Constructing Vernacular Culture in the Trans-Caribbean traces the contradictory cultural trajectories constructed and re-produced in the fluid diasporic spaces we call the Trans-Caribbean. Particular emphasis is placed on such cultural expressions that reflect or derive from the cultural vernacular and popular culture as it exists in these spaces. Its multidisciplinary approach and focus on different language areas in the Trans-Caribbean are of particular interest to scholars in cultural studies, migration, literary theory, and cultural criticism.

Transformations in Urban Education: Urban Teachers and Students Working Collaboratively addresses pressing problems in urban education, contextualized in research in New York City and nearby school districts on the Northeast Coast of the United States. The schools and institutions involved in empirical studies range from elementary through college and include public and private schools, alternative schools for dropouts, and museums. Difference is regarded as a resource for learning and equity issues are examined in terms of race, ethnicity, language proficiency, designation as special education, and gender. The contexts for research on teaching and learning involve science, mathematics, uses of technology, literacy, and writing comic books. A dual focus addresses research on teaching and learning, and learning to teach in urban schools. Collaborative activities addressed explicitly are teachers and students enacting roles of researchers in their own classrooms, cogenerative dialogues as activities to allow teachers and students to learn about one another’s cultures and express their perspectives on their experienced realities and negotiate shared recommendations for changes to enacted curricula. Coteaching is also examined as a means of learning to teach, teaching and learning, and undertaking research. The scholarship presented in the constituent chapters is diverse, reflecting multi-logicality within sociocultural frameworks that include cultural sociology, cultural historical activity theory, prosody, sense of place, and hermeneutic phenomenology. Methodologies employed in the research include narratology, interpretive, reflexive, and authentic inquiry, and multi-level inquiries of video resources combined with interpretive analyses of social artifacts selected from learning environments. This edited volume provides insights into research of places in which social life is enacted as if there were no research being undertaken. The research was intended to improve practice. Teachers and learners, as research participants, were primarily concerned with teaching and learning and, as a consequence, as we learned from research participants were made aware of what we learned—the purpose being to improve learning environments. Accordingly, research designs are contingent on what happens and emergent in that what we learned changed what happened and expanded possibilities to research and learn about transformation through heightening participants’ awareness about possibilities for change and developing interventions to improve learning.

This book explores representations of Obeah – a name used in the English/Creole-speaking Caribbean to describe various African-derived, syncretic Caribbean religious practices – across a range of prose fictions published in the twentieth century by West Indian authors. In the Caribbean and its diasporas, Obeah often manifests in the casting of spells, the administration of baths and potions of various oils, herbs, roots and powders, and sometimes spirit possession, for the purposes of protection, revenge, health and well-being. In most Caribbean territories, the practice – and practices that may resemble it – remains illegal. Narratives of Obeah in West Indian Literature analyses fiction that employs Obeah as a marker of the Black ‘folk’ aesthetics that are now constitutive of West Indian literary and cultural production, either in resistance to colonial ideology or in service of the same. These texts foreground Obeah as a social and cultural logic both integral to and troublesome within the creation of such a thing as ‘West Indian’ literature and culture, at once a product of and a foil to Caribbean plantation societies. This book explores the presentation of Obeah as an ‘unruly’ narrative subject, one that not only subverts but signifies a lasting ‘Afro-folk’ sensibility within colonial and ‘postcolonial’ writing of the West Indies. Narratives of Obeah in West Indian Literature will be of interest to scholars and students of Caribbean Literature, Diaspora Studies, and African and Caribbean religious studies; it will also contribute to dialogues of spirituality in the wider Black Atlantic.

The Caribbean has been traditionally associated with externally devised mappings and categories, thus appearing as a passive entity to be consumed and categorized. Challenging these forces and representations, Carlos Garrido Castellano argues that something more must be added to the discussion in order to address contemporary Caribbean visual creativity. Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art arises from several years of field research and curatorial activity in museums, universities, and cultural institutions of Jamaica, Trinidad, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and the United States. This book explores the ways in which Caribbean individuals and communities have recurred to art and visual creativity to create and sustain public spaces of discussion and social interaction. The book analyzes contemporary Caribbean art in relation to broader discussions of citizenship, cultural agency, critical geography, migration, and social justice. Covering a broad range of artistic projects, including curatorial practice, socially engaged art, institutional politics, public art, and performance, this book is about the imaginative ways in which Caribbean subjects and communities rearrange the sociocultural framework(s) they inhabit and share.

The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature offers a comprehensive, critically engaging overview of this increasingly significant body of work. The volume is divided into six sections that consider: the foremost figures of the Anglophone Caribbean literary tradition and a history of literary critical debate textual turning points, identifying key moments in both literary and critical history and bringing lesser known works into context fresh perspectives on enduring and contentious critical issues including the canon, nation, race, gender, popular culture and migration new directions for literary criticism and theory, such as eco-criticism, psychoanalysis and queer studies the material dissemination of Anglophone Caribbean literature and generic interfaces with film and visual art This volume is an essential text that brings together sixty-nine entries from scholars across three generations of Caribbean literary studies, ranging from foundational critical voices to emergent scholars in the field. The volume's reach of subject and clarity of writing provide an excellent resource and springboard to further research for those working in literature and cultural studies, postcolonial and diaspora studies as well as Caribbean studies, history and geography.

Patrick Chamoiseau: A Critical Introduction examines the career, oeuvre, and literary theories of one of the most important Caribbean writers living today. Chamoiseau's work sheds light on the dynamic processes of creolization that have shaped Caribbean history and culture. He is the recipient of numerous literary prizes, including the prestigious Prix Goncourt for the epic novel Texaco. The author's diverse body of work, which includes plays, novels, fictionalized memoirs, treatises, and other genres of writing, offers a compelling vision of the postcolonial world from a francophone Caribbean perspective. An important addition to Caribbean literary studies, Patrick Chamoiseau is an indispensable work for scholars interested in francophone, Caribbean, and world literatures as well as cultural studies. Scholars and students with interests in creolization, neocolonialism, and globalization will find this work particularly valuable. Patrick Chamoiseau brings the writer's major works of fiction into dialogue with lesser-known texts, including unpublished theatrical works, screenplays, visual texts, and treatises. This holistic, comprehensive, and largely chronological study of Chamoiseau's oeuvre includes analyses of various authorial strategies, especially the use of narrative masques, cross-cultural storytelling techniques, and creolizing poetics.

Living Folk Religions presents cutting-edge contributions from a range of disciplines to examine religious folkways across cultures. This collection embraces the non-elite and non-sanctioned, the oral, fluid, accessible, evolving religions of people (volk) on the ground. Split into five sections, this book covers: What Is Folk Religion? Spirit Beings and Deities Performance and Ritual Praxis Possession and Exorcism Health, Healing, and Lifestyle Topics include demons and ambivalent gods, tree and nature spirits, revolutionary renunciates, oral lore, possession and exorcism, divination, midwestern American spiritualism, festivals, queer sexuality among ritual specialists, the dead returned, vernacular religions, diaspora adaptations, esoteric influences underlying public cultures, unidentified flying objects (UFOs), music and sound experiences, death rituals, and body and wellness cultures. Living Folk Religions is a must-read for those studying Comparative Religions, World Religions, and Religious Studies, and it will also interest specialists and general readers, particularly enthusiastic readers of Anthropology, Folklore and Folk Studies, Global Studies, and Sociology.

Within the circum-Caribbean, the ubiquity of tourism and the variety of musical life are hard to miss. Scholars have long explored both of these themes in the Caribbean, but have done so from disciplinary perspectives that tended until recently (and for a variety of reasons) to foreclose readings that considered tourism and music together. This volume addresses itself to analyzing the dynamics and interrelationships between tourism and music throughout the region.

Bringing together the most exciting recent archival work in anglophone, francophone, and hispanophone Caribbean studies, Raphael Dalleo constructs a new literary history of the region that is both comprehensive and innovative. He examines how changes in political, economic, and social structures have produced different sets of possibilities for writers to imagine their relationship to the institutions of the public sphere. In the process, he provides a new context for rereading such major writers as Mary Seacole, José Martí, Jacques Roumain, Claude McKay, Marie Chauvet, and George Lamming, while also drawing lesser-known figures into the story. Dalleo's comparative approach will be important to Caribbeanists from all of the region's linguistic traditions, and his book contributes even more broadly to debates in Latin American and postcolonial studies about postmodernity and globalization.

Philosophizing the Americas establishes the field of inter-American philosophy. Bringing together contributors who work in Africana Philosophy, Afro-Caribbean philosophy, Latin American philosophy, Afro-Latin philosophy, decolonial theory, and African American philosophy, the volume examines the full range of traditions that have, separately and in conversation with each other, worked through how philosophy in both establishes itself in the Americas and engages with the world from which it emerges. The book traces a range of questions, from the history of philosophy in the Americas to philosophical questions of race, feminism, racial eliminativism, creolization, epistemology, coloniality, aesthetics, and literature. The essays place an impressive range of philosophical traditions and figures into dialogue with one another: some familiar, such as José Martí, Sylvia Wynter, Martin R. Delany, José Vasconcelos, Alain Locke, as well as such less familiar thinkers as Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, Hilda Hilst, and George Lamming. In each chapter, the contributors find fascinating and productive matrices of tension or convergence in works throughout the Americas. The result is an original and important contribution to knowledge that introduces readers from various disciplines to unfamiliar yet compelling ideas and considers familiar texts from novel and prescient perspectives. Philosophizing the Americas stands alone as a representation of current scholarly debates in the field of inter-American philosophy. Contributors: Stephanie Rivera Berruz, Jacoby Adeshei Carter, Nadia Celis, Tommy J. Curry, Hernando A. Estévez, Daniel Fryer, James B. Haile III, Chike Jeffers, Lee A. McBride III, Michael Monahan, Adriana Novoa, Susana Nuccetelli, Andrea J. Pitts, Dwayne A. Tunstall, and Alejandro A. Vallega