Highlands (northern Brazil and southern French Guiana and Suriname). Schmidt's is a story that takes account of the pathological mechanisms of colonialism in which Indigenous Peoples and African Diaspora communities—both victims of colonialism—vilify each other, falling privy to the divide-and-conquer mentality mechanisms of colonialism. Moreover, silenced in the original 1942 publication, Schmidt was sent on a covert mission to determine if the Nazis had established bases and airfields at the southern border of Suriname. Schmidt described the precariousness of the Amazonian forest and the Indigenous Peoples and African Diasporic people who lived and continue to live there, drawing on language that foreshadows our current anthropic and ecological concerns. Duin's profound knowledge of the history, geography, and ecology of the region contextualizes Schmidt's accounts in a new introduction and in his analysis and afterthought forces us to take account of the catastrophe that is deforestation and ethnocide of the Indigenous Peoples of Amazonian Guiana.Lodewijk J. Schmidt (1898-1992) Saramaka from Gansee (modern Saamaka spelling: Ganzë; pronounced Ganzè), upper Suriname river, Suriname, South America. The Saramaka are one of the largest African Diaspora communities in Suriname. He was educated by the Herrnhutters in the school of the Moravian Church, and during the mid-twentieth century he took part in several momentous expeditions, such as the 1935-38 Border Expedition between Suriname and Brazil. The present work is the annotated translation of his accounts of a tri-partite expedition conducted between 1940 and 1942 at and across the southern border of Suriname.Renzo S. Duin (1974) obtained a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Florida (USA). Between 1996 and 2019 he conducted over 40 months of fieldwork in the Guianas (Suriname, French Guiana, and Guyana). His research and publications cover a broad range of topics: socio-political landscape studies; material culture; intangible heritage; social memory; oral history; identity; ethno-astronomy; historical ecology; decolonization; and the intertwining nature of these topics, and as such offers an alternative to the twentieth century model of tropical forest cultures in Amazonia.

Generations of West Indian migrants have long called Central America home. The descendants of these Creole English speakers live in communal enclaves along the Caribbean coast of Central America, where their Creole heritage and language are in contact zones with Spanish language and culture. When Creoles and Spanish Collide: Language and Culture in the Caribbean presents contemporary insight into these intra-Caribbean diasporic communities on how they grapple with evolving Creole identity and representation, language contact, language endangerment, and linguistic discrimination. Communal resilience oftentimes manifests itself via linguistic innovation and creativity. Editors Glenda-Alicia Leung and Miki Loschky showcase the scholarship of emerging and established regional and transatlantic scholars in When Creoles and Spanish Collide, which serves as a decolonizing research space.

This book conveys a unique, unrivaled, and moving insight into the life of Monty Howell, the little-know eldest son of Leonard Howell, regarded as the Father of Rastafari. Opening several files, over the pages, the man is revealed behind the son. Being both an actor and storyteller of History, Monty Howell blends anecdotes, reflections, and revelations, avoiding no subject, even the most delicate and scorching. With confidence, he takes you through his childhood memories, his conflicts with Jamaica, and his reconciliations on behalf of his father’s legacy. With bold, mature, incisive, and provocative assertions, he even reframed the Rasta experiences and the development of Rastafari, altering the terms of the knowledge and the subsequent discourse.

The Things of Others: Ethnographies, Histories, and Other Artefacts deals with the things mainly, but not only, mobilized by anthropologists in order to produce knowledge about the African American, the Afro-Brazilian and the Afro-Cuban during the 1930s. However, the book's goal is not to dig up evidence of the creation of an epistemology of knowledge and its transnational connections. The research on which this book is based suggests that the artefacts created in fieldwork, offices, libraries, laboratories, museums, and other places and experiences – beyond the important fact that these places and situations involved actors other than the anthropologists themselves – have been different things during their troubled existence. The book seeks to make these differences apparent, highlighting rather than concealing the relationships between partial modes of making and being ‘Afro’ as a subject of science. If the artefacts created in a variety of situations have been different things, we should ask what sort of things they were and how the actors involved in their creation sought to make them meaningful. The book foregrounds these discontinuous and ever-changing contours.

26 Years a Slave represents the inaugural book-length study of the little-known “Spanish Negroes,” or non-white Spanish-speaking sailors enslaved in colonial North America. Bringing to light their history of slavery and resistance, the book tells the incredible story of the free-born Juan Miranda. Enslaved in New York, Miranda fights an arduous legal battle to win his freedom. His attorney, William Kempe, makes a strong case for his rights and against slavery based on skin color. This well-illustrated account touches on legal history, the War of Jenkins’ Ear, and the so-called “Slave Plot” of 1741. 26 Years a Slave is not just a translation of the critically acclaimed publication 26 años de esclavitud but a revised enriched version, containing a selection of additional study cases. The original Spanish edition of this book received the following awards:Willi Paul Adams Award, Organization of American Historians, Bloomington, Indiana, USA (2023)Best Academic Themed Book, The 24th International Latino Book Awards, Gold medal, Los Angeles, USA (2022)The Victor Villaseñor Best Latino Focused Nonfiction Book Award – Spanish or Bilingual, The 24th International Latino Book Awards, Silver medal, Los Angeles, USA (2022) Best Biography – Spanish or Bilingual, The 24th International Latino Book Awards, Silver medal, Los Angeles, USA (2022)