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(2021). Films for the Colonies: Cinema and the Preservation of the British Empire. Caribbean Quarterly: Vol. 67, No. 3, pp. 363-365.

(2020). Distant Voices Near: Historical Globalization and Indian Radio in Trinidad and Tobago. Caribbean Quarterly: Vol. 66, No. 1, pp. 140-142.

(2019). The 1935 Riots in St Vincent: From Riots to Adult Suffrage. Caribbean Quarterly: Vol. 65, African-Caribbean Spirituality and Creativity, pp. 314-316.

Maureen Warner-Lewis, Guinea's Other Suns: The African Dynamic in Trinidad Culture. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2015. xxi + 294 pp.LAST YEAR (2016) MAUREEN WARNER-LEWIS WAS PRESENTED with a Lifetime Achievement Award by an Orisha association in Trinidad for her life-long research and publications on the African, and especially Yoruba, heritage and its role in shaping the culture of her country of birth. The Orisha faith, which used to be called Shango, is the most important African religious tradition in Trinidad and is of Yoruba origin. The Emerita Professor at the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies is unquestionably the leading scholarly authority on the Yoruba language and culture in Trinidad, and she has also researched and published on other aspects of the African heritage in the English-speaking Caribbean, including Jamaica.Guinea's Other Suns is the second edition of a book she first published in 1991; it has four new chapters, and the ten others have been lightly revised; the bibliography has also been updated. An illuminating foreword by the late Rex Nettleford has been retained from the first edition.Writing this review just before the Trinidad Carnival 2017, I note that three chapters in the new edition deal with West African influences on traditional (minor key) calypso and on the older Carnival masking practices. In chapter 12, Warner-Lewis analyses some of the 160 Yoruba songs she recorded in Trinidad in the late 1960s and early 1970s (they have been published in her 1994 book, Yoruba Songs of Trinidad) to trace their influence on traditional kaiso - the word is an "exclamation of encouragement from the audience during a song performance" in the Efik/Igbo language of West Africa, she explains (220). She concludes that one significant element in creating the minor key kaiso was the music and songs of the Yoruba people (from a region in modern Nigeria) who settled in Trinidad between the 1830s and 1860s.Warner-Lewis carried out the interviews which yielded these songs, and a huge body of information about African culture in Trinidad, mainly between 1966 and 1972. And this was "just in time", as Nettleford says in his foreword (xii): just in time to speak to elderly Trinidadians who were the grandchildren, and occasionally the children, of the so-called "Liberated Africans" or, perhaps better, the "African Recaptives".When Britain abolished its transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans, it tried to prevent other nations from carrying on this trade. Slave ships were seized by the British Navy, and many of the unlucky captives were later sent to the British Caribbean colonies as indentured labourers, with more or less the same status as the immigrants from India. Several thousand came to Trinidad (and Tobago), most between 1840 and 1860. Many of them were very young when they arrived, so in the period 1966-72, Warner-Lewis could still find people who had personally known these Africans, their grandparents or even parents. …

Maurice St Pierre, Eric Williams and the Anticolonial Tradition: The Making of a Diasporan Intellectual. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2015. ix + 254 pp.REV I E WED BY B RIDGET BRER ETONthis yeAR (2016), the pARty FounDeD By eRic wiLLiAMs, the People's National Movement (PNM), celebrates its sixtieth birthday; it was formally launched in Port of Spain, Trinidad, on 24 January 1956. The PNM is in power (again) in Trinidad and Tobago; indeed, it has been the party of government for all but sixteen years since its formation sixty years ago. Its role in the nation's modern history, as well as the towering stature of the man, ensures that interest in Williams, scholarly and otherwise, has remained vibrant.Maurice St Pierre's book is the latest of several on Williams published in the last few years, notably Colin Palmer's Eric Williams and the Making of the Modern Caribbean, 1956-1970 (2006) and Selwyn Ryan's massive biography, Eric Williams: The Myth and the Man (2009) - not to mention the still lively historiographical debate arising from Williams's seminal study Capitalism and Slavery.1 Unlike Ryan, St Pierre writes about his career only up to 1962 (he died in 1981 after twenty-five years as head of government). This is also the case with Palmer's book; both scholars, who clearly greatly admire their subject, perhaps preferred not to deal with the post-Independence and especially the post-1970 years.St Pierre's focus is on the formation of Williams as a "Diasporan intellectual". His study combines a body of social scientific theory about "public intellectuals" and "social-movement intellectuals" with archival research typical of the historical method. He makes especially good use of the reports from the US ConsulsGeneral in Port of Spain between 1948 and 1962, and other related documents in the US National Archives, as well as unpublished materials in the Eric Williams Memorial Collection held at the University of the West Indies Library at St Augustine, and other sources. This is a well-researched book, though I did feel that the theory at times got in the way of the narrative and analysis, no doubt reflecting my own disciplinary bias.St Pierre argues that Williams developed into a major anticolonial intellectual through three distinct phases. First, he made himself into an academic intellectual as a student, researcher and then professor at Oxford and Howard universities (1932-48). This is the subject of chapter two. Through his research, his publications, and his assiduous cultivation of academic mentors and elders in the UK and the USA, Williams established his credentials as a formidable academic expert on Caribbean history and on the contemporary (1940s) region. And through his work with the Caribbean Commission, while still employed at Howard, he began to develop as a "public intellectual".The second phase, examined in chapter three, considers how Williams consolidated his standing as a public intellectual when he returned to Trinidad in 1948 as the full-time deputy chair of the Research Council of the Caribbean Commission, based in Port of Spain. …

