Abeng

Abeng PDF Author: Michelle Cliff
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780930436186
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description

Abeng

Abeng PDF Author: Michelle Cliff
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780930436186
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 167

Get Book Here

Book Description


Abeng

Abeng PDF Author: Michelle Cliff
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0452274834
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
A lyrical coming-of-age story and an essential retelling of the colonial history of Jamaica. Originally published in 1984, this critically acclaimed novel is the story of Clare Savage, a light-skinned, middle-class twelve-year-old growing up in Jamaica in the 1950s. As Clare tries to find her own identity and place in her culture, she carries the burden of her mixed heritage. There are the Maroons, who used the conch shell—the abeng—to pass messages as they fought against their English enslavers. And there is her white great-great-grandfather, Judge Savage, who committed a terrible act of violence on the eve of emancipation. In Clare’s struggle to reconcile the conflicting legacies of her own personal lineage, esteemed Caribbean author Michelle Cliff dramatically confronts the cultural and psychological brutality inflicted upon the island and its people by colonialism.

No Telephone to Heaven

No Telephone to Heaven PDF Author: Michelle Cliff
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0452275695
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
A brilliant Jamaican-American writer takes on the themes of colonialism, race, myth, and political awakening. Originally published in 1987, this critically acclaimed novel is the continuation of the story that began in Abeng following Clare Savage, a mixed-race woman who returns to her Jamaican homeland after years away. In this deeply poetic novel, Clare must make sense of her middle-class childhood memories in contrast with another side of Jamaica which she is only now beginning to see: one of extreme poverty. And Jamaica—almost a character in the book—comes to life with its extraordinary beauty, coexisting with deep human tragedy. Through the course of the book, Clare sees the violence that rises out of extreme oppression, the split loyalties of a colonized person, and what it means to be neither white nor Black in that environment. The result is a deeply moving, canonical work.

Radicalism and Social Change in Jamaica, 1960-1972

Radicalism and Social Change in Jamaica, 1960-1972 PDF Author: Obika Gray
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9780870496615
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
In August 1962, the island nation of Jamaica achieved independence from Great Britain. In this provocative social and political history of the first decade of independence, Obika Gray explores the impact of radical social movements on political change in Jamaica during a turbulent formative era. Led by a minority elite and a middle class of mixed racial origins, two parties, each with its associated workers' union, emerged to dominate the postcolonial political scene. Gray argues that party leaders, representing the dominant social class, felt vulnerable to attack and resorted to dictatorial measures to consolidate their power. These measures, domestic social crises, and the worldwide rise of Black Power and other Third World ideologies provoked persistent challenges to the established parties' political and moral authority. With students, radical intellectuals, and the militant urban poor in the vanguard, the protest movement took many forms. Rastafarian religious symbolism, rebel youth's cultural innovations, efforts to organize independent labor unions, and the intelligentsia's varied attempts to use mass media to reach broader audiences--all influenced the course of political events in this period. Grounding his tale in relevant theory, Gray persuasively contends that, despite its narrow social and geographical base of support, this urban protest movement succeeded in moving the major parties toward broader and more progressive agendas.

The Difference Place Makes

The Difference Place Makes PDF Author: Angeletta K. M. Gourdine
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
ISBN: 9780814209264
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description


Race, Class, and Political Symbols

Race, Class, and Political Symbols PDF Author: Anita M. Waters
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351495062
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
Dr. Waters is one of a new breed of analysts for whom the interpenetration of politics, culture, and national development is key to a larger integration of social research. Race, Class, and Political Symbols is a remarkably cogent examination of the uses of Rastafarian symbols and reggae music in Jamaican electoral campaigns. The author describes and analyzes the way Jamaican politicians effectively employ improbable strategies for electoral success. She includes interviews with reggae musicians, Rastafarian leaders, government and party officials, and campaign managers. Jamaican democracy and politics are fused to its culture; hence campaign advertisements, reggae songs, party pamphlets, and other documents are part of the larger picture of Caribbean life and letters. This volume centers and comes to rest on the adoption of Rastafarian symbols in the context of Jamaica's democratic institutions, which are characterized by vigorous campaigning, electoral fraud, and gang violence. In recent national elections, such violence claimed the lives of hundreds of people. Significant issues are dealt with in this cultural setting: race differentials among Whites, Browns, and Blacks; the rise of anti-Cubanism; the Rastafarians' response to the use of their symbols; and the current status of Rastafarian ideological legitimacy.

