Edited by L. H. Roper, The Torrid Zone: Caribbean Colonization and Cultural Interaction in the Long Seventeenth Century charts how the Danish, the Dutch, the English, the French, and multiple Indigenous groups – most notably, the Kalinago – fought Spain’s claims of dominion over the West Indies. From 1598 to 1720, owing to fierce combat and simmering rivalries between various European and Indigenous nations, commercial and colonizing activities in the region were a constant question rather than a definite, fixed reality. … For colonies such as Jamaica, Suriname, and St. Thomas, shifting imperial control resulted in colonial populations that were a mix of different European nations, each with growing numbers of African, and sometimes also Indian, slaves. … While there are a few curious omissions – for instance, no mention of Aruba and Bonaire, barely any reference to Curaçao, and outside of [Carolyn] Arena’s chapter, little discussion of women’s roles – these do not diminish Roper’s contributions. With the lecture material and other scholarship filling in those gaps, the volume would be an excellent addition to a number of courses. Historians and students alike will benefit from reading The Torrid Zone.
REVIEW OF The Torrid Zone: Caribbean Colonization and Cultural Interaction in the Long Seventeenth Century, EDITED BY L. H. ROPER, THE SOUTH CAROLINA HISTORICAL MAGAZINE 122 no. 1 (JANUARY 2021): 47-50.
Four years after the researchathon, “The Kamau Brathwaite Bibliography” was published as a work in progress PDF version in the February 2018 issue of sx salon: a small axe literary platform. Following the “hype” of a collaborative digital effort, there is seldom much reward to be found in completing the painstaking follow-up process within the current academic humanities mandate of single-authored publications. This essay uses the experience of the researchathon and follow-up work to consider moments of conflict and incompatibility between available resources – human and technological – and the distinct trajectories of Caribbean intellectual life, in general, and of Kamau Brathwaite’s career in particular. Because Brathwaite was a dedicated historian, multi-disciplinary academic, literary critic, and multi-generic creative writer, the range and variety of his primary sources – numbering above 500 – necessitated repeated re-evaluations of the uses and affordances of Zotero and other software. Thus, Brathwaite serves as a paradigmatic example of the need for creative usage of existing technology to accommodate the tensions, frequently experienced in building digital projects, between the projected potential needs of future scholars and the strictures of contemporary preservation methods and scholarship.
“After the Collaboration: The Kamau Brathwaite Bibliography,” – coauthored with Kelly Baker Josephs Caribbean Quarterly 65 no. 3 (July 2019): 405-420.
Those goals mean that there are three parts to this essay:
1. The advantages of collaboration, between academics and between academics and digital technologies;
2. The challenges of scholarly usage of digital technologies, particularly software and platforms we do not build or control;
3. Exploration of what the particularities of Kamau Brathwaite’s career and Caribbean intellectuals more broadly, might teach us about not only the points above – collaboration and scholarly usage of digital technologies – but also the forms our scholarly work have taken and might take in future.
This bibliography is a reworking and expansion of the “Kamau Brathwaite SX Bibliography” begun as a collective effort at the Caribbean Digital researchathon in December 2014.[1] It represents a snapshot of the bibliography’s progress up to the end of February 2018. The full collection exists as a living library on Zotero, and members may continue to add to and update it. Nonmembers may view and search the library; they may also use the tag function to reorganize entries according to various criteria (specific works, years, language, etc.). In preparing this stand-alone publication of the bibliography, Kelly Baker Josephs and Teanu Reid have added sources, checked and revised previous entries for accuracy and completeness, and formatted and organized the collection for publication. We have concentrated on expanding Brathwaite’s primary works, which now number above five hundred, not including recordings. We depended heavily on Doris Brathwaite’s two published bibliographies, EKB: His Published Prose and Poetry, 1948–1986 (Savacou, 1986) and A Descriptive and Chronological Bibliography of the Work of Edward Kamau Brathwaite (New Beacon, 1988). There is still much to be done on including secondary sources to indicate the breadth of scholarly work on Brathwaite’s writings and theories.
“The Kamau Brathwaite Bibliography,” – coauthored with Kelly Baker Josephs SX Salon 27 (February 2018): 1-38.
Abstract:
“A Road Through a Home: A History of the Bush River Quaker Settlement in Colonial South Carolina,” The Proceedings of the NCUR (September 2016): 1116-1121.
A study of culture in colonial and early 19th century South Carolina offers valuable insight into the lives and practices that defined the various groups of the colony, and how these groups were impacted by the development of the new nation. This paper will answer the question of how the intersections between Quaker and South Carolinian culture affected the Quaker communities, culture, and faith in Bush River. Completing a study of the Bush River Quaker community and the larger South Carolinian community, will show how transatlantic migration transformed the original principles of settlers into something new and “American”. Quakers in colonial South Carolina are the focus of this paper because they kept detailed records and maintained a large correspondence network between the other Quaker communities in Pennsylvania and North Carolina. My paper will rely on primary texts, such as the meeting minutes of the Bush River Quakers, for information on the South Carolinian and Quaker cultures. I will also utilize secondary sources, such as George Fox and Early Quaker Culture and Unification of a Slave State, for analysis. The goal of this paper is to show that when the Quakers migrated to colonial South Carolina, the colony’s dependence on slave labor divided, and then caused the relocation of, the Bush River Quakers.
Teanu Reid 