Rescuing Our Roots

Download or read book Rescuing Our Roots written by Andrea J. Queeley and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2017-05-16 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Contributes new perspectives on historical black identity formation and contemporary activism in Cuba."--Choice "Provides invaluable insight into the histories and lives of Cubans who trace their origins to the Anglo-Caribbean."--Robert Whitney, author of State and Revolution in Cuba: Mass Mobilization and Political Change, 1920-1940 "Adds a missing piece to the existing literature about the renewal of black activism in Cuba, all the while showing the links and fractures between pre- and post-1959 society."--Devyn Spence Benson, Davidson College In the early twentieth century, laborers from the British West Indies immigrated to Cuba, attracted by employment opportunities. The Anglo-Caribbean communities flourished, but after 1959, many of their cultural institutions were dismantled: the revolution dictated that in the name of unity there would be no hyphenated Cubans. This book turns an ethnographic lens on their descendants who--during the Special Period in the 1990s--moved to "rescue their roots" by revitalizing their ethnic associations and reestablishing ties outside the island. Based on Andrea J. Queeley's fieldwork in Santiago and Guantánamo, Rescuing Our Roots looks at local and regional identity formations as well as racial politics in revolutionary Cuba. Queeley argues that, as the island experienced a resurgence in racism due in part to the emergence of the dual economy and the reliance on tourism, Anglo-Caribbean Cubans revitalized their communities and sought transnational connections not just in the hope of material support but also to challenge the association between blackness, inferiority, and immorality. Their desire for social mobility, political engagement, and a better economic situation operated alongside the fight for black respectability. Unlike most studies of black Cubans, which focus on Afro-Cuban religion or popular culture, Queeley's penetrating investigation offers a view of strategies and modes of black belonging that transcend ideological, temporal, and spatial boundaries. A volume in the series Contemporary Cuba, edited by John M. Kirk

Download or read book Rescuing the Gospel from the Cowboys written by Richard Twiss and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2015-06-09 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The gospel of Jesus has not always been good news for Native Americans. But despite the far-reaching effects of colonialism, some Natives have forged culturally authentic ways to follow Jesus. In his final work, Richard Twiss surveys the complicated history of Christian missions among Indigenous peoples and voices a hopeful vision of contextual Native Christian faith.

Download or read book The Silver Women written by Joan Flores-Villalobos and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2023-01-31 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The construction of the Panama Canal is typically viewed as a marvel of American ingenuity. What is less visible, and less understood, is the project’s dependence on the labor of Black migrant women. The Silver Women shifts the focus of this monumental endeavor to the West Indian women who travelled to Panama, inviting readers to place women’s intimate lives, choices, grief, and ambition at the center of the economic and geopolitical transformation created by the construction of the Panama Canal and U.S. imperial expansion. Joan Flores-Villalobos argues that Black West Indian women made the canal construction possible by providing the indispensable everyday labor of social reproduction. West Indian women built a provisioning economy that fed, housed, and cared for the segregated Black West Indian labor force, in effect subsidizing the construction effort and the racial calculus that separated pay in silver for Black workers and gold for white Americans. But while also subject to racial discrimination and segregation, West Indian women mostly worked outside the umbrella of U.S. canal authorities. They did not hold contracts, had little access to official services and wages, and received pay in both silver and gold. From this position, they found ways to skirt, and at times subvert, the legal, moral, and economic parameters imperial authorities sought to impose on the migrant workforce. West Indian women developed important strategies of claims-making, kinship, community building, and market adaptation that helped them navigate the contradictions and violence of U.S. empire. In the meantime, these strategies of social reproduction nurtured further West Indian migrations, linking Panama to places like Harlem and Santiago de Cuba. The Silver Women is thus a history of Black women’s labor of social reproduction as integral to U.S. imperial infrastructure, the global Caribbean diaspora, and women’s own survival.

Download or read book Caribbean Military Encounters written by Shalini Puri and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-05-19 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a much-needed study of the lived experience of militarization in the Caribbean from 1914 to the present. It offers an alternative to policy and security studies by drawing on the perspectives of literary and cultural studies, history, anthropology, ethnography, music, and visual art. Rather than opposing or defending militarization per se, this book focuses attention on how Caribbean people negotiate militarization in their everyday lives. The volume explores topics such as the US occupation of Haiti; British West Indians in World War I; the British naval invasion of Anguilla; military bases including Chaguaramas, Vieques and Guantánamo; the militarization of the police; sex work and the military; drug wars and surveillance; calypso commentaries; private security armies; and border patrol operations.

Download or read book Populism in the Civil Sphere written by Jeffrey C. Alexander and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-12-07 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even as the specter of populism haunts contemporary societies, scholars have not been able to agree about what it is. Except for one thing: a deviation from democracy, the source, it seems, of the precarious position in which so many societies find themselves today. This volume aims to break the Gordian knot of “populism” by bringing a new social theory to bear and, in so doing so, suggesting that normative judgments about this misunderstood phenomenon need to be reconsidered as well. Populism is not a democratic deviation but a naturally occurring dimension of civil sphere dynamics, fatal to democracy only at the extremes. Because populism is highly polarizing, it has the effect of inducing anxiety that civil solidarity is breaking apart. Left populists feel as if civil solidarity is an illusion, that democratic discourse is a fig leaf for private interests, and that the social and cultural differentiation that vouchsafes the independence of the civil sphere merely reflects the hegemony of narrow professional interests or those of a ruling class. Right populists share the same distrust, even repulsion, for the civil sphere. What seems civil to the center and left, like affirmative action or open immigration, they call out as particularistic; honored civil icons, such as Holocaust memorials, they trash. How can the sense of a vital civil center survive such censure from populism on the left and the right? Populism in the Civil Sphere provides compelling answers to these fundamental questions. Its contributions are both sophisticated theoretical interventions and deeply researched empirical studies, and it will be of great interest to anyone concerned about the most important political developments of our time.

Download or read book Empire's Guest Workers written by Matthew Casey and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-09 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative analysis of Haitian migrant experience, central to the exploration of race, politics, and development during US military occupation in Cuba.

Download or read book International Genealogy and Local History written by Ruth Hedegaard and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2008-08-27 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contains the papers delivered at sessions organised by the Genealogy and Local History Section at the annual conferences of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) between 2001 and 2005; many of these are updated versions of the original presentations. A wide range of significant issues and trends in historical and family research is covered. The authors, all experts in their own fields, address those engaged in delivering genealogy and local history services in libraries, archives and museums across the world. Moreover, they focus on the growing army of enthusiasts directly engaged in tracing their own ancestral and local history. Several papers give useful hints on how various resources can be used to further personal research. These include the exciting opportunities offered by the digitisation of primary resources and by the impact of the powerful new technology, among other things now on offer through DNA profiling.