PDF Transnational Blackness: Navigating the Global Color Line (Critical Black Studies) by From Manning Marable in History

Description

Contact and clash; amalgamation and accommodation; resistance and change have marked the history of the Caribbean islands. It is a unique region where people under the stress of slavery had to improvise; invent and literally create forms of human association through which their pasts and the symbolic interpretation of their present could be structured.Caribbean Transformations is divided into three major parts; each preceded by a brief introductory chapter. Part One begins with a look at the African antecedents of the Caribbean; then discusses slavery and the plantation system. Two chapters deal with slavery and forced labor in Puerto Rico and the history of a Puerto Rican plantation. Part Two is concerned with the rise of a Caribbean peasantry--the erstwhile slaves who separated themselves from the plantation system on small plots of land. This creative adaptation led to the growth of a class of rural landowners producing a large part of their own subsistence but also selling to and buying from wider markets. Mintz first discusses the origins of reconstructed peasantries; and then proceeds to the specifics of the origins and history of the peasantry in Jamaica. Part Three turns to Caribbean nationhood--the political and economic forces that affected its shaping and the social structure of its component societies. A separate chapter details the case of Haiti. The book ends with a critique of the implications of Caribbean nationhood from an anthropological perspective; stressing the ways that class; color and other social dimensions continue to play important parts in the organization of Caribbean societies.