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This chapter is a follow-up anecdote to the concert described in the previous one, Introducing at the very end one, an illegitimate child begot by Edgar Palm, the last great composer of the Palm dynasty. They had been of Swedish origin who built a bridge between Europe and Afro- Caribbean music.

In summarizing the main points of the book, this conclusion notes that in the black calypso craze it was not Trinidadian culture that was stolen, but the culture industry and the temporality of the fad. This stolen time was not an imperial appropriation but a form of exchange across black difference within the idiom of fad culture. This book examines the constrained possibilities of this exchange as it occurred in the short-lived North American fad for calypso. By taking seriously these counterfeit performances of Afro-Caribbean cultures and histories, Stolen Time argues that the black calypso craze provides insight into the development of diasporic consciousness in the mid-twentieth century as African American performers self-reflexively and circuitously engaged with Caribbean performance traditions. This exchange was not one way; it went in multiple directions, including back to Trinidad.

This chapter exposes the sporadic yet barely recorded struggle for the hegemony of ideas in the radical Caribbean movement of the seventies. The resilience of the Caribbean revolutionary movement was primarily due to an alliance between middle class intellectuals, who were of the Marxist-Leninist variety, and popular grassroots supporters, who had their own worldview of African-centered revolutionism. The chapter provides a critical Caribbean historical analysis that includes understanding the boundaries to political and social action set by a particular socio-economic and geopolitical moment, as well as exploring the ideological landscape that determines unique social and political outcomes. It cites the works of Trinidadian calypsonian Valentino and Jamaican reggae vocalist Pablo Moses in illustrating the Afro-Caribbean organic philosophy of the seventies.

This chapter examines Paget Henry's book, Caliban's Reason, where he argues for the existence of an Afro-Caribbean philosophy that operates in the crevices of the more dominant forms of Caribbean knowledge. Henry begins by discussing the traditional African philosophy, along with Pan-Africanism, Afro-American philosophy, and contemporary Caribbean Marxism. He seeks to make the connection between traditional African philosophy and that of African descendants in the diaspora. The latter part of the book is comprised of critical analyses concerning mostly Caribbean individuals and intellectual trends, in which Henry tries to identify the continuities that support the existence of an Afro-Caribbean philosophy, and then simultaneously indicates his preferred direction for its development in the near future.

Chapter two focuses on well-known Afro-Caribbean women writers, Jamaica Kincaid and Edwidge Danticat, who reside in the United States and make a significant contribution to “resistance culture.” Through narratives of return, Kincaid and Danticat challenge exploitative consumption and tourism in their literary works by exposing and utilizing the power that lies in the production of history. They do this by using their mobility and prominence in North American literary markets to inform potential tourists and fellow Caribbeans abroad of the injustices of the tourist industry that are rooted in the history of slavery and colonialism. Kincaid directly confronts and criticizes the tourist industry in her satirical essay/memoir A Small Place; while Danticat participates in and critiques the tourist industry with her travel guide/memoir After the Dance. They produce alternative travel narratives that resist the travel guide genre, which has historically defined “natives” (the other) outside of history, modernity, and humanity.

“Transatlantic Coloniality” focuses on the work of Wifredo Lam and Virgilio Piñera to explore the construction of a national Cuban cannon in the 40s. From the perspective of Transatlantic Studies, the development of Cuban arts illustrates the dynamic tensions between those seeking to build Cuban national arts emerging from a whitewashed colonial past and those cosmopolitans, such as Lam and Piñera, emphasizing popular and Afro-Caribbean culture. Colonial discourses were, in both cases, at the center of the struggle to establish and consolidate the Cuban arts. Absorbed and integrated in one case as a historical foundation, it was critically questioned by Lam and Piñera.

This chapter asks what counts as “black experience” by focusing on Touré’s claim that Caribbean people of African descent lack cultural understanding about and interest in the black experience in America. Taking up some of the roles played by Afro-Caribbean identifications, it examines the ways in which nation, empire, and questions of diaspora complicate discussions of an imagined “black identity.” It also considers how restrictive and confining conceptualizations of black experience as bounded by geography and culture might limit the quality of the creative engagement we might productively engender, and what happens to race in the absence of transnational global discourses of blackness. The chapter concludes by offering a reading of Stephanie Black’s 2001 documentary Life and Debt.

In chapter 1, I lay out my theory of elevated minority status and linked fate of black ethnics—an extension of Dawson’s (1994) black utility heuristic—in order to better understand elevated minority status as an ethnic utility heuristic that incorporates segmented assimilation, political attitudes, and political behaviors of black ethnic immigrants in the late twentieth century. I utilize previous scholarship from sociologists, economists, and political scientists who have advanced the fields of racial and ethnic politics. My analysis links the research to Asian American studies, Latino politics, urban politics, social identity, and public opinion that have not previously been integrated in a comprehensive analysis pertaining to black diversity. I also focus on how these integrated theories have implications for all “minority” groups living in the United States and can illuminate how they use amorphous concepts of race and detailed ethnic identifications as building blocks for larger conversations pertaining to policy, political resources, representation, and benefits.

