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3 books match the query 'Dominica'
Peasants and Capital
Dominica in the World EconomyMichel-Rolph Trouillot
HAU, 2025
A new edition of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s influential ethnography of a village in Dominica.
Over thirty-five years ago, Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s debut ethnography, Peasants and Capital: Dominica in the World Economy, dared to regard peasants not as vestiges of premodern economies but as instrumental to, and integrated in, a capitalist world system. Combining historical ethnography with an intimate portrait of a banana-producing eastern Caribbean village, this multi-sited study demonstrates how multinational capital thrives on the surplus production of peasant cultivators. At the same time, it investigates how peasantries generate independent conceptions of value and subsistence in the process of building a new postcolonial state in Dominica. This new edition of Peasants and Capital invites anthropologists to revisit the methodological innovations of this multi-scalar study and readers to meditate on the continued vitality of peasant livelihoods in the Caribbean today.
Ryan Cecil Jobson’s new introduction situates this edition in the context of Trouillot’s remarkable life and career. Jobson reminds us of the book’s enduring theoretical and ethnographic significance and asks us to consider how the entanglement of peasants from Dominica in national and world affairs has been impacted by more recent histories, such as the end of preferential markets for Caribbean bananas, the migration of “banana children” to regional and metropolitan urban centers, and the devastation of Dominica by Hurricane Maria.
Over thirty-five years ago, Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s debut ethnography, Peasants and Capital: Dominica in the World Economy, dared to regard peasants not as vestiges of premodern economies but as instrumental to, and integrated in, a capitalist world system. Combining historical ethnography with an intimate portrait of a banana-producing eastern Caribbean village, this multi-sited study demonstrates how multinational capital thrives on the surplus production of peasant cultivators. At the same time, it investigates how peasantries generate independent conceptions of value and subsistence in the process of building a new postcolonial state in Dominica. This new edition of Peasants and Capital invites anthropologists to revisit the methodological innovations of this multi-scalar study and readers to meditate on the continued vitality of peasant livelihoods in the Caribbean today.
Ryan Cecil Jobson’s new introduction situates this edition in the context of Trouillot’s remarkable life and career. Jobson reminds us of the book’s enduring theoretical and ethnographic significance and asks us to consider how the entanglement of peasants from Dominica in national and world affairs has been impacted by more recent histories, such as the end of preferential markets for Caribbean bananas, the migration of “banana children” to regional and metropolitan urban centers, and the devastation of Dominica by Hurricane Maria.
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Phyllis Shand Allfrey
A Caribbean LifeParavisini-Gebert, Lizabeth
Rutgers University Press, 1996
Phyllis Shand Allfrey is the first biography of one of the Caribbean's most intriguing writers and politicians. Allfrey (1908-1986) is best known as the author of The Orchid House, a fictionalized account of her early life that was turned into a highly acclaimed film for British television. Born to a prominent family of formerly wealthy sugar planters in Dominica, Allfrey followed an unexpected path: a rising novelist (who is often paired with Jean Rhys in critical discussion) and Fabian socialist in England and the United States, she returned to Dominica to organize the peasantry and estate workers into the island's first political party. Ostracized by the white elite into which she was born, she led the Dominica Labour party to power and became the West Indian Federation's only woman (and only white) minister, only to find herself expelled from the party when the rise of black nationalism made it expedient. The biography recreates Allfrey's life as it unfolds against the background of twentieth-century Caribbean political and literary history, from the decline of the