Memory, Migration and (De)Colonisation in the Caribbean and Beyond

In recent years, academics, policy makers and media outlets have increasingly recognised the importance of Caribbean migrations and migrants to the histories and cultures of countries across the Northern Atlantic. Memory, Migration and (De)Colonisation furthers our understanding of the lives of many of these migrants, and the contexts through which they lived and continue to live. In particular, it focuses on the relationship between Caribbean migrants and processes of decolonisation. The chapters in this book range across disciplines and time periods to present a vibrant understanding of the ever-changing interactions between Caribbean peoples and colonialism as they migrated within and between colonial contexts. At the heart of this book are the voices of Caribbean migrants themselves, whose critical reflections on their experiences of migration and decolonisation are interwoven with the essays of academics and activists.

Prologue

Rod Westmaas

Introduction

Jack Webb, Maria del Pilar Kaladeen and William Tantam

1. Loving and leaving the new Jamaica: reckoning with the 1960s

Matthew J. Smith

2. Why did we come?

B. M. Nobrega

3. History to heritage: an assessment of Tarpum Bay, Eleuthera, the Bahamas

Kelly Delancy

4. ‘While nuff ah right and rahbit; we write and arrange’: deejay lyricism and the transcendental use of the voice in alternative public spaces in the UK

William ‘Lez’ Henry

5. Journeying through the ‘motherland’

Peter Ramrayka

6. De Zie Contre Menti Kaba – when two eyes meet the lie ends. A Caribbean meditation on decolonising academic methodologies

Nadine King Chambers

7. Organising for the Caribbean

Anne Braithwaite

8. The consular Caribbean: consuls as agents of colonialism and decolonisation in the revolutionary Caribbean (1795–1848)

Simeon Simeonov

9. To ‘stay where you are’ as a decolonial gesture: Glissant’s philosophy of Antillean space in the context of Césaire and Fanon

Miguel Gualdrón Ramírez

10. Finding the Anancyesque in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and the decolonisation project in Jamaica from 1938 to the present

Ruth Minott Egglestone

11. Maybe one day I’ll go home

Rod Westmaas