Download or read book Religion and Society in Post emancipation Jamaica written by Robert J. Stewart and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What role did religion or the agents of religion, both European and Afro-Jamaican, play in the conflicts that characterized the formation of a creole society in Jamaica after emancipation? Beginning from this question, Robert J. Stewart has produced the most comprehensive available treatment of the religious, social, and cultural history of nineteenth-century Jamaica. This remarkable volume explores the interaction of two Christianities, one European and the other African-based. It examines the organization, presence, politics, and mission philosophy of the major Christian denominations, as well as the creative responses of Afro-Jamaicans to evangelization. The ideological, theological, and racial assumptions embraced by the various denominations and missionaries prevented them from valuing Africanisms in the religious and cultural heritage of Afro-Jamaicans and, with Baptist exceptions, from identifying with the latter's aspirations and social problems. In consequence, Afro-Jamaican religion became a source of identity and resistance against European cultural hegemony in Jamaica. Drawing on rich troves of documents unavailable in the United States, Stewart develops major new accounts of the processes of syncretism and creolization. His grasp of European intellectual history and deft critiques of prior scholarship add to the importance of this work. An excellent raconteur, the author also presents a vivid portrait gallery of both missionaries and Afro-Jamaicans during this crucial period in the island's history.
Download or read book Contentious Liberties written by Gale L. Kenny and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2011-12-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oberlin College mission to Jamaica, begun in the 1830s, was an ambitious, and ultimately troubled, effort to use the example of emancipation in the British West Indies to advance the domestic agenda of American abolitionists. White Americans hoped to argue that American slaves, once freed, could be absorbed productively into the society that had previously enslaved them, but their “civilizing mission” did not go as anticipated. Gale L. Kenny's illuminating study examines the differing ideas of freedom held by white evangelical abolitionists and freed people in Jamaica and explores the consequences of their encounter for both American and Jamaican history. Kenny finds that white Americans—who went to Jamaica intending to assist with the transition from slavery to Christian practice and solid citizenship—were frustrated by liberated blacks' unwillingness to conform to Victorian norms of gender, family, and religion. In tracing the history of the thirty-year mission, Kenny makes creative use of available sources to unpack assumptions on both sides of this American-Jamaican interaction, showing how liberated slaves in many cases were able not just to resist the imposition of white mores but to redefine the terms of the encounter.
Download or read book Art and Emancipation in Jamaica written by T. J. Barringer and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 620 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coinciding with the bicentenary of the abolition of the British slave trade, this multi-disciplinary volume chronicles the iconography of sugar, slavery, and the topography of Jamaica from the beginning of British rule in 1655 to the aftermath of emancipation in the 1840s. Focusing on the visual and material culture of slavery and emancipation in Jamaica, it offers new perspectives on art, music, and performance in Afro-Jamaican society and on the Jewish diaspora in the Caribbean. Central to the book is "Sketches of Character "(1837-38)--a remarkable series of lithographs by the Jewish Jamaican artist Isaac Mendes Belisario--the earliest visual representation of the masquerade form Jonkonnu. Innovative scholarship traces the West African roots of Jonkonnu through its evolution in Jamaica and continuing transformation today; offers a unique portrait of Jamaican culture at a pivotal historical moment; and provides a new model for interpreting the visual culture of empire.
Download or read book Jamaica Genesis written by Diane J. Austin-Broos and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-06-12 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How has Pentecostalism, a decidedly American form of Christian revivalism, managed to achieve such phenomenal religious ascendancy in a former British colony among people of predominately African descent? According to Diane J. Austin-Broos, Pentecostalism has flourished because it successfully mediates between two historically central yet often oppositional themes in Jamaican religious life—the characteristically African striving for personal freedom and happiness, and the Protestant struggle for atonement and salvation through rigorous ethical piety. With its emphasis on the individual experience of grace and on the ritual efficacy of spiritual healing, and with its vibrantly expressive worship, Jamaican Pentecostalism has become a powerful and compelling vehicle for the negotiation of such fundamental issues as gender, sexuality, race, and class. Jamaica Genesis is a work of signal importance to all those concerned not simply with Caribbean studies but with the ongoing transformation of religion andculture.
Download or read book Slaves and Missionaries written by Mary Turner and published by University of the West Indies Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On 27 December 1831 a fire on Kensington Estate in St James, Jamaica signalled the start of one of the largest slave revolts in the Caribbean. Its leaders were leaders also in the mission churches and the independent sects, and their followers expected the missionaries to support them in their bid for wage work and free status. The missionaries, however, sent to save souls from sin in the face of planter hostility, were explicitly committed to neutrality on the slavery issue. This book traces the response of all classes in Jamaican society to mission work, focusing in particular on the dynamic interplay between slaves and missionaries. Embraced as fellow sinners, assured of spiritual equality of all before God, their intellectual equality with whites demonstrated in schools and classes, the slaves imbued Christianity with political purpose and questioned why blacks and whites were equal after death but slave and master in life. The slaves transformed the question into action in the political circumstances created by the decade-long campaign for abolition, and in doing so made the missionaries themselves into committed anti-slavery campaigners.
Download or read book Religion and the State written by Scott A. Merriman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2009-07-14 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This timely and authoritative resource combines both topical and country-by-country coverage to help readers understand the coexistence of church and state in nations around the world today. At a time when faith-based groups have become more politically active in the United States, and with religious conflicts at the epicenter of many of the world's most dangerous hotspots, Religion and the State: An International Analysis of Roles and Relationships could not be more welcomed or timely. Country by country, faith by faith, it unravels the historic underpinnings and long-range effects of the relationship between religious principles and the operations of government in its many guises worldwide. The work combines topical essays on significant developments in the confluence of religion and law throughout the world with short descriptions of each countries' current treatment of religion. Readers can investigate specific nations, compare situations across nations, and explore key issues in the pervasive, often controversial relationship between religion and government.
Download or read book Passages and Afterworlds written by Maarit Forde and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-15 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributors to Passages and Afterworlds explore death and its rituals across the Caribbean, drawing on ethnographic theories shaped by a deep understanding of the region's long history of violent encounters, exploitation, and cultural diversity. Examining the relationship between living bodies and the spirits of the dead, the contributors investigate the changes in cosmologies and rituals in the cultural sphere of death in relation to political developments, state violence, legislation, policing, and identity politics. Contributors address topics that range from the ever-evolving role of divinized spirits in Haiti and the contemporary mortuary practice of Indo-Trinidadians to funerary ceremonies in rural Jamaica and ancestor cults in Maroon culture in Suriname. Questions of alterity, difference, and hierarchy underlie these discussions of how racial, cultural, and class differences have been deployed in ritual practice and how such rituals have been governed in the colonial and postcolonial Caribbean. Contributors. Donald Cosentino, Maarit Forde, Yanique Hume, Paul Christopher Johnson, Aisha Khan, Keith E. McNeal, George Mentore, Richard Price, Karen Richman, Ineke (Wilhelmina) van Wetering, Bonno (H.U.E.) Thoden van Velzen
Download or read book Religion Diaspora and Cultural Identity written by J.W. Pulis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-02 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the religions of the Caribbean have been a subject of popular media, there have been few ethnographic publications. This text is a much-needed and long overdue addition to Caribbean studies and the exploration of ideas, beliefs, and religious practices of Caribbean folk in diaspora and at home. Drawing upon ethnographic and historical research in a variety of contexts and settings, the contributors to this volume explore the relationship between religious and social life. Whether practiced at home or abroad, the contributors contend that the religions of Caribbean folk are dynamic and creative endeavors that have mediated the ongoing and open-ended relation between local and global, historical and contemporary change.
