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Stretching from the Bahamas in the north to the Guianas on the South American mainland, the societies of the Caribbean have been shaped over time be the contirbutions of many peoples--the region's originial Amerindian inhabitants; colonists from Spain, England, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark; men and women from hundreds of African societies who were imported as slaves; and the contract laborers who were later brought from Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East.

In Caribbean Contours eight leading scholars in the humanities and the social sciences survey the history, politics, economics, demography, and culture of the Caribbean to provide an authoritative yet accessible introduction to this complex and geographically fragmented region.

From a United States perspective, the eople of the Caribbean are at once familiar and foreign--an everyday presence in the lives of many urban Americans on the one hand, representatives of exotic worlds for millions of American tourists on the other. This volume is intended to provide some of the essential facts underlying both the unity and diversity of Caribbean scieties, and thus to contirbute to an understanding of the region's increasing importance in the modern world.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Introduction(p. 3)
• 1 A Political Profile of the Caribbean(p. 13)
• 2 "Race" and Color in the Caribbean(p. 55)
• 3 Sugar in the Caribbean: Turning Sunshine into Money(p. 85)
• 4 From Plantations to Peasantries in the Caribbean(p. 127)
• 5 A Linguistic Perspective on the Caribbean(p. 155)
• 6 The Caribbean as a Musical Region(p. 181)
• 7 The Contemporary Caribbean: A General Overview(p. 219)
• Notes on the Contributors(p. 251)
• List of Books in the Series(p. 253)

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CHOICE Review

Written by distinguished specialists, these high-quality essays are informative and readable. The collection includes Carl Stone on politics, H. Hoetink on ``race'' and color, G.B. Hagelberg on sugar, Sidney W. Mintz on peasantries, Mervyn C. Alleyne on languages, Kenneth M. Bilby on music, and Gordon K. Lewis, who provides an overview that emphasizes contemporary political issues. Unlike most studies, these essays generally address the entire region (Hispanic, British, French, and Dutch) while exploring its extraordinary cultural diversity and political fragmentation. One recurring and unifying concept is ``creolization,'' the process in which something new, whether language, music, or conceptualizations of ``race,'' is created in the Caribbean on the basis of ancestral cultural heritages. With the exception of Bilby's outstanding analysis of Caribbean music, there is little that specialists will find to be new in this volume, yet there is much that is thought-provoking and, at best, eloquently expressed. There is no index and the map leaves out Belize, though this new nation is referred to in several essays. Public, college, and university libraries.-O.N. Bolland, Colgate University

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Sidney W. Mintz is professor of anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University. He is author of Worker in the Cane , Caribbean Transformations , and Sweetness and Power . Sally Price , also a Johns Hopkins anthropologist, has co-written Afro-American Arts of the Suriname Rain Forest and Co-wives and Calabashes .