Browsing by Subject "Caribbean"

Sea turtles, marine mammals and sea birds are vulnerable to higher mortality rates as a direct function of incidental capture (bycatch) in marine fisheries. Their migratory behavior exposes them to multiple fishing gear types and fishing practices and efforts to understand the rates of interaction between these taxa and fishing necessarily entails analysis of data over large spatial areas (ocean-basin) and multiple types of fishing activities. The acquisition the requisite data, however, requires considerable resources and many regions in the world are data-poor with respect to bycatch, including the Wider Caribbean Region (WCR) in the west central Atlantic Ocean basin. This dissertation presents the results of multiple strategies used to assess sea turtle, marine mammal and seabird bycatch in the WCR, with a particular focus on sea turtle bycatch. The research incorporated a synthetic review of the literature, expert consultation, statistical techniques, and geospatial analyses to assess the bycatch seascape for the region. I conclude that sea turtle bycatch in the WRC is significantly linked to turtle rookeries, especially those on the continental land mass and in the southern section of the Caribbean basin, in large part because of the near shore artisanal nature of the fisheries and the importance of these habitats for foraging and reproduction. The limited information on marine mammal bycatch does not permit robust inferences, but it clearly identifies threats to at least one vulnerable marine mammal species, the tucuxi (Sotalia fluviatilis). Information on seabird bycatch was even more limited; the most vulnerable seabird populations occur in the higher latitudes (temperate zones) while the seabird populations in the WCR face significant threats from habitat loss and over-exploitation. This dissertation proposes specific recommendations for improving and advancing the information base for a regional, ecosystem-level management and mitigation of bycatch.

Anticipating Freedom explores the numerous ways enslaved and freedpeople shaped the politics and policies of gradual emancipation in the British Empire, using Barbados as a case study. It binds antislavery debates, legislative reforms, and slave resistance into one conceptual frame to reveal the processes that informed the British Parliament’s decision to pass the Emancipation Act of 1833, thereby conditionally freeing thousands of enslaved men, women, and children across the British Caribbean. As a major sugar-producing colony for the British Empire, Barbados offers a unique context for studying emancipation in the Atlantic World. At first glance, the prospect of freedom seemed impossible due to the planters' utter dependence on slave labor. Still, emancipation in Barbados was achieved through the unyielding determination of enslaved people to resist their captivity and the antislavery legislation initiated by abolitionists in the British Parliament. Hence the project is arranged both chronologically and thematically. It begins with Bussa’s Rebellion of 1816 — the only large-scale slave insurrection in the history of Barbados — and its impact on British Parliamentary reforms designed to lessen some of the coercive aspects of slavery during the 1820s. Then, I examine the rise of slave resistance in the months leading up to Emancipation Day and their effect on the Emancipation Act of 1833. My dissertation concludes with a discussion on the implementation of conditional freedom known as ‘Apprenticeship’ in 1834 and the factors that led to its premature demise in 1838. Anticipating Freedom argues that the covert and explicit means through which men and women of African descent resisted enslavement influenced the British Parliament’s decision to implement an intermediate period between slavery and absolute freedom in Barbados. This revelation is significant because it broadens our understanding of what factors were taken into consideration during the antislavery debates between the abolitionists, planters, Members of Parliament, and Barbados legislators. Moreover, by prioritizing the wants, needs, and desires of enslaved and freedpeople in Barbados, we step away from romantic notions often associated with emancipation to focus on the quotidian realities of a society no longer ruled by slave labor.

“Sonic Records” explores representations of early African diasporic musical life in literature. Rooted in an effort to recover the early history of an influential arts movement, the project also examines literature and sound as interdependent cultural spheres. Increasingly, the disciplines of literature and history have turned their attention to the Atlantic world, charting the experience of Africans living in the Americas through innovative archival interpretations and literary investigations. “Sonic Records” brings this work deeper into conversation with sound studies, a field that puts pressure on the historical privileging of textual and visual material over auditory expression. I show that scholarship on the early African diaspora and sound-based research are fittint allies; the very people whose culture and history were aggressively silenced by the violence of slavery and the print regime of the colonial archive participated in flourishing aural traditions. Black studies has a significant and long-standing tradition of scholarship on sound and music in literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, yet the earliest eras of Atlantic slavery typically fall beyond the scope of this work, largely because of the scarcity of records from the period.

