1. English 112 – Lecture 1 Caribbean/Africa -- General

2. Today’s Lecture
I will be talking primarily about the Caribbean in an attempt to modify some of the commonly held notions about that region of the world.
The Slave Trade and the links between the two regions I will be discussing in my four sessions with you – Africa (Nigeria) and the Caribbean (Guyana).
(Previous?)European perceptions of blacks and the black body.

3. Caribbean Islands

4. A more comprehensive map of the Caribbean

5. St Lucia

6. Beach front hotel

7. The Warm Caribbean

8. Underneath the Mango Tree
‘underneath the mango tree, me honey and me watch for the moon Underneath the mango tree me honey and me make boolooloop soon.’

9. Victor Marquis: Of Cabbages and Kings
Parody?

10. Derek Walcott – Nobel Prize winning St. Lucian poet (1992)
‘But we were all strangers here . . .We have not wholly sunk into our own landscapes everything is immediate, and this immediacy means over breeding, illegitimacy, migration without remorse. The sprout casually stuck in the soil. The depth of being rooted is related to the shallowness of racial despair. The migratory West Indian feels rootless on his own earth, chafing at its beaches.”

11. Derek Walcott
‘A culture based on joy is bound to be shallow. Sadly, to sell itself, the Caribbean encourages the delights of mindlessness, of brilliant vacuity, as a place to flee not only winter but that seriousness that comes only out of a culture with four seasons.’ [Of course, Walcott is, in part, mocking the value placed on European culture]

12. Reggie with Regie

13. And again

14. At Sandals Hotel (Pigeon point) in St. Lucia

15. Africa

16. Locating Nigeria

17. Origin of name of continent
‘Africa’ is a term based on another mis-naming (as is the term black) and an attempt to create a monolithic construction out of a diverse continent of people, culture, nations, and experiences. ‘Africa’ becomes important as a defining term only in opposition to what is European or what is American. African historians indicate, for example, that the term ‘African’ was originally the name of a small Tunisian ethnic group which then began to be applied to a larger geographic area ranging from what is now eastern Morocco to Libya.

18. Lagos

19. Trying to find fish in oil contaminated waters

20. Oil spill in Nigeria

21. William Blake: Europe supported by Africa and America

22. Stacked like corpses

23. Slaves in the hole of a slave ship

24. Slaves destined for the slave market

25. Slaves

26. On board a slave ship

27. Stacked like cattle

28. Grace Nichols, ‘Taint’
But I was stolen by men the colour of my own skin borne away by men whose heels had become hoofs whose hands had turned talons bearing me down to the trail of darkness But I was traded by men traded like a fowl like a goat like a sack of kernels I was traded for beads for pans for trinkets? No it isn’t easy to forget what we refuse to remember Daily I rinse the taint of treachery from my mouth

29. Homo sapiens divided into varieties (Latin for ‘wise man’, but is the term used for the human species)

30. Linnaeus – four types of anthropomorpha
Wild Man – four-footed, mute, hairy American – copper-coloured, choleric, erect. Hair black, straight, thick; nostrils wide, face harsh; beard scanty; obstinate; content, free. Paints himself with fine red lines Regulated by customs. Asiatic – Sooty, melancholy, rigid. Hair black; eyes dark; severe; haughty; covetous. Covered with loose garments. Governed by opinions. African – Black, phlegmatic, relaxed. Hair black, frizzled; skin silky; nose flat, lips tumid; crafty, indolent, negligent. Anoints himself with grease. Governed by caprice European: White, sanguine, muscular, gentle, acute and inventive; covered with close vestments; governed by laws

31. A final category of ‘monster’ included dwarfs and giants, as well as man-made ‘monsters’ like eunuchs. The categorisation of humans is explicitly comparative with Europeans as the most attractive – hence perpetuating the myth of European superiority.

32. The slave trade was abolished in 1807
The slave trade was abolished in This meant that ships transporting slaves were fined. This did not stop the slave trade. Captains who were in danger of being boarded simply threw most of the slaves overboard into the Atlantic. The Slavery Abolition Act was passed in 1833, allowing slavery throughout the British empire. But as all slaves over 7 years old were ‘apprenticed’ to their masters, it was not until 1840 that slavery was, in effect, abolished. Even then many plantations still kept slaves.

33. Grace Nichols ‘Eulogy’
Yes the souls
caught in the Middle Passage
limbo
the dead ones
who are not dead
the sleeping ones
who are not sleeping
the restless ones
the leaping suicide
ones the saddest
ones of all who toss and
moan
with each lash of the ocean foam

34. ‘I'm just a red nigger who love the sea, I had a sound colonial education, I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation.’ Derek Walcott – from Schooner Flight

35. "Sarah" Baartman was the most famous of at least two Khoikhoi women who were exhibited as freak show attractions in 19th-century Europe under the name Hottentot Venus

36. Caricature of Hottentot Venus

37. Cartoon

38. Love Act
She enter into his Great House her see-far looking eyes  unassuming
He fix her with his glassy stare  and feel the thin fire in his blood  awakening
He / his mistresswife / and his  children who take to her breasts  like leeches
He want to tower above her  want to raise her ebony  haunches and when she does  he think she can be trusted and drinks her in 
And his mistresswife  spending all her days in rings  of vacant smiling  is glad to be rid of the  loveact
But time pass…
Her sorcery cut them  like a whip
She hide her triumph  and slowly stir the hate of poison in

39. Grace Nichol ‘epilogue’ to I Is a Long Memoried Woman
I have crossed an ocean I have lost my tongue from the root of the old one A new one has sprung.

40. Black Ivory: A Tale of Adventure among the Slavers of East Africa (1873)
Money was to be made out of ivory and slavery.
R. M. Ballantyne