Franklin W. Knight

Africa and the West: The Legacies of Empire

This volume, written by leading African and Western specialists, is among the first to provide a broad interdisciplinary view of African culture that allows contemporary Africa to be understood on its own terms--freed from Western ethnocentric preconceptions and values. The book begins with an overview of current African scholarship, followed by Philip Curtins historical essay on Africas 400-year relationship with European culture, with special emphasis on the mass migrations brought about by the slave trade. Discussions of indigenous cultural symbols and religious belief systems reveal a rich and continuing heritage and deepen our understanding of modern African society. Several chapters are devoted to the intellectual and cultural life of Francophone Africa--its major writers and scholars and the deep cultural conflict experienced by French-speaking African elites. A chapter by Leopold Senghor, former president of Senegal and a leading cultural figure in Francophone Africa, offers an eloquent statement of the post-colonial African world view. A new form of imperialism--the control of the mass media by powerful industrial nations--and the dangers it poses to African identity and autonomy are examined. Other topics covered are the evolution of African legal and judicial systems and recent developments in African musicology.

The New Caribbean and the United States

Most Caribbean states have produced new political leadership that is significantly different from the last generation in a number of ways. Relying more on the projections of technical competence than on charisma and gratitude, these new leaders face volatile domestic situations in which they find themselves challenged by increasing drug problems, local political indifference, weak party organizations, and a world dramatically altered by the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the precarious internal economic situation of the United States. The United States remains inordinately important as the major market for Caribbean products, although trade with the region represents only a small part of American foreign trade. The diversity of the various states makes unanimity in matters of foreign policy difficult among Caribbean leaders. Differences in scale will affect foreign policy concerns, although, on many major issues, Caribbean political leaders must work closely with the United States. The primary challenge will be to balance equitably their local interests with those of the larger state.

The Caribbean in the 1930s

THE decade of the 1930s constituted an exceptionally poignant and clearly defining period in the history of the entire Caribbean region. Serious challenges to the political system occurred everywhere. This crucial turning point in the history of the region provided a transitional phase between the older Caribbean societies dominated by a few and a more open and modern era based on universal adult suffrage. The decade also had some obviously memorable boundaries in the Great Depression which began starkly in the Caribbean in the 1920s and ended — or at least changed direction sharply — with the Second World War which started in 1939. Most of the world, too, experienced a decade of transcendental importance, especially among the great majority of nations in the Atlantic community. The principal political and economic factors that shaped the western world as well as the Caribbean during that turbulent decade were closely intertwined. Both the wider world and the Caribbean region experienced severe disruptions during the Great Depression.2 Both suffered prolonged consequences from the Second World War at the end of it. For both, the adjustments to an unprecedented combination of depression and war would be painful and protracted. Yet the principal forces that created the distinctiveness of that important decade were not confined narrowly within a ten-year framework. Forces of serious change manifested themselves long before 1930 - in some cases as early as the eighteenth century - and lasted well beyond 1940.

Drugged Out. Globalization and Jamaica's Resilience to Drug Trafficking

This extensively researched book emphatically indicates that trafficking in narcotic drugs has a long history. Today it is a global commerce. As a major unregulated trade commodity the implications of illegal narco-trafficking are immense for the security as well as the legal structure of any state regardless of its physical size or economic, political and military power. Professor Haughton’s case study of Jamaica places it in the wider Atlantic context and illuminates the various challenges to a small Caribbean state geographically located between major narcotic producers in Colombia and major consumer markets in North America and Europe, especially the United States and Great Britain.