C.L.R. James, Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History, edited and introduced by Christian H?gsbjerg. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013. xii + 222 pp.REVIEWED BY BRIDGET BRERETONTHIS FIRST-TIME PUBLICATION OF A PLAY BY C.L.R. JAMES, which was performed in London in 1936, is part of Duke University's multi-volume series, The C.L.R. James Archives, edited by Robert A. Hill. The play, according to James, was conceived in 1932, when he left Trinidad for England, and completed in 1934. Of course it is closely linked to his famous non-fictional account of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins, which appeared in 1938.In his erudite and rewarding introduction, Christian Hogsbjerg explains that he found the "long-lost original playscript" by chance, in the papers of one Jock Haston, in the University of Hull library. Haston had collaborated with James in the work of the Independent Labour Party in London in the mid-1930s, and must have been given this flimsy typewritten copy, which has some corrections by James. This script, presumably dating to 1934, seems to be earlier than other versions which are known to exist. The Alma Jordan Library, at the St Augustine campus of the University of the West Indies, holds no fewer than four typescripts of the play in its James Collection. One is heavily annotated and corrected by James; but, from internal evidence, all are later than the script in the Haston Papers which is published in this book.Hogsbjerg provides a comprehensive and informative account of the background to the writing and production of James's play. James had read up on Toussaint while he was still in Trinidad, regarding him as one of the "greatest Negroes" whose career and achievements could be used in the "vindicationist discourse" so important to African-descended intellectuals in this period. He spent six months in Paris in 1933-34 doing archival research for what became The Black Jacobins, and this was also when he wrote his play. In a detailed and well-researched section of the introduction, Hogsbjerg describes how the production of the play came to pass (March 1936, in London, for only two performances), how the world-famous Paul Robeson was persuaded to play the title role, and how the production was received and reviewed in Britain.James's play tells the story of the Haitian Revolution from 1791, when the massive rising of the enslaved began in the north of the rich French colony of Saint-Domingue, to the moment when - Toussaint having died in a French prison - Dessalines decides to lead a final battle against Napoleon's army for national independence under the name of Haiti. The central theme of the play is the conflict between two ideologies or worldviews, symbolised respectively by Toussaint and Dessalines.Toussaint, who was literate, and had been freed before 1791, feels intense loyalty to the France of the Revolution, the France which had abolished slavery in all her colonies in 1794, the France which had ended its monarchy and proclaimed its adherence to Republican ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. …

Joshua R. Hyles, Guiana and the Shadows of Empire: Colonial and Cultural Negotiations at the Edge of the World. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014. xv + 185 pp.REVIEWED BY BRIDGET BRERETONthe purpose of this short book is to "reincorporate the three modern separated entities [Guyana, Suriname, Guyane] into a comprehensive regional history and study" (7). Author Joshua R. Hyles wants to study, in a single work, the transformation of what had, he believes, been a relatively homogenous region before European colonisation - the "Guiana Shield" - into three very different states today, English, French and Dutch-speaking places in a Spanish and Portuguesespeaking continent. The Guianas, he believes, form "an ideal historical laboratory in which to study the cultural outcomes of European colonisation" (3).Hyles divides the history of the Guianas into various periods. The "homogenous period" (chapter 2) deals with the region from earliest times to 1667, while chapter 3 considers the "demarcation period", 1667-1814, when France, Britain and the Netherlands finalised the borders between their various settlements there. For the period of "active administration", 1814-1914, Hyles devotes a chapter on each colony (4, 5 and 6); he denotes 1914-50 as the "abandonment period" for all three colonies, treated in a single chapter (7). Finally, chapters 8, 9 and 10 examine Guyana, Guyane and Suriname in the era of decolonisation and independence (or department status for Guyane).The idea of examining the evolution of these three modern political entities in a single study is a good one. But the execution falls short, in my view, in three main respects.First, a study like this must be based on secondary sources, and there is nothing wrong with that. But one surely has the right to expect that the author would have read, and used, the most significant published works on the history of the three states. In the case of Guyana, however, the important books on the country's nineteenth- and twentieth-century history by Alan Adamson, Juanita de Barros, M.N. Menezes, Brian Moore, Colin Palmer, Stephen Rabe, Walter Rodney, Clem Seecharan, Thomas Spinner, Maurice St Pierre and Alvin Thompson are all absent from bibliography and endnotes. For Suriname and Guyane, Hyles has read nothing in French or Dutch, though he has used a few important works in English on those countries. For the most part, however, Hyles seems to mainly rely on a few general histories of the Caribbean, or of French and Dutch colonisation, plus various internet pieces especially for the last three chapters. …

Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados. Hilary McD. Beckles. London: Zed Books Ltd. 1989. ix, 197pp. Slave Women in Caribbean Society 1650–1838. Barbara bush. London: James Currey Ltd. 1990. xiii, 190pp. Slave Women in the New World: Gender Stratification in the Caribbean. Marietta Morrissey. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas. 1989. xiv, 202pp.

Edited collection of essays examining the social evolution of the colonial Caribbean, from the end of slavery to mid-20th century. Focuses on social & ethnic groups, class, gender, & development of cultural & intellectual traditions.