A response essay to Kincaid’s article According to Jamaica Kincaid’s article, seeing things or going to new places for the first time can be exciting. But Kincaid gives us a view on personal opinions and thoughts on the reality of England. Also her purpose in writing this piece was to inform us how the people of England made them feel superior to the settlers in British colonies. Ever her tone has been criticized and angry.…
3. Note how often through the course of the essay he is either alone or at the edge of a group of people whose language he doesn’t understand. How do you interpret this?…
Their behavior and their disregard for her country anger her. As a country, Antigua has wrestled to find its identity. Tourism and banking have become Antigua’s primary industries. Banham Richardson, a scholar of Caribbean geography, blames the Antiguan government, as other Caribbean governments for promoting tourism as national industries. Kincaid dislikes tourists because they use her country as a relief for their boredom. They do not contribute any benefits to the country. Kincaid condemns the manner in which Antigua is depicted to tourists. The natives do not exist in their promotion. The ‘Antigua’ that Kincaid knows and grew up in is not the one shown or described to tourists. In Antigua and Barbuda’s website it states “Welcome to Antigua and Barbuda”. It goes on to say “In 1784 the legendary Admiral Horatio Nelson sailed to Antigua and established Great Britain’s most important Caribbean base. Little did he know that over 200 years later, the same unique characteristics that attracted the Royal Navy would transform Antigua and Barbuda into one the Caribbean’s premier tourist destinations.” This is stated on the Antigua and Barbuda homepage. It is because of depictions like this, that Antigua is becoming a tourism capitol. Which is why Kincaid expresses her anger in “The Ugly…
This essay shall explore the identity of Charlotte and her Father as presented in Sugar and Slate, Williams, C (2002), Wales: Planet, and how their experiences of Africa, Guyana and Wales have shaped their personal identities as black people.…
In Exchanging Our Country Marks, Michael Gomez brings together various strands of the historical record in a stunning fusion that points the way to a definitive history of American Slavery. In this fusion of history, anthropology, and sociology, Gomez has made expert use of primary sources, including newspapers ads for runaway slaves in colonial America. Slave runaway accounts from newspapers are combined with personal diaries, church records, and former slave narratives to provide a firsthand account of the African and African-American experiences during the eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. With this mastery of sources, Gomez challenges many of the prevailing assumptions about slavery-- for example, that "the new condition of slavery superseded all others" (48)-- and he advances intriguing new speculations about the development of a collective African-American identity. In Gomez's words: "It is a study of their efforts to move from ethnicity to race as a basis for such an identity, a movement best understood when the impact of both internal and external forces upon social relations within this community is examined"(4).…
The called me M.J., that stood for Michael Jones. It was the early part of April in 1760 when I departed an English port and headed across the waters for the North American colonies where I planned to settle, start a family, and begin what I hoped to be a very prosperous life. It was the summer if 1760 when I planted my feet and my heart in Boston along with several black slaves that I purchased when I arrived here. I brought a hefty 10,000 British pounds in my purse, which was my entire life savings. I was twenty-two years old, turning twenty-three in the fall. I had heard so many wonderful things about this place and I could not wait to get here. When I first arrived here, because of my better fortune it was very easy for me to become a landowner and the owner of a small but successful farm. I purchased a decent size piece of land and began to build a constructive family and life.…
James Ramsay served as a surgeon on a warship bound for St Kit Kitts . There he had been called to attend an epidemic on a slave ship and never forgot the horrors he saw in the middle decks. He became an Aglican priest and served in St Kitts for 14 years, making outspoken attacks on slavery. In 1781 he returned to England and joined the abolitionists. He published in 1784 an “Essay on the Testament and Conversion of the African Slaves in the Sugar Colonies.”…
Dr. Knight a native of the Stoufville area of Ontario came as a young man to Jamaica in 1929 and became immersed in the culture of the citizens of South Western St. Ann. Can you imagine? , a white man who any pregnant woman could at any hour of the night call upon to take her to the local Alexandria Hospital to have her child delivered. Can you also imagine a white man who would stop his car to give a ride to a Civil servant , a teacher, a housewife, a student or a farmer if that person request a ride by flagging him down on the main road, arterial road or highway.…