This project, therefore, takes on a significant challenge: how do you tell a story about a historical phenomena for which there appears to be no archive? “Sonic Records” argues that the sounds of the past are not actually lost, rather they are recorded in the pages of literature, on the surface of instruments, and in the evocative strains of living musical traditions. Across four chapters, this dissertation chronicles a genealogy of early African diasporic music by drawing together diverse sources from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, including seventeenth and eighteenth-century travel narratives, nineteenth-century slave narratives, musical notation, and visual illustrations. As a literary scholar, I interpret these works by close-reading, but I also close-listen to them, a kin strategy that scholars of sound use to show how auditory expression produces cultural meaning. The first two chapters focus on representations of African and Caribbean music in seventeenth and eighteenth-century memoirs by European observers, Richard Ligon (1657), Hans Sloane (1707), and John Stedman (1796). The final two chapters turn to subsequent generations in the biographies of African-American performers, including John Marrant (1785), Solomon Northup (1853), and a singer named Tina (circa 1830).

African musicians living in the new world made use of the presumption that sound is ephemeral to craft enduring performances that escaped capture while resonating across great distances. These artful productions, which took many forms across diverse societies, amounted to a significant force shaping life in the Americas alongside other well-documented intellectual genealogies. “Sonic Records” restores this legacy to intellectual history by locating the confluence of print and aural culture within the literature of the early Atlantic world.

“The City and the State: Construction and the Politics of Dictatorship in Haiti (1957-1986)” charts a new history of place-making in the Caribbean. It analyzes construction practices in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince—ranging from slum clearance, transportation infrastructure, to the political economy of cement—to reveal the multifaceted relationship between the Duvalier dictatorship and rapid urban transformation in the mid-20th century. It argues that through the patterns and practices of building Port-au-Prince, the social, political and economic dimensions of the Duvalier regime became embedded in material space of the city. At the same time, the nature of these spatial and material changes informed the regime’s tumultuous internal dynamics. This thesis also situates these intertwined themes within a broader context of uneven geographies of power produced through the country’s long transition from slavery to freedom.

This dissertation uses the revolutionary potential of Caribbean religion to theorize black feminism between the two World Wars. It argues that women artists and performers across the diaspora produced ethnographic and creative representations of Haitian Vodou (and its sister religions) in order to formulate a radical and pan-African feminism. Unlike accounts of the savagery and hedonism of a sensationalized “voodoo” perpetuated by white male travelers to Haiti, black women’s narratives of Vodou focused specifically on its status as a theology of resistance. By re-animating apolitical narratives of “voodoo” with their original spiritual provenance in Vodou, women of color laid claim to the political force of the religion behind the largest successful slave revolt in the Western hemisphere.

Over four chapters, the Vodou lens of “Whosoever Doubts My Power” shows that black feminism and black radicalism are inextricable. Following the tradition of Karen McCarthy Brown and Natasha Omi’seke Tinsley, I take the religious forms of the African diaspora as potential sources of feminist political mobilization. Haitian Vodou, hoodoo of the American South, and other Afro-diasporic cosmologies allow women to attain the highest positions of leadership (Marie Laveau), and to follow the example of powerful female spirits (Ezili). My dissertation unpacks the radical underpinnings of Afro-Caribbean religious symbology in works by and about black women. In doing so, I address the gender imbalance in scholarship on interwar figures such as Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Dubois, Aimé Césaire, and Léopold Sédar Senghor, which often portrays the black radicalism of the interwar period as an endeavor crafted solely by men. If, as Brent Edwards argues, “black radicalism is an internationalization,” I seek to call attention to the transnational movements of women in this time period, despite their more limited access to international circuits. “Whosoever Doubts My Power” bridges the works of Anglophone, Francophone, and Creolophone women whose paths crossed, collided, or simply ran parallel in the shared transnational dream of the voodoo queen. I also include the life and travels of little-researched figures like the essayist Suzanne Césaire and the performer Florence Emery Jones in order to correct the archival elisions of black women’s contributions to the construction of a Pan-African radical tradition.

At times metaphorical, at other times quite literal, this dissertation argues that Black female artists deployed African-derived religious practice in order to intentionally blur the line between cultural inheritance and invention. These practices were not just a means of deflecting or circumventing racism and misogyny; rather, engagements with New World religions became a world ordering system, a cosmology meant to replace the traditions that had been lost over time and in the Middle Passage. Often, these practices were processes of invention as much as they were processes reclamation. In fact, the power of the voodoo/Vodou lens lies precisely in its liminal status between factuality and invention, between myth and history. In a lacunar archive of the Middle Passage that makes past African traditions unknowable and Pan-African solidarity untenable, Afro-diasporic artists must come to terms with the lost of their histories and communities. However, rather than succumbing to the loss of that realization, Black artists of the interwar period used the idea of Vodou to conjure imagined histories and mobilize imagined communities in the present. It was not so much the end of a worldview as the beginning of one.