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Abstract

The importance of demanbre, the sacred plot of family land in Haiti, is undisputed, but the development of demanbre from land to lwa (an elevated Vodou spirit) has not yet been explored. Building upon the integrative approaches of Karen McCarthy Brown and Colin (Joan) Dayan, this study aims to demonstrate the cultural imagination of the Haitian people, not only through the recounting of history but through the interpretational probabilities, ambiguities, and complexities inherent in the Vodou worldview. In cases such as this, where the Haitian peasantry left behind no written records, it is necessary to use alternative means to ensure their voices are heard. It is with great respect for the seminal works of Brown and Dayan that I expand upon the possibility of mythologizing the origin of the lwa Demanbre, using an interdepartmental approach that combines history, anthropology, and the study of myth.

Open Access
In: New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids

Abstract

This article centers what provision grounds meant to and for Afro-Jamaican apprentice laborers, and it details the complicated nature of customary rights, which were under attack after abolition in 1834. Although the apprentices’ provision grounds did not belong to them legally, they believed this land was theirs by customary right. Maintaining provision grounds allowed some apprentices to increase their capital and carve out autonomous spaces. For others, provision grounds led to familial and communal disputes over land rights. Furthermore, this study highlights rights lost and gained for apprentices after abolition and emphasizes how apprentice laborers sometimes exercised their newfound right to file complaints against overseers to secure their customary rights. By evaluating the factors that encouraged and discouraged the careful cultivation of one’s grounds during apprenticeship, this article also evaluates the role that these grounds played in the wider Afro-Jamaican community forged on pens and plantations.

Open Access
In: New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids
Free access
In: New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids

Abstract

Few early eighteenth-century Caribbean paintings survive. Among them is an important pair of previously unpublished Jamaican portraits of Chief Justice Thomas Fearon Jr., of Clarendon, and of his wife, Mary Peters Fearon, with their oldest son, Thomas Peters Fearon, from the 1730s. Colonial reflections of London art and society, although distorted by distance, occupied unique spaces where fantasies and realities collided. This article examines the historical context, provenance, and interpretation of the large, three-quarter-length paintings by an unidentified artist as well as the little that is known about the Jamaican art world at the time. Two unpublished drawings by Pierre du Simitière of Black West Indian women—one enslaved, one free—provide a counterpoint, as do other colonial depictions. The Fearon portraits form a rare pictorial record of a family at the apex of a transatlantic human pyramid of visible privilege and unseen pain, a century before that world ended.

Open Access
In: New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids