In the grand design of slavery in the Caribbean, White planters separated African slaves of similar tribal and linguistic groups in an effort to destroy African cultural traditions. The result was an African population that lost most of its African heritage and adopted a creolized variant of European culture. The dominance of Creolization, a colonial legacy, ignores the Caribbean multiethnic mosaic and endangers national unity, good governance, and political stability. Through a series of readings, this book argues that the Creolization is antithetical and challenging to nation building and results in cultural and working-class fragmentation, competition for national space, ranking, ethno-cultural categorization, racialization of consciousness, cultural imperialism, use of the 'political' race card, and ethnic dominance. This book acknowledges the need to create a framework for mutual cultural appreciation and institutionalization of all cultures in the pursuit of national unity in the Caribbean.

In this volume, the editors and authors strive to understand the evolving Trans-Caribbean as a discontinuous, displacing and displaced, transnational space. It considers the imagined community in the islands as its psycho-social homeland, while simultaneously pursuing different cultural strategies of redefining and resisting colonial 'homeland' conventions (which Kamau Brathwaite appropriately termed the 'inner plantation'). Thus, the Trans-Caribbean is suspended in a double-dialectic, which opposes both the hegemonic metropolitan space inhabited, as well as the romanticized, yet colonialized, 'inner plantation, ' whose transcendence via migration perpetually turns out to be an illusion. Given this, cultural production and migration remain at the vortex of the Trans-Caribbean. The construction of cultural products in the Trans-Caribbean understood as a collection of social and new migratory practices both reflects and contests post-colonial metropolitan hegemonies. Following Arjun Appadurai's distinction, these homogenizing and heterogenizing counter-trends in Trans-Cariabbean spaces can be observed through cultural transactions manifesting themselves as ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, cityscapes, ideoscapes, etc. For the purposes of this book the editors invited anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, linguists, liberal arts and gender studies specialists, as well as cultural and literary historians to begin drawing some of the diasporic trajectories on the huge canvas of cultural production throughout the Trans-Caribbean.Constructing Vernacular Culture in the Trans-Caribbean will find its audience among scholars in cultural studies, migration, literary theory, and cultural criticism who have a special interest in Caribbean and Latin American Studies, as well as among students and scholars of migration and postcolonialism and postmodernity in general."

Gendered Realities is an interdisciplinary reader that situates the present understanding of Caribbean feminist scholarship after fifteen years of indepth and increasingly sophisticated research. The book provides a space for scholars to put forward new and challenging ideas and attempts to encourage new contributors to intellectual thought in the Caribbean. The essays deal with diverse and rich topics including the role of women in Caribbean art and the visual grammars of gender in early Caribbean painting as well as the development of women's history and gendered history in relation to the historiography of the English-speaking Caribbean. Other essays probe the representation of masculinity in Caribbean feminist thought, gender and adult sexuality, and symbols of masculinity in visual art. Of interest to scholars in gender studies, women's studies, minority studies, and Caribbean history and culture.

This volume looks at the paradox of motherhood among the women of Barbados, St Lucia and Dominica.