Literary Black Power in the Caribbean

Literary Black Power in the Caribbean PDF Author: Rita Keresztesi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000221563
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
Literary Black Power in the Caribbean focuses on the Black Power movement in the anglophone Caribbean as represented and critically debated in literary texts, music and film. This volume is groundbreaking in its focus on the creative arts and artists in their evaluations of, and insights on, the relevance of the Black Power message across the region. The author takes a cultural studies approach to bring together the political with the aesthetic, enriching an already fertile debate on the era and the subject of Black Power in the Caribbean region. The chapters discuss various aspects of Black Power in the Caribbean: on the pages of journals and magazines, at contemporary conferences that radicalized academia to join forces with communities, in fiction and essays by writers and intellectuals, in calypso and reggae music, and in the first films produced in the Caribbean. Produced at the 50th anniversary of the 1970 Black Power Revolution in Port of Spain, Trinidad, this timely book will be of interest to students and academics focusing on Black Power, Caribbean literary and cultural studies, African diaspora, and Global South radical political and cultural theory.

"Rock it Come Over"

Author: Olive Lewin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789766400286
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
This volume describes the music and lore of Jamaica from the early 16th century through emancipation in 1838 to the mid-20th century. Olive Lewin explores the role of music in the lives of slaves and explores the life and beliefs of the Kumina cult queen, Imogene Queenie Kennedy.

Postcolonial Representations

Postcolonial Representations PDF Author: Françoise Lionnet
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501724541
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Passionate allegiances to competing theoretical camps have stifled dialogue among today's literary critics, asserts Françoise Lionnet. Discussing a number of postcolonial narratives by women from a variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, she offers a comparative feminist approach that can provide common ground for debates on such issues as multiculturalism, universalism, and relativism. Lionnet uses the concept of métissage, or cultural mixing, in her readings of a rich array of Francophone and Anglophone texts—by Michelle Cliff from Jamaica, Suzanne Dracius-Pinalie from Martinique, Ananda Devi from Mauritius, Maryse Conde and Myriam Warner-Vieyra from Guadeloupe, Gayl Jones from the United States, Bessie Head from Botswana, Nawal El Saadawi from Egypt, and Leila Sebbar from Algeria and France. Focusing on themes of exile and displacement and on narrative treatments of culturally sanctioned excision, polygamy, and murder, Lionnet examines the psychological and social mechanisms that allow individuals to negotiate conflicting cultural influences. In her view, these writers reject the opposition between self and other and base their self-portrayals on a métissage of forms and influences. Lionnet's perspective has much to offer critics and theorists, whether they are interested in First or Third World contexts, American or French critical perspectives, essentialist or poststructuralist epistemologies.

If I Could Write this in Fire

If I Could Write this in Fire PDF Author: Michelle Cliff
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816654743
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 105

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Book Description
In her first book-length collection of nonfiction, Cliff interweaves reflections on her life in Jamaica, England, and the United States with a powerful and sustained critique of racism, homophobia, and social injustice. If I Could Write This in Fire begins by tracing her transatlantic journey from Jamaica to England, coalescing around a graceful, elliptical account of her childhood friendship with Zoe, who is dark-skinned and from an impoverished, rural background; the divergent life courses that each is forced to take; and the class and color tensions that shape their lives as adults. In other essays and poems, Cliff writes about the discovery of her distinctive, diasporic literary voice, recalls her wild colonial girlhood and sexual awakening, and recounts traveling through an American landscape of racism, colonialism, and genocide - a history of violence embodied in seemingly innocuous souvenirs and tourist sites.