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"Q: "What time is it?" A: "Skin, past flesh, goin' on to bone."" As descendants of stolen Black bodies in the 'New World', many dancing Jamaicans have become living anachronisms, unconsciously embodying retentions of life-renewing cultural movement practices past spirit and bone, into flesh and skin. Jamaican tertiary dance education has long been predicated on this baseline understanding of spirit, skin, flesh and bone as felt things. Although dance educators had grappled with 'dis'embodied millennial audacity before COVID-19, we trusted that corporeal ancestral alchemy would remain, and thought we would always have safe touch in our pedagogy toolkits when words were not enough. This article discusses selected experiences of tertiary dance education at the Edna Manley College of the Visual Arts during the COVID-19 pandemic and questions the ability of ancestral somatic legacies to transcend this 'no-touch', physically distant pandemic moment. Additionally, it highlights key ways in which teaching dance virtually has provided rich embodiment experiences, crossing from screen to bone with technology and imagination, and provides recommendations for dance educators to re-create learning spaces for students which re-connect them with spirit, skin, flesh and bone.

Most, if not all, writings by Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff are connected by a subterranean desire to re-write Afro-Caribbean history from new untold perspectives in reaction to the immense loss and/or distortions that marked the region's history for entire centuries. In this paper, I meticulously read four of Cliff's texts--"Abeng" (1984), its sequel "No Telephone to Heaven" (1987), "Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise" (1980) and "The Land of Look Behind" (1985)--to look at how Cliff retrieves her black ancestors' submerged history and erased past. I particularly explore the methods Cliff deploys to re-center a history deliberately erased/or distorted by what she ironically calls "the official version" ("Free Enterprise," 1994, p. 138) in allusion to the Eurocentric narratives about the twin imperial projects of slavery and colonialism. Finally, I investigate the wealth of possibilities offered by fiction, unrecorded memory, oral story-telling and imagination to out-tell Eurocentric historiography and re-write Afro-Caribbean history from the victims' perspective: slaves, colonial subjects, marginalized female figures, black Diasporic characters, etc.

For more than fifty years, Jamaican farm workers have been seasonally employed in Canada under the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). In Canada, these workers live and work in conditions that make them vulnerable to various health issues, including poor mental health. This ethnographic study investigated Jamaican SAWP workers' mental health experiences in Southern Ontario. Several common factors that engender psychological distress among Jamaican workers, ranging from mild to extreme suffering, were uncovered and organised into five themes: (1) family, (2) work environments and SAWP relations, (3) living conditions and isolation, (4) racism and social exclusion, and (5) illness and injury. I found that Jamaican workers predominantly use the term 'stress' to articulate distress, and they associate experiences of suffering with historic plantation slavery. Analysis of workers' stress discourses revealed their experiences of psychological distress are structured by the conditions of the SAWP and their social marginalisation in Ontario. This article presents and discusses these findings in the context of SAWP power dynamics and concludes with policy recommendations aimed at improving the mental health of all SAWP workers. In foregrounding the experiences of Jamaican workers, this study addresses the dearth of research on the health and wellbeing of Caribbean SAWP workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The late Rev. Margaret Fowler, United Church Minister, was a key supporter of LGBTQ rights and a vocal advocate against human trafficking in Jamaica. As the founder of the Theodora Project, Rev. Fowler served many persons coerced into sex work or subject to sexual exploitation. She argued that human trafficking is a complex connection of economy, gender, social dynamics, law, and foreign relations. She called for the Church to be involved in anti-trafficking work as to do nothing risks "the very real possibility of Jamaica becoming another major area of sex tourism". As we celebrate her life and ministry, we are given the opportunity to carefully excavate her perspective on the nexus among trafficking, slavery, and sex work. It does appear that her discourse follows the traditional Church line, which conflates slavery, trafficking and sex work in a fashion that views sex work as wholly coerced. In exploring the arguments that validated her important ministry in Negril, this chapter centres sex positive approaches to sex work and questions the slavery and exploitation framing that is normal in Christian discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the current demands of compensation for the damages and crimes caused by the transatlantic slave trade of African persons and from the institution of slavery in the Americas. This proposal has been put forward by many actors and in different global historical contexts and it is currently is fundamental issue in the agenda of Afro-American activism, especially in the English-speaking Caribbean and in the United States. This topic is also under discussion in Latin America as a part of the "afro-reparations" approach. The article analyzes the mobilization around this issue in the English-speaking Caribbean, the "reparative justice" agenda put forward by the CARICOM Reparations Commission --mainly composed by former British colonies in the Caribbean--, and the demands directed against European governments. Using data collected in Jamaica, this text exposes the main arguments presented by advocates of reparations, as well the arenas where they have been more active: public education, awareness raising campaign and archival reconstruction of documentation evidencing the economic impact of slavery. Next, the activity of advocates in the social media and in transnational debates is discussed. Finally, consideration is given to the different approaches to the topic of reparations seen from an interregional perspective, focusing in viewpoints drawn from Cuba as a case representing the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Levels of incorporation of joint-stock companies were far lower between 1790 and 1860 than in the American South, let alone New England and the British Isles, suggesting that slavery had a direct and proportional impact on patterns of incorporation and wider economic development. Examining the foundation of the Close Harbour Company of Jamaica between 1795 and 1803, the first joint-stock company chartered by a colonial legislature in the British West Indies, shows that potential entrepreneurs did not face legal or political obstacles, but rather a range of exogenous and endogenous economic factors arising in part from the conditions of a slave society which discouraged company formation. The effect may have been to exacerbate existing levels of economic backwardness in these islands by cutting off the supplies of capital needed for modernisation, thereby contributing to their underdevelopment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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