Dr Donna E. McFarlane Curator and Director of the Marcus Mosiah Garvey Multimedia Museum (2003–2017) carefully reconstructs the history of Jamaica’s museums, and the world of new museum studies centered on Jamaica’s First National Hero life’s work and philosophy. The timelessness of Garvey and The Universal Negro Improvement (UNIA) is examined through exhibitions, library holdings, local community activities and 21st century museum technology housed in the historical and renovated Liberty ...

An exploration into why and how Jamaicans become Rastafari in spite of increasing incrimination of the religionSo much has been written about the Rastafari, yet we know so little about why and how people join the Rastafari movement. Although popular understandings evoke images of dreadlocks, reggae, and marijuana, Rastafarians were persecuted in their country, becoming a people seeking social justice. Yet new adherents continued to convert to Rastafari despite facin...

"The centuries-long attack on Black history represents a strike against our very worth, brilliance, and value. We’re ready to fight back. And when we fight, we win." —Colin KaepernickSince its founding as a discipline, Black Studies has been under relentless attack by social and political forces seeking to discredit and neutralize it. Our History Has Always Been Contraband was born out of an urgent need to respond to the latest threat: efforts to remove content from an AP ...

An exhaustive volume of leading scholarship in the field of Black Canadian history, Unsettling the Great White North highlights the diverse experiences of persons of African descent within the chronicles of Canada’s past. The book considers histories and theoretical framings within the disciplines of history, sociology, law, and cultural and gender studies to chart the mechanisms of exclusion and marginalization in "multicultural" Canada and to situate Black Canadians as speakers ...

DanceHall combines cultural geography, performance studies and cultural studies to examine performance culture across the Black Atlantic. Taking Jamaican dancehall music as its prime example, DanceHall reveals a complex web of cultural practices, politics, rituals, philosophies, and survival strategies that link Caribbean, African and African diasporic performance.Combining the rhythms of reggae, digital sounds and rapid-fire DJ lyrics, dancehall music was popular...

Short-listed for the 2012 Speaker’s AwardOne hundred years ago, the City of Brantford advertised itself as the most important manufacturing centre in Canada. During the century that followed, its industrial economy boomed, faltered, and finally collapsed. By the end of the twentieth century, Brantford was known for unemployment, hard luck, and the infamy of having "the worst downtown in Canada." For twenty years the downtown was in steep decline. Significant attempts at ur...

Black people in the British Empire have long challenged the notion that "there ain't no black in the Union Jack." For the post-World War II wave of Afro-Caribbean migrants, many of whom had long been subjects of the Empire, claims to a British identity and imperial citizenship were considered to be theirs by birthright. However, while Britain was internationally touted as a paragon of fair play and equal justice, they arrived in a nation that was frequently hostile and unwilling to incorpo...

Modern urban planning has long promised to improve the quality of human life. But how is human life defined? Displacing Blackness develops a unique critique of urban planning by focusing, not on its subservience to economic or political elites, but on its efforts to improve people’s lives.While focused on twentieth-century Halifax, Displacing Blackness develops broad insights about the possibilities and limitations of modern planning. Drawing connections between t...

This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of the ancient world find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs. Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consu...

This book records how Black women carved space within a specific community - with its political challenges and social realities - to determine and redefine their conditions. Photographs, poems and press cuttings enrich this historical and reflective account of the activism and achievements of the Abasindi Cooperative and its political impact. It shows Abasindi as a significant contributor and historical antecedent to community activism in the UK today against race, class and gender oppress...

This collection provides an in-depth and up-to-date examination of the concept of Intangible Cultural Heritage and the issues surrounding its value to society. Critically engaging with the UNESCO 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, the book also discusses local-level conceptualizations of living cultural traditions, practices and expressions, and reflects on the efforts that seek to safeguard them. Exploring a global range of case studies, the...

In hundreds of businesses, secretaries — usually women — do clerical work in “open floor” settings while managers — usually men — work and make decisions behind closed doors. According to Daphne Spain, this arrangement is but one example of the ways in which physical segregation has reinforced women’s inequality. In this important new book, Spain shows how the physical and symbolic barriers that separate women and men in the office, at home, and at school block women’s access to the social...