'Praise songs' of the family: Lineage and kinship in the Caribbean diaspora

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 50, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 114-128

  Chamberlain, Mary ^a  

^a OXFORD BROOKES UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 12344297557     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/2000.50.114     Document Type: Article

References (60)

1. JA 028/2/1/1/9.
2. BF 069/2/1/2/15.
3. For a more detailed discussion see Mary Chamberlain and Paul Thompson, 'Introduction', in Narrative and Genre, ed. Chamberlain and Thompson, Routledge Studies in Memory and Narrative, London, 1998, pp. 1-22.
4. Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating Our Past: the Social Construction of Oral History, Cambridge University Press, 1992.
5. Walter Benjamin, 'A Berlin Chronicle' in One Way Street, Verso, London, 1997, p. 316.
6. Alessandro Portelli, 'Oral History as Genre', in Chamberlain and Thompson (eds), Narrative and Genre, 1998, pp. 23-46.
7. Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, Praeger, New York, 1980.
8. Benjamin, 'Berlin Chonicle', p. 314.
9. This term was used by Constance Sutton in private correspondence to me on the theme of praise song retentions in the contemporary Caribbean. I am grateful to her for permitting me to appropriate it.
10. TM 098/1/1/1/2-6.
11. TP 108/2/1/1/1/8.
12. JG025/2/1/1/16.
13. TC 029/2/1/1/9-10.
14. Alessandro Portelli, 'Uchronic Dreams', in Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson (eds), The Myths We Live By, Routledge, London, 1990.
15. Mary Chamberlain, 'Brothers and Sisters, Uncles and Aunts. A Lateral Perspective on the Caribbean Family', in Elizabeth Silva and Carol Smart (eds), The New Family? Sage, London, 1997.
16. Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory, Verso, London, 1995, p. 17.
17. Jean-Jaques Rousseau, Suicide, as quoted in Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1961, p. 371.
18. See Trevor Marshall, Peggy McGeary, Grace Thompson (eds), Folksongs of Barbados, Bridgetown 1981, for the categorization of song forms.
19. For an interesting discussion on the language and function of naming and nicknaming, see Richard D. E. Burton, 'Names and Naming in Afro-Caribbean Cultures', New West Indies Gulde/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, 73: 1/2 1999.
20. Marshall, McGeary, Thompson (eds), Folksongs of Barbados. This particular song was recorded in St. John, Barbados, in the mid twentieth century.
21. Sidney Mintz, Caribbean Transformations [1974], Columbia University Press, New York, 1989, p. 14.
22. Leroy Vail and Landeg White, Power and the Praise Poem: Southern African Voices in History, University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville, and James Currey, London, 1991.
23. Tonkin, Narrating Our Past.
24. Karin Barber, I could Speak Until Tomorrow. Oriki, Women and the Past in a Yoruba Town, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington D.C., 1991.
25. Vail and White, Power and the Praise Poem, p. 41.
26. Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery, MacGibbon and Kee, London, 1968.
27. Gordon Rohlehr, Calypso and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad, Gordon Rohlehr, Port-of-Spain, 1990.
28. B21/1/1. M. Chamberlain Barbados Migration Project. The informant was a female agricultural labourer, born in Barbados in 1912. This research was conducted with the support of the Nuffield Foundation.
29. As note 28.
30. Rex Nettleford, 'Implications for Caribbean Development', in John W. Nunley and Judith Bettelheim (eds), Caribbean Festival Arts St. Louis Art Museum in association with University of Washington Press, Seattle and London, 1988.
31. Lorna McDaniel, The Big Drum Ritual of Carriacou: Praisesongs in Rememory of Flight, University Press of Florida, Gainesville, 1998.
32. Maureen Warner Lewis, Guinea's Other Sons: The African Dynamic in Trinidad Culture, Majority Press, Dover, Mass, 1991.
33. Marjorie Whylie and Maureen Warner-Lewis, 'Characteristics of Maroon Music from Jamaica and Suriname', in E. Kofi Agorsah, Maroon Heritage. Archaeological, Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives, Canoe Press, Jamaica, University of the West Indies, 1994.
34. Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial of the British Colonies in the West Indies, Dublin, 1793, quoted in Rohlehr Calypso and Society, p. 57.
35. As note 34.
36. As note 34.
37. Tonkin, Narrating Our Past.
38. Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism, Oxford University Press, New York, 1988, p. xxiv.
39. Dionne Brand, 'Photograph' in Sans Souci and other stories, Women's Press, Toronto, 1989, p. 75.
40. TC 058/2/1/1/5.
41. Virginia Kerns, Women and the Ancestors. Black Carib Kinship and Ritual (1983), University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 1997.
42. Constance Sutton, 'Introduction', Kerns, Women and the Ancestors, 1997.
43. As note 42.
44. Mary Chamberlain, 'The Global Self. Narratives of Caribbean Migrant Women', in Tess Coslett and Penny Summerfield (eds), Feminism and Autobiography, Routledge, London, forthcoming, 2000.
45. As note 44.
46. Gloria Wekker, 'One Finger Does Not Drink Okra Soup. African-Surinamese Women and Critical Agency', in M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpede Mohanty (eds), Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, Routledge, London, 1997.
47. Erna Brodber, Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, New Beacon, London, 1980 p. 12.
48. See also Elsa Barkley Brown ('Polyrhythms and Improvisation: Lessons for Women's History', History Workshop Journal 31, spring 1991): she invokes the practice of gumbo ya ya (Creole for everybody talks at once) and the metaphor of jazz to ask that we listen for how difference (and improvisation) mean that multiple voices interact and combine: 'History is also everybody talking at once, multiple rhythms being played simultaneously'.
49. Jamaica Kincaid, The Autobiography of my Mother, Vintage, London, 1996, p. 227.
50. JI 028.
51. JB 008.
52. JI 028.
53. See, for instance, Linda Basch et al, Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Post-Colonial Predicaments and Deterritorialized Nation States, Gordon and Breach, Langhorne P.A., 1994.
54. Pierre Chamoiseau, Texaco, Praeger, New York, 1997.
55. McDaniel, The Big Drum Ritual, p. 166.
56. See Mary Chamberlain, Narratives of Exile and Return, Macmillan, London, 1997.
57. Also 'Gender and the Narratives of Migration', History Workshop Journal 43, spring 1997.
58. Lord Melody's calpyso in the early 1950s 'Mama Look A Boo-boo' may well have been saying in song what could not be said in speech.
59. R. T. Smith, Kinship and Class in the West Indies: a genealogical study of Jamaica and Guyana, Cambridge University Press, 1988.
60. JF 022.