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emergence of British Guiana’s first national poet, Egbert Martin, best known to his readers as ‘Leo’. Throughout the 1880s, before his death in 1890, Martin published two collections of poetry, a book of short stories, and numerous uncollected works in every major periodical in British Guiana. The Guiana Herald claimed he was ‘far and away the first West Indian poet’. 23 About this characterisation A. J. Seymour writes, ‘I presume the writer means first in quality’, although, given what I have suggested above, the description does double duty, not only glorifying
British artists, for whom performance poetry has been an important (although only one) mode in the 1980s and 1990s. But the point might also be made here that of the sixty or so black British poets writing, recording or performing in Britain, only a handful, whether writing for the page or for the stage, are brought to the attention of students of literature or discussed in critical essays. Moreover, African and West Indian British poets generally enjoy a greater visibility than Asian British poets, despite notable exceptions such as Debjani Chatterjee. Renewed focus on
report that had made multiple references to Duignan’s Irishness (Colling 1973; Daily Mail 1973). (His accomplices were Paul Storey, who had a West Indian father and white English mother, and Mustafa Faut, who was Turkish-Cypriot.) Here, the authors emphasise that this news report ‘picked up the familiar themes of race and crime’, quoting the paper’s assertion that ‘[all] the sentenced youths are either coloured or immigrants’ (Hall et al. 1978: 102, my emphasis). But they overlook the report’s emphasis on Duignan’s Irishness, and its distinction between ‘coloured’ and
and merchants who relied on the labour of enslaved Africans for their profits. The initiator of the West Indian Docks scheme was Robert Milligan, a West Indies merchant and owner of a plantation in Jamaica, and as Melissa Bennett and Kristy Warren note, some of the ships that left and arrived at the West India Docks shipped enslaved Africans to the Caribbean before loading their hold with plantation products for London. 12 The Caribbean context of the West India Docks saw people of colour designated as property rather than the possessors of property, and so the
College, Dublin (5 February). Chavkin, W. and J. M. Maher (eds) (2010). The Globalization of Motherhood: Deconstructions and Reconstructions of Biology and Care. New York: Routledge. Cohen, L. (2005). ‘Operability, bioavailability and exception’, in Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier (eds), Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. London: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 79–90. Colen, S. (1995). ‘ “Like a mother to them”: Stratified reproduction and West Indian childcare workers and employers in New York’, in F. D. Ginsburg and R. Rapp
brotherhood, and universal happiness’.33 The ideological patriliny, or male line of nationalist influence, is to be repeated upon the future. Expanding a very similar, indeed form-giving network, Nkrumah in his Autobiography notes that he learned politics and African history from meeting people like Dr Aggrey and also Azikiwe, and, later, the West Indian radicals C. L. R. James and George Padmore.34 The constructedness of these accounts of influence may not be immediately apparent in that the writers are in many cases presumably describing actual meetings or contacts at a