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This book traces the life of Albert Raymond Forbes Webber (1880–1932), a distinguished Caribbean scholar, statesman, legislator, and novelist. Using Webber as a lens, it outlines the Guyanese struggle for justice and equality in an age of colonialism, imperialism, and indentureship. The author examines Webber’s emergence from the interior of Guyana to become a major presence in Caribbean politics. The book examines Webber’s insightful novel, Those That Be in Bondage; his travel writings; and his poetry. It chronicles Webber’s formation of the West Indian Press Association, his work on British Guiana’s constitution, and his championing of its people’s causes. The author studies Webber’s work with the British Guiana Labor Union to improve the conditions of the Guyanese working people and his authorship of the Centenary History and Handbook of British Guiana.

This book builds upon current research on the anticolonial and nationalist experience in the Caribbean. It explores the impact of global transformation upon the independent experience of St. Lucia and argues that the island’s formal decolonization roughly coincided with the period of the rise of global neoliberalism hegemony. Consequently, the concept of “limited sovereignty” became the defining feature of St. Lucia’s understanding of the possibilities of independence. Central to the analysis is the tension between the role of the state as a facilitator of domestic aspirations on one hand, and as a facilitator of global capital on the other. The author examines six critical phases in the St. Lucian experience. The first is 1940 to 1970, when the early nationalist movement gradually occupied state power within a framework of limited self-government. The second period is 1970 to 1982, during which formal independence was attained and an attempt at socialist-oriented radical nationalism was pursued by the St. Lucia Labor Party. The third distinctive period was the period of neoliberal hegemony, 1982–1990. The fourth period (1990–1997) witnessed a heightened process of neoliberal adjustment in global trade that destroyed the banana industry and transformed the domestic political economy. A later period (1997–2006) involved the SLP’s return to political power, resulting in tensions between an earlier radicalism and a new and contradictory accommodation to global neoliberalism. The final period (2006–2010) coincides with the onset of a crisis in global neoliberalism.

The Grenada Revolution: Reflections and Lessons utilizes the benefit of thirty years’ hindsight to reflect on and critique the Grenada Revolution. This collection of twelve essays brings together in one place the perspectives of scholars, politicians and technocrats drawn from North America and the Caribbean. The volume introduces the reader to historical analyses, insiders’ perspectives, theoretical critiques and prescriptions for the way forward. The principal aim of the volume is to use the Grenada Revolution as the point of departure to revisit a critical period in the post colonial Caribbean experience to explore lessons for Caribbean politics and society. The volume seeks to examine several broad questions: what factors gave rise to the Grenada Revolution on March 13, 1979? Why did the Grenada Revolution implode in October 1983, paving the way for the United States invasion of Grenada? What is the legacy of the Grenada Revolution and the implications of its demise for the Caribbean Left and for party politics in post-revolutionary Grenada? A central contention is that the Grenada Revolution marked a critical juncture in Caribbean development and there are glaring lessons to be learnt from the Grenada experience for democratic transformation and revolutionary change in the twenty-first century.

This book explores how fiction of the Reconstruction and the New South intervenes in debates over black schools, citizen-building, Jim Crow discrimination, and U.S. foreign policy toward its territories and dependencies. The author urges a reexamination not only of the contents and formal innovations of New South literature but also its importance in U.S. literary history. Many rarely studied fiction authors (such as Ellwood Griest, Ellen Ingraham, George Marion McClellan, and Walter Hines Page) receive generous attention here, and well-known figures such as Albion Tourgée, Frances E. W. Harper, Sutton Griggs, George Washington Cable, Mark Twain, Thomas Dixon, Owen Wister, and W. E. B. Du Bois are illuminated in significant new ways. The book’s readings seek to synthesize developments in literary and cultural studies, ranging through New Criticism, New Historicism, postcolonial studies, black studies, and “whiteness” studies. The book posits and answers significant questions: In what ways did the “uplift” projects of Reconstruction—their ideals and their contradictions—affect U.S. colonial policies in the new territories after 1898? How can fiction that treated these historical changes help us understand them? What relevance does this period have for us in the present, during a moment of great literary innovation and strong debate over how well the most powerful country in the world uses its resources?