THE SOCIAL STRUCTURE OF CUBAN SLAVE SOCIETY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

The expansion of plantation agriculture during the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century exerted a tremendous influence on the demographic structure, the institutions and the culture of Cuban society. Like most other Caribbean and circum-Atlantic societies, the Cuban development depended o n the massive importation and use of African slave labor. The commitment t o the plantation system of agriculture not only accentuated the division of races, castes and classes, but also diversified the island culture in a number of ways. The end result was a complex, stratified, highly variegated society in which the influences of African, Asian and European heritages blended in a peculiar Cuban milieu.1-8 That the Cuban slave society provided a variation on the montonous sugarcum-slavery experience in the New World derived largely from the fortuitous circumstances of its late participation in the agricultural revolution in the tropical American lowlands. The Iberian past and the residual settler characteristics of Cuba were not rapidly overthrown as they were in Barbados or Saint-Domingue at the onset of the sugar revolutions. Moreover, during the nineteenth century, t h e other European metropolises were rapidly dismantling their socioeconomic South Atlantic system, and were not enthusiastic that the Spanish should succeed in rebuilding it. Cuba, therefore, could not get all the slaves desired t o maximize the rapid expansion of the sugar-cane belt across the island. Nor could the normal social profile with its dominant European minority, which had achieved such classic forms in the English and French Caribbean during the eighteenth century, be faithfully duplicated in Cuba. Instead, during the nineteenth century the Cuban population increased enormously, distorting but never quite destroying the basic white, creole majority Spanish culture. African slaves and African influences blended but did not inundate the Hispanic style of Cuban society. In common with other American plantation societies, the rapid population growth affected the social structure. Between 1774 and 1861, the population of the island increased eightfold from 171,620 to 1 ,396,530.9 At the beginning of the period, fully 70.0 percent of the people lived in only four population zones. Havana, the capital, with a population of 75,618 had 44.0 percent of the total. Santiago de Cuba, with 18,374, or 11.0 percent, ranked second, followed by Puerto Principe with 14,332, or 8.0 percent; then Bayamo with 12,250, or 7.0 percent. With its overwhelming proportion of the population, Havana clearly dominated the culture, politics and economy of the island, and continued t o d o so even after its proportional representation had been greatly altered (TABLES 1 and 2 ) . By 1861, however, the demographic center and the density had been considerably diffused throughout the western sector of the island. Havana, despite its dramatic increase t o more than 205,000 individuals-an increase of almost 300 percent-accounted for merely 14.7 percent of the total population. Santiago de Cuba declined t o 6.9 percent, while its population increased to 96,000; while

On the poetry of history

‘The Poetry of History’ represents an interesting, thoughtful and eloquent discussion of the complex taxonomical problems produced by the intellectual legacy accentuated during the nineteenth century on literary history, especially in its attempts to classify the novel, then viewed as a new literary genre. Implicitly and explicitly the essay makes some excellent observations. One observation is that written language often lags behind experience and ideas, or, in the words of the essay’s author, ‘in the sixteenth century, the practice of literature evolved at such a rapid pace that it outstripped the critical vocabulary of the time.’ Every written work, therefore, has some element of error or even deliberate falsity. This should not be surprising in the early modern period. After all, the narrow European world was exploding in all directions after the later fifteenth century. New lands were discovered, especially across the Atlantic Ocean, and arrogantly described as a ‘New World’ or as ‘the Americas.’ Newly discovered peoples had to be explained, especially the customs unfamiliar to the European experience. Most important, new ideas had to be integrated into the existing European worldview. The expansion of Europe beyond the Eurasian peninsula profoundly changed the languages of Europe as much as it changed Europeans’ concepts of themselves and the other. Slowly Europe began to impress itself on the wider world, but it would never be a universally successful conquest. As Alfred Tennyson saw it in Morte D’Arthur published in 1842,

The Cuban Slave Market, 1790-1880.

1. Introduction: prices and the historiography of slavery 2. Sources and methods of data collection 3. The development of African slavery and Cuban economic history 4. The price structure of the Cuban slave market, 1790-1880 5. Regional variations in the Cuban slave market: Havana, Santiago, and Cienfuegos 6. Coartacion and letters of freedom 7. Conclusions and comparative perspectives.

Persistent Poverty: Underdevelopment in Plantation Economies of the Third World.

This is a revised edition of a seminal work on the nature of underdevelopment. It includes a new foreword and appendixes on the significance of plantations to Third World economies and the contribution that George Beckford made to Caribbean economic thought.