Download or read book Myal written by Erna Brodber and published by Waveland Press. This book was released on 2014-08-08 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jamaican-born novelist and sociologist Erna Brodber describes Myal as “an exploration of the links between the way of life forged by the people of two points of the black diaspora—the Afro-Americans and the Afro-Jamaicans.” Operating on many literary levels—thematically, linguistically, stylistically—it is the story of women’s cultural and spiritual struggle in colonial Jamaica. The novel opens at the beginning of the 20th century with a community gathering to heal the mysterious illness of a young woman, Ella, who has returned to Jamaica after an unsuccessful marriage abroad. The Afro-Jamaican religion myal, which asserts that good has the power to conquer all, is invoked to heal Ella, who has been left "zombified” and devoid of any black soul. Ella, who is light skinned enough to pass for white, has suffered a breakdown after her white American husband produced a black-face minstrel show based on the stories of her village and childhood. This cultural appropriation is one of a series Ella encountered in her life, and parallels the ongoing theft of the labor and culture of colonized peoples for imperial gain and pleasure. The novel‘s rich, vivid language and vital characters earned it the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Canada and the Caribbean. The novel links nicely with Brodber’s coming-of-age story, Jane & Louisa Will Soon Come Home, also from Waveland Press, for its similar images, themes, and specific Jamaican cultural references to colonialism, religion, slavery, gender, and identity. Both novels are Brodber’s way of telling stories outside of published history to point out the whitewashing and distortion of black history through religion and colonialism.
Download or read book The Cultural Politics of Obeah written by Diana Paton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-10 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the importance of debates about obeah, and state suppression of it, for Caribbean struggles about freedom and citizenship.
Download or read book Between Babel and Pentecost written by Andre Corten and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2001-08-22 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text considers the important transnational character of Pentecostal movements in Africa and Latin America and their tendency to foster identities that transcend national and cultural contexts.
Download or read book Black Missionary in an Age of Enslavement written by Noel Leo Erskine and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2024-08-06 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much discussion of Protestant Christianity and its missions in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is focused on the work of English missionary William Carey and American Missionaries Adoniram and Ann Judson, who travelled to India in 1793 and 1813. This book reframes this conventional understanding of mission studies and outreach by exploring the legacy and life of the enslaved American Baptist George Liele (1750–1825)—the first African American ordained to the Christian ministry. Black Missionary in an Age of Enslavement looks at Christianity and mission through the life and times of Liele, highlighting his travels as an itinerant preacher in South Carolina, Georgia, Jamaica (and through his protégé there, David George), Nova Scotia, Sierra Leone and, toward the end of his life, England. Liele knew what it meant to be both slave and free. In Jamaica, as in Savannah, he was imprisoned for his faith and saw the survival of the church as pivotal. Liele was a man of firsts: the first African American ordained to the Christian ministry (May 20, 1775), and the first missionary to take the Christian gospel outside the United States. It was Liele, more than any other missionary, who initiated the practice of offering education to native people both enslaved and free. With the hymnal in one hand and the Bible in the other, Liele taught the enslaved and free that they were destined for liberation.
Download or read book Civilising Subjects written by Catherine Hall and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2002-05 with total page 586 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume argues that the empire was at the heart of 19th century Englishness. It tells stories of a group of English men and women who constructed themselves as colonizers. It then uses these studies as a means of exploring wider colonial issues.
Download or read book The Encyclopedia of Caribbean Religions written by Patrick Taylor and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2013-04-30 with total page 1185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Encyclopedia of Caribbean Religions is the definitive reference for Caribbean religious phenomena from a Caribbean perspective. Generously illustrated, this landmark project combines the breadth of a comparative approach to religion with the depth of understanding of Caribbean spirituality as an ever-changing and varied historical phenomenon. Organized alphabetically, entries examine how Caribbean religious experiences have been shaped by and have responded to the processes of colonialism and the challenges of the postcolonial world. Systematically organized by theme and area, the encyclopedia considers religious traditions such as Vodou, Rastafari, Sunni Islam, Sanatan Dharma, Judaism, and the Roman Catholic and Seventh-day Adventist churches. Detailed subentries present topics such as religious rituals, beliefs, practices, specific historical developments, geographical differences, and gender roles within major traditions. Also included are entries that address the religious dimensions of geographical territories that make up the Caribbean. Representing the culmination of more than a decade of work by the associates of the Caribbean Religions Project, The Encyclopedia of Caribbean Religions will foster a greater understanding of the role of religion in Caribbean life and society, in the Caribbean diaspora, and in wider national and transnational spaces.
