The first intellectual history of the Caribbean written by a top Caribbean studies scholar, this book examines both writings penned by natives of the region as well as a body of texts interpretive of the region produced by Western authors. Stressing the experiential and cultural particularity of the Caribbean, the study considers four major questions: What art, literature or thought can come from the minds of people who have undergone a catastrophic history? What makes the conceptual paradigms fashioned by the Western intellectual industry capable of illuminating the distinct experience of Antilleans, but not vice versa? Do Antilleans lack the intellectual history required for the interpretation of culture, whether in their region or elsewhere in the world? Why is the specificity of Caribbean humanity such that it cannot be used as a paradigm for humanity as a whole?

This profile of Dominican Americans closes a critical gap in information about the accomplishments of one of the largest immigrant groups in the United States. Beginning with a look at the historical background and the roots of native Dominicans, this book then carries the reader through the age-old romance of U.S. and Dominican relations. With great detail and clarity, the authors explain why the Dominicans left their land and came to the United States. The book includes discussions of education, health issues, drugs and violence, the visual and performing arts, popular music, faith, food, gender, and race. Most important, this book assesses how Dominicans have adapted to America, and highlights their losses and gains. The work concludes with an evaluation of Dominicans' achievements since their arrival as a group three decades ago and shows how they envision their continued participation in American life. Biographical profiles of many notable Dominican Americans such as artists, sports greats, musicians, lawyers, novelists, actors, and activists, highlight the text.

The authors have created a novel book as they are the first to examine Dominicans as an ethnic minority in the United States and highlight the community's trials and tribulations as it faces the challenge of survival in a economically competitive, politically complex, and culturally diverse society. Students and interested readers will be engaged by the economic and political ties that have attached Americans to Dominicans and Dominicans to Americans for approximately 150 years. While massive immigration of Dominicans to the United States began in the 1960s, a history of previous contact between the two nations has enabled the development of Dominicans as a significant component of the U.S. population. Readers will also understand the political and economic causes of Dominican emigration and the active role the United States government had in stimulating Dominican immigration to the United States. This book traces the advances of Dominicans toward political empowerment and summarizes the cultural expressions, the survival strategies, and the overall adaptation of Dominicans to American life.

The essays in this collection offer new evidence and new conclusions on topics in the history of African Americans in Virginia such as the demography of early slave imports, the means used to regulate slave labor, the situation of female hired slaves in the backcountry, African American women in the Civil War era, and the Garveyite grassroots organizations of the 1920s.

Nantucket's People of Color is a fascinating study of Nantucket's African population from historical, cultural, and racial perspectives. While most other Africans were sold into slavery and bondage, the African-Americans and Cape Verdeans on Nantucket worked as free people and established communities and institutions such as schools and churches. This anthology examines the relationships that developed between Africans, Quakers, others of European descent, and Cape Verdeans on Nantucket and the events and controversies that both united and divided the larger community along 'racial' lines. This anthology is the culmination of more than ten years of scholarly research on the culture and history of Nantucket Island by James Bradford Ames Scholars. The James Bradford Ames Fellowship Program was established at the University of Massachusetts Boston to foster research into the history and culture of African-Americans and Cape Verdeans on Nantucket.

The essays in this collection offer new evidence and new conclusions on topics in the history of African Americans in Virginia such as the demography of early slave imports, the means used to regulate slave labor, the situation of female hired slaves in the backcountry, African American women in the Civil War era, and the Garveyite grassroots organizations of the 1920s.

Born in Connecticut, Lemuel Haynes was first an indentured servant, then a soldier in the Continental Army, and, in 1785, an ordained congregational minister. Haynes's writings constitute the fullest record of a black man's religion, social thought, and opposition to slavery in the late-18th and early-19th century. Drawing on both published and rare unpublished sources, John Saillant here offers the first comprehensive study of Haynes and his thought.

The first intellectual history of the Caribbean written by a top Caribbean studies scholar, this book examines both writings penned by natives of the region as well as a body of texts interpretive of the region produced by Western authors. Stressing the experiential and cultural particularity of the Caribbean, the study considers four major questions: What art, literature or thought can come from the minds of people who have undergone a catastrophic history? What makes the conceptual paradigms fashioned by the Western intellectual industry capable of illuminating the distinct experience of Antilleans, but not vice versa? Do Antilleans lack the intellectual history required for the interpretation of culture, whether in their region or elsewhere in the world? Why is the specificity of Caribbean humanity such that it cannot be used as a paradigm for humanity as a whole?

Studying the literature written in the West Indies as a regionally unified corpus with its own identity, this analysis examines the recurring thematic motifs and formal devices that Caribbean literary artists have drawn from during the last six decades. The dynamic study isolates the writers' engagements with language, religion, and history as primary components of their cultural discourse and argues that West Indian literary texts contain clues to their own explication. Including authors from the Dominican Republic, Barbados, and Haiti, this volume is one of the few that explores the writing of all Caribbean language regions. Revised to include updated criticism of three featured poets--Kamau Brathwaite, Pedro Mir, and Rene Depestre--this insightful and profound discussion presents a truly multicultural approach to literature.

Vapor Trails exposes intrigue at the highest corporate level, which unravels when one senior executive defects from the dark conspiracy in order to escape from the burdens of his past, regain self-respect and open himself to the potential of a new love. Grounded in carefully researched science, this book was written by two authorities in the area of sustainable business. At last, a thriller centered on the global climate disruption issue, based on solid science, and told from a perspective that shows both the business and environmental sides of the story. Like airplanes, we all leave behind a vapor trail. And though we can easily see others', we rarely see our own.

The Once and Future Muse presents the first major study of the life and work of Dominican-born bilingual American poet and translator Rhina P. Espaillat (b. 1932). Beginning with her literary celebrity as the youngest poet ever inducted into the Poetry Society of America, it traces her relative obscurity after 1952 when she married and took on family and employment responsibilities, to her triumphant return to the poetry spotlight decades later when she reclaimed her former prestige with a series of award-winning poetry collections. The authors define Espaillat's place in American letters with attention to her formalist aesthetics, Hispanic Caribbean immigrant background, poetic community building, bilingual ethos, and domestically minded woman-of-color feminism. Addressing the temporality of her oeuvre-her publishing before and after the splitting of American literature into distinct ethnic segments-this work also highlights the demands that the social transformations of the 1960s placed on literary artists, critics, and readers alike.