Jamaica Kincaid’s critical novel, A Small Place, highlights the adverse effects of imperialism on her birthplace Antigua. Antigua became a sovereign state in 1981. However according to Kincaid, its yield to its colonizer, England, has yet to cease. Kincaid provides clear evidence of the natives’ high regard for everything that is English through national celebrations of the Queen’s birthday and royal visits, the education system, and the English named streets. Nonetheless, it is through these very examples that we receive Kincaid’s critique of post-colonial Antigua and thus, slavery. Kincaid strengthens her argument of resentment by providing a recurring symbol, the dilapidated library. The library just like many of the other remnants of colonialism represents the struggle between colonialism and emancipation on this “small place.” It is through these examples that Kincaid is able to establish a relationship between imperialism and its unfavorable repercussions on the island of Antigua.…
Bahamian renound photographer, Sabrina Lightbourn in her recent editorial written by Erica Wells in the Nassau Guardian of “Who is a Bahamian?” highlights her aims to increase Bahamians awareness of a multi-cultural ethnicity often unseen, ignored or misunderstood (Wells 1). She expresses her views not in so many words but with photographs of random Bahamians with varying skin hues, hair types and facial features that seems to beckon Bahamians to address their “roots”. Presently, Bahamian whites as she expressed in her editoral, often find it challenging to live in The Bahamas where the general consensus is that being Bahamian means having a dark skin complexion with thick Negro hair. She alludes to the fact that even our spoken language is also a determinant of who is a “true” Bahamian. Bahamian dilect is comprised of jargon special to the Bahamas and its natives. However, if a Bahamian, born and raised, speaks with proper diction and clearity one would assume he or…
My “saintly person” is Bob Marley. His full name was Robert “Bob” Nesta Marley. He was actually named Nesta Robert Marley when he was born but a Jamaican Passport official accidently mixed up his names. He was born on February 6,1945 in the village of Nine Mile in Saint Ann Parish, Jamaica. In 1977 he was diagnosed with having a type of skin cancer under one of toe nails. He refused to have his toe amputated. He died on May 11, 1981 after the cancer had spread to his lungs and brain.…
In Cambridge by Caryl Phillips, the history of the slave trade is exposed through different points of view or narratives, one by an Englishwoman and another by a slave called Cambridge. Phillips wants the reader to understand how European merchants treated the slaves and make a connection to what they went through. Evelyn O’Callaghan is one of the editors of the Journal of West Indian Literature. She had many interests like contemporary West Indian ‘diaspora’ literature, narratives of indentured servitude, the creole language in Caribbean literature and culture, etc. In 1993, O’Callaghan writes an essay called “Historical Fiction and Fictional History: Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge” so readers can understand and speculate more thoroughly about the novel, providing evidence that Phillips used other texts as reference.…
Slavery was probably the cruelest crime executed on a black African in the Caribbean. Although there were those who found it to be the norm, there isn’t an inch of doubt that slavery was an evil deed. This research is aimed at enlightening the reader on how the major revolts in Jamaica affected its society.…
Today Bangladesh is experiencing a rapid pace of urbanization. Although the level of urbanization is low (23.1%) the country already has got a huge urban population which is more than 28 million (Census, 2001). However after the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, urbanization and urban planning got little priority in the national policies and strategies of the country. Even at present, there is no proper policy guideline or regulations through which urbanization can be tackled. As a result, unplanned and haphazard growth is the common feature in most urban areas of the country and this situation is much more severe in metropolitan cities particularly in Dhaka. Such a situation resulted mainly due to inadequate attention given to urban planning and development. Being predominantly an agrarian country, rural and agricultural development in Bangladesh received priority in public allocations and management attention in the past. However, in the current situation it has been recognized that in spite of a declared national policy in favour of rural and agricultural development, ultimately much of the investments might well have flowed back to urban areas (Islam, 1990). The positive association of urbanization with industrialization and economic growth is well known in today’s world. Actually urbanization is an index or determinant of economic growth of the country. There has been a phenomenal increase in the level of urbanization and urban growth in Bangladesh for the last three decades. In 1974, the urban population was only 8.78% of the total population while this percentage increased to 23.1% in 2001 and it is estimated that 38.2% of the total population will live in urban areas in 2020 (Rouf, 1999).…
Cheryl M. Cassidy takes a journalistic approach to deal with the Morant Bay Rebellion this time, but reverses the focus, choosing to work on the press written by, and for, the White population of Jamaica. She is interested in showing that even though expatriates were familiar with the context of the colony, close contacts with coloured people who might have been involved in the uprising and its repression did not prevent racism. On the contrary, White Jamaicans displayed the same feeling of superiority prevailing in the metropolis and indistinctly condemned Black people, some of whom had actually rebelled, and Brown ones who had not taken part in the riots. Cassidy explains that ‘how a culture views itself is often dependent upon its definition…