Download or read book Jah Kingdom written by Monique A. Bedasse and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-08-11 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its beginnings in 1930s Jamaica, the Rastafarian movement has become a global presence. While the existing studies of the Rastafarian movement have primarily focused on its cultural expression through reggae music, art, and iconography, Monique A. Bedasse argues that repatriation to Africa represents the most important vehicle of Rastafari's international growth. Shifting the scholarship on repatriation from Ethiopia to Tanzania, Bedasse foregrounds Rastafari's enduring connection to black radical politics and establishes Tanzania as a critical site to explore gender, religion, race, citizenship, socialism, and nation. Beyond her engagement with how the Rastafarian idea of Africa translated into a lived reality, she demonstrates how Tanzanian state and nonstate actors not only validated the Rastafarian idea of diaspora but were also crucial to defining the parameters of Pan-Africanism. Based on previously undiscovered oral and written sources from Tanzania, Jamaica, England, the United States, and Trinidad, Bedasse uncovers a vast and varied transnational network--including Julius Nyerere, Michael Manley, and C. L. R James--revealing Rastafari's entrenchment in the making of Pan-Africanism in the postindependence period.
Download or read book Christian Ritual and the Creation of British Slave Societies 1650 1780 written by Nicholas M. Beasley and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-01-25 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study offers a new and challenging look at Christian institutions and practices in Britain’s Caribbean and southern American colonies. Focusing on the plantation societies of Barbados, Jamaica, and South Carolina, Nicholas M. Beasley finds that the tradition of liturgical worship in these places was more vibrant and more deeply rooted in European Christianity than previously thought. In addition, Beasley argues, white colonists’ attachment to religious continuity was thoroughly racialized. Church customs, sacraments, and ceremonies were a means of regulating slavery and asserting whiteness. Drawing on a mix of historical and anthropological methods, Beasley covers such topics as church architecture, pew seating customs, marriage, baptism, communion, and funerals. Colonists created an environment in sacred time and space that framed their rituals for maximum social impact, and they asserted privilege and power by privatizing some rituals and by meting out access to rituals to people of color. Throughout, Beasley is sensitive to how this culture of worship changed as each colony reacted to its own political, environmental, and demographic circumstances across time. Local factors influencing who partook in Christian rituals and how, when, and where these rituals took place could include the structure of the Anglican Church, which tended to be less hierarchical and centralized than at home in England; the level of tensions between Anglicans and Protestants; the persistence of African religious beliefs; and colonists’ attitudes toward free persons of color and elite slaves. This book enriches an existing historiography that neglects the cultural power of liturgical Christianity in the early South and the British Caribbean and offers a new account of the translation of early modern English Christianity to early America.
Download or read book New Negroes from Africa written by Rosanne Marion Adderley and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 722 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1838, the British government outlawed the slave trade, emancipated all of the slaves in its possessions, and began to interdict slave ships en route to the Americas. Almost at once, colonies that had depended on slave labour were faced with a liberated and unwilling labour force. At the same time, newly freed slaves in Sierra Leone (and later from America and elsewhere) were "persuaded" to emigrate to other British colonies to provide a new workforce to replace or augment remnants of the old. Some became paid labourers, others indentured servants. These two groups - one, English-speaking colonists; the other, new African immigrants - are the focus of this study of "receptive" communities in the West Indies. Adderley describes the formation of these settlements, and, working from scant records, tries to tease out information about the families of liberated Africans, the labour they performed, their religions, and the culture they brought with them. She addresses issues of gender, ethnicity, and identity, and concludes with a discussion of repatriation.
