<p> Maroon communities are often portrayed as renegade groups of Africans living within or on the fringes of some of the more popular slave societies such as Jamaica, Saint-Domingue (Haiti), Suriname, or Brazil, whose purpose or goals in their existence was never to strive towards universal emancipation of the African lot, and whose resistance and radicalism, if occurring during the Age of Revolution (i.e. Haiti), is often attributed to European influences during that era. This socio-cultural and political history about a lesser known group of maroons in Dominica challenges the preconceived notions of African maroonage and resistance, and is original in four ways: One, this dissertation demonstrates that the maroons of Dominica who lived in the interior of the island worked with the enslaved population on plantations on several occasions to overthrow the British colonial government in an attempt to assist their African brethren in freedom; Secondly, this work highlights the African origins of the spiritual and political philosophies, particularly the lesser credited Igbo, who comprised of a significant portion of Africans in Dominica, are what guided their anti-slavery and anti-colonial resistance; Thirdly, the maroons and enslaved populations, who demonstrated alliances with one another in Dominica during the 1790s and early nineteenth century were not influenced by French Revolutionary ideals, but were pursued for an alliance, and the former, in particular, often rejected alliances with French Revolutionary sympathizers; Lastly, this dissertation takes the maroons of Dominica outside the confines of a national history and connects it to the greater African Diaspora.</p>

<p> This study traces the history of birth control and reproductive politics in the West Indies from the 1930s to the 1970s, focusing on Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, and Bermuda. During this period, a diverse group of activists began to organize in order to spread modern contraceptives to the working classes. These efforts provoked widespread debate over reproduction and led to the opening of the region's first birth control clinics from the 1930s to 1950s. Birth control advocates also pressured politicians to support the cause, and by the late 1960s/early 1970s nearly every newly-independent government in the region had committed itself to state-funded family planning services. </p><p> Utilizing papers of family planning advocates and associations, government records, newspapers, pamphlets, and reports, this study places these birth control campaigns and debates within the context of Caribbean political and social movements, the rise of the international birth control campaign, working class family life and gender relations, the decline of British rule, and the expansion of political independence across the region. It demonstrates that &mdash; as argued by much of the scholarly literature on the international birth control movement &mdash; early campaigns in the West Indies were initiated and funded largely by local and foreign (white) elites, and were pushed by many conservative actors who blamed political and economic instability on working class (black) fertility as a means to stave off wider reforms. However, this study also shows that the birth control cause found support among a much wider demographic on these islands, including anti-imperial politicians who incorporated birth control into broader development plans, doctors, nurses, and social workers who saw it as a critical measure to aid working class families, black nationalist feminists who argued that it was a woman's right, and working class women and men who seized the opportunity to exercise a measure of control over their reproductive lives. These actors shaped both reproductive politics and the delivery of birth control services on the ground over the course of the twentieth century, producing campaigns that were more diverse, decentralized, and dynamic than they appear on the surface.</p>

<p> During the 17^th Century, the Caribbean saw an explosion in seaborne raiding. The most common targets of these raids were Spanish ships and coastal towns. Some of the men who went on these raids experienced degrees of social and economic mobility that would not have been possible in continental Europe. This was because the 17^th Century Caribbean created an environment where such mobility was possible. Among these was a Welshman was known to his compatriots as Harry Morgan. By the end of his life, Morgan would become one of the most famous buccaneers in history, a wealthy sugar planter, the Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica, and a knight. </p><p> No one is exactly sure of Morgan's social status before he entered the Caribbean. Historians largely agree that he was born to a freeholding family in Wales, although some dissenters contend that Morgan entered the Caribbean as an indentured servant. From either position, he experienced a high degree of social and economic mobility through his raids against the Spanish Empire and the conventional businesses that those raids funded. His life does not represent the way that social or economic mobility worked for a typical buccaneer. What it does represent is the best case scenario for an individual who came to the Caribbean and engaged in buccaneering. Morgan utilized his raiding as a means to fund more conventional business interests such as sugar planting. This paper argues that the Caribbean provided a unique political, economic, and military atmosphere for an individual to climb the social and economic ladder from Harry Morgan, a common buccaneer, to Sir Henry Morgan, Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica and Admiral of Buccaneers.</p>