Chapter 4 offers a detailed account of the feelings and perceptions of foreign-born and native-born black union members using the SSEU Local 371 Survey. This chapter argues that even if black intraracial differences are subtle, such nuances in attitudes and opinions can greatly influence the US political system. It also includes a qualitative analysis of the genesis of many of these perceptions and feelings of black groups living and working in New York City and of how these opinions affect black perceptions of the American Dream. I find that, although there are varying black ethnic attitudes regarding modes of success and achievement efforts that present distinctive attitudes among black ethnic populations, there is a significant black racial identity present among native-born and foreign-born populations in this country.

This chapter opens with a summary of Dutch decolonization policies in the Caribbean, followed by an analysis of the state of affairs in Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles in the late 1960s, including the position of the Afro-Caribbean population in both countries. It then analyses the dramatic events of the May 1969 revolt in Curaçao, assessing the long-term implications of the uprising for the constitutional development of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and for Afro-Caribbean empowerment in the former Dutch colonies. While ideas of Afro-Caribbean liberation contributed both to the 1969 revolt and to the later independence of Suriname in 1975, these events do not conform to a simple heroic narrative of emancipatory Black Power in the Dutch Caribbean.

This chapter discusses the Panama of Walrond's youth—a place he had identified with more closely than any other. Panama has been one of the hemisphere's most volatile sites of political positioning and a crucible of transnational communities. The experience of Panama's Afro-Caribbean community is well documented, and Walrond wrote a great deal about Panama after he left it. He had come to see Panama as his ticket out of the West Indies—a springboard to the United States—but the area in which he lived was in an important sense a satellite of the United States, the Canal Zone, a colony in the tropics.

This chapter situates interviews with women who attended the Cali tour alongside media representations of beauty and desire in telenovelas, advertisements, beauty pageants, and films, as well as in the current state campaign, “Colombia Is Passion.” It analyzes how working-class Afro-Caribbean women in Cali, Colombia, described their bodies as “pliable” in relation to the beautification process which usually involves plastic surgery in order to alter class status, to move safely across space, and as a form of pleasure and as the compulsory reconfiguring of the body that is necessary to participate in local and global markets. Rather than understand women's erotic bodies only through male clients and agency perspectives—as a natural resource to be exchanged and extracted from Latin America—for Colombian women, the body can be remade as highly valuable within transnational romance, especially in a local society where women describe high degrees of uncertainty, lawlessness, and stagnation.

Chapter 5 illuminates the plight of the poor, the youth and members of racial minorities, many of whom were also jobless but not necessarily trade unionists or political activists. In particular, this chapter analyses the meaning and causes of why large numbers of the unrepresented turned to violence and civil unrest in Liverpool’s inner city neighbourhood of Toxteth in the summer of 1981. It is argued that rioting was seen by some of the unorganised and unrepresented as the only means available to some for expressing a deep dissatisfaction with the status quo. Unlike the trade unionists, there were no organised groups in place that could serve the special needs and act as advocates for this element of the unemployed. This chapter argues that while racial divisions and poor police relations played some part in the urban unrest exploding in the streets of Toxteth in the summer of 1981, the evidence will clearly demonstrate that the inordinately high rates of unemployment, economic deprivation and lack of opportunity amongst all of Liverpool’s working-class youth – both black and white – was the main fires stoking these riots.

Opal Palmer Adisa's first novel, It Begins with Tears, represents a more contemporary revision of the Janie paradigm. Set in a fictional village in rural Jamaica, Adisa's novel interrogates contesting ideologies and values vis-à-vis notions of progress and modernity in the late twentieth century. Adisa's text uses a female-centered, Afro–Caribbean spirituality as the bridge between two competing ideologies (modernity and tradition) whose oppositional imperatives threaten the cohesion and stability of the community. Drawing upon the syncretic religious traditions of Jamaica, Adisa uses strong female characters modeled after West African orishas and linked with nature to demonstrate the coterminous relationship between individual female empowerment and sociopolitical viability for the community. Adisa's codification of the erotic as both spiritual and sexual energy takes place at several levels within the text.

In July 1932, Una Marson arrived in London from Jamaica and became part of a small but significant population of Afro-Caribbean students and intellectuals living in the city long before the boom of West Indian immigration after the Second World War. A writer, poet, and political activist, Marson produced her own portrait of the 1930s London scene that seems at times a world apart from that of Woolf, though the writers shared several spatial and social networks. If Marson and Woolf seem, at best, to inhabit different planes within the same space, a closer look reveals that a version of the transnational society of outsiders that Woolf would fully articulate in Three Guineas was already being imagined within Bloomsbury's colonial community. This chapter focuses on the possibilities for social exchange and cosmopolitan belonging as imagined by Una Marson, particularly in her most sustained treatment of the imperial metropolis, her play London Calling, produced in 1937.