<p> This study helps to broaden a growing body of literature by examining the growth of an urban Jamaican community in the southeastern port of Santiago de Cuba, Cuba.</p><p> <i>Background:</i> When the British colony of Jamaica abolished slavery in 1838, the upper classes attempted to tie free workers to sugar plantations; ex&ndash;slaves attempted to move away from the estates as soon as possible. Despite an increase in internal migration after abolition, the majority of the black population remained in rural areas, and dedicated their labor to the land. The Jamaican elite successfully argued for the introduction of contract laborers from Asia as a replacement for the slavery system. It brought the planters some limited economic success as export crops&mdash;particularly sugar&mdash;had the chance to rebound, but planters used immigrants to drive down wages. Increasing population pressure on the land, a series of natural disasters, few economic opportunities, and ineligibility for political participation prompted Jamaicans to look outside of their homeland for socioeconomic improvement by the late 1800s. Travelers emigrated in significant numbers to Panama, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua with the hope of earning higher wages, sending remittances to family members, and returning home with enough money to live independently. As work on the Panama Canal ended by the 1910s, Jamaicans turned their sights back to the Caribbean. During the second half of the 19th century, Cuba was one of Spain's two remaining Caribbean colonies despite attempting several wars of independence. At the end of the final effort in 1898, the United States intervened against the metropolis; the two powers reached an agreement giving possession of Cuba to the US, who would help to establish political order and assist the islanders in ruling themselves. US investment in Cuban industry, especially in sugar, allowed foreigners to purchase enormous tracts of land and to influence the restructuring of the island's political, social, and economic landscape. The seasonal sugar cane harvest attracted foreign workers from Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean seeking better wages than what they could find at home; between 1912 and 1920, thousands of British West Indians traveled to Cuba to labor in the agricultural industry or to occupy niches in the service industry. </p><p> However, Cubans scrutinized and discriminated against them for being black, for being foreign, for driving down wages, or some combination thereof. Though Cubans claimed to live in a color-blind society, racial discrimination persisted and the white elite supported a policy of &ldquo;whitening&rdquo; the island through selective immigration from Spain and miscegenation; these racial and cultural prejudices were particularly divisive given that a significant percentage of Cubans were of African descent. Furthermore, the general population was frustrated by the lack of Cuban sovereignty and saw foreign workers as complicit in the US intervention. As a result, calls for nationalism tended to veer into xenophobia and racism during economic downturns in the early 1920s and 1930s. </p><p> <i>Methods/Sources:</i> Due to limited access to archival sources in Cuba, the bulk of the data is from the British National Archives: the consular reports summarized political and social upheaval in Cuba, collected publications from the Cuban government, and gave a perspective of the migration from the viewpoint of the British government. Similar information came from the U.S. National Archives at College Park, Maryland. The provincial archive of Santiago de Cuba provided information on migrant activities: marriage and citizenship documents; and social, cultural, and political organizations. It also yielded the Cuban government's responses to West Indian immigration. Correspondence between colonial officials and international organizations came from the Jamaican National Archives; the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute for Social and Economic Studies at the University of the West Indies, Mona, held interviews of Jamaicans who lived during the period under study. Cuban and Jamaican newspaper reports detailed economic and political conditions in the two islands from journalists' investigations, letters from migrants, and governmental decrees. </p><p> <i>Findings:</i> I relate how different groups in Cuba reacted to Jamaican migration: the support for and against it, how this support changed over time, and how it differed by geography. I also attempt to give a fuller description of who these migrants were. I discuss their relationships with other West Indians and Cubans, their marriages, and the paths that they took to Cuban citizenship. How gender influenced and differentiated Jamaicans' experiences when they went abroad&mdash;how they were perceived and treated, and how they fared&mdash;receives special attention.</p><p> The work concludes by examining the reaction of the British officials who represented British West Indians in Cuba. It also puts the migration into a broader context by examining black British subjects who traveled to other parts of Latin America and the Caribbean during this era. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)</p>

This project explores the military and political mobilization of rural and urban working sectors of Puerto Rican society as the Island transitioned from Spanish to U.S. imperial rule. In particular, my research is interested in examining how this shift occurs via patterns of inclusion-exclusion within the military and the various forms of citizenship that are subsequently transformed into socio-economic and political enfranchisement. Analyzing the armed forces as a culture-homogenizing agent helps to explain the formation and evolution of Puerto Rican national identities from 1868 to 1952, and how these evolving identities affected the political choices of the Island. This phenomenon, I argue, led to the creation of the Estado Libre Asociado in 1952. The role played by the tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans in the metropolitan military in the final creation of a populist project taking place under colonial rule in the Island was threefold. Firstly, these soldiers served as political leverage during WWII to speed up the decolonization process. Secondly, they incarnated the commonwealth ideology by fighting and dying in the Korean War. Finally, the Puerto Rican soldiers filled the ranks of the army of technicians and technocrats attempting to fulfill the promises of a modern industrial Puerto Rico after the returned from the wars. ^ In contrast to Puerto Rican popular national mythology and mainstream academic discourse that has marginalized the agency of subaltern groups; I argue that the Puerto Rican soldier was neither cannon fodder for the metropolis nor the pawn of the Creole political elites. Regaining their masculinity, upward mobility, and political enfranchisement were among some of the incentives enticing the Puerto Rican peasant into military service. The enfranchisement of subaltern sectors via military service ultimately created a very liberal, popular, and broad definition of Puerto Rico’s national identity. When the Puerto Rican peasant/soldier became the embodiment of the Commonwealth formula, the political leaders involved in its design were in fact responding to these soldiers’ complex identities, which among other things compelled them to defend the “American Nation” to show their Puertorriqueñidad . ^

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In this thesis I investigate connections between modern Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean fiction between the 1950s and the present. My study brings into focus literary representations of inter-related histories and cultures and problematises the fragmentation of Caribbean studies into separate academic disciplines. The disciplinary compartmentalisation of Caribbean studies into English studies on the one hand and French and Francophone studies on the other has contributed to a reading of Caribbean literature within separate linguistic spheres. This division is strikingly reflected in the scarcity of any sustained literary criticism that acknowledges cultural and literary interpenetration within the archipelago. My comparative study of selected Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean fiction allows me to account for the ethnic, cultural, linguistic and historical diversity of Caribbean societies while, at the same time, foregrounding their inter-relatedness. Through a series of specific case studies the thesis illuminates ways in which theoretical concepts and literary tropes have travelled within the archipelago. Through a close reading of selected narrative fiction I will contextualise and analyse significant underlying linguistic, ethnic and cultural links between the various Caribbean societies which are largely based on the shared history of slavery, colonialism and decolonisation processes. The themes of migration, transformation and creolisation will be at the centre of my investigation. Chapter One establishes the historical and literary-critical framework for this thesis by engaging with key developments in Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean writing from the 1920s until the present. My comparison of the most influential trends in both Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literature and criticism from the discourse of négritude to postcolonial studies seeks to highlight connections between these two linguistically divided fields of study. The analysis of Caribbean fiction in Chapters Two to Four pursues such theoretical, stylistic and thematic links further. Chapter Two challenges the conception of postwar Antillean and West Indian writing produced in the metropolis as distinct literary canons by drawing attention to thematic connections between the two traditions. Through the comparison of The Lonely Londoners by Samuel Selvon and La Fête à Paris by Joseph Zobel it argues that these continuities represent a wider trend in ‘black European’ writing. Chapter Three examines concepts of cultural identity which have been central to Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literature and criticism during the last two decades. Specifically it focuses on the notions of hybridity, créolité/creoleness and créolisation/creolisation which it discusses in relation to Robert Antoni’s novel Divina Trace and Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco. The final chapter focuses on Shani Mootoo’s and Gisèle Pineau’s representations of specific female experiences of trauma which are related to reiterated colonial violence. Their fictional portrayal of suppressed memories can be read in light of recent critical debates about a collective remembrance of the history of slavery and colonialism.

No início da Guerra da Secessão (1861-1865), os Estados Unidos promoveram negociações internacionais que pretendiam transferir seus afrodescendentes, em diversas condições de escravidão e liberdade para diversos países independentes da América Latina e possessões coloniais no Caribe. Ainda que tais negociações não tenham resultado de fato na realocação de homens e mulheres afro-americanos, as trocas diplomáticas, bem como outras fontes documentais, revelaram interessantes debates sobre escravidão, raça, construção nacional e o trabalho dependente no pós-abolição, que fazem do tema uma espécie de microcosmo que abrange questões substanciais que marcaram as mudanças nos mundos do trabalho no século XIX. Os projetos de colonização, como então foram chamados, para população afroamericana foram propostos e negociados por Washington com os seguintes países e colônias abrangidos pelo presente trabalho: Brasil, Equador, atual Panamá (pertencente, à época, à atual Colômbia), Costa Rica, Nicarágua. Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Jamaica, Belize (Honduras Britânicas), Guiana Britânica, Suriname (colônia da Holanda), na ilha dinamarquesa de Santa Cruz, Haiti e Libéria. / In the early years of its Civil War, the United States Government proposed to resettle African- Americans throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Though these schemes did not ultimately come to fruition, the intentions of the United States and the responses of negotiating nations reflected broader debates on slavery, race, nation building and indenture labor in the post abolition era. These colonization projects, as they were then called, aimed to resettle African-Americans in countries such as Brazil, Ecuador, present-day Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Jamaica, present-day Belize, British Guiana, Surinam, St. Croix Island, Haiti and Liberia.

No início da Guerra da Secessão (1861-1865), os Estados Unidos promoveram negociações internacionais que pretendiam transferir seus afrodescendentes, em diversas condições de escravidão e liberdade para diversos países independentes da América Latina e possessões coloniais no Caribe. Ainda que tais negociações não tenham resultado de fato na realocação de homens e mulheres afro-americanos, as trocas diplomáticas, bem como outras fontes documentais, revelaram interessantes debates sobre escravidão, raça, construção nacional e o trabalho dependente no pós-abolição, que fazem do tema uma espécie de microcosmo que abrange questões substanciais que marcaram as mudanças nos mundos do trabalho no século XIX. Os projetos de colonização, como então foram chamados, para população afroamericana foram propostos e negociados por Washington com os seguintes países e colônias abrangidos pelo presente trabalho: Brasil, Equador, atual Panamá (pertencente, à época, à atual Colômbia), Costa Rica, Nicarágua. Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Jamaica, Belize (Honduras Britânicas), Guiana Britânica, Suriname (colônia da Holanda), na ilha dinamarquesa de Santa Cruz, Haiti e Libéria. / In the early years of its Civil War, the United States Government proposed to resettle African- Americans throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Though these schemes did not ultimately come to fruition, the intentions of the United States and the responses of negotiating nations reflected broader debates on slavery, race, nation building and indenture labor in the post abolition era. These colonization projects, as they were then called, aimed to resettle African-Americans in countries such as Brazil, Ecuador, present-day Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Jamaica, present-day Belize, British Guiana, Surinam, St. Croix Island, Haiti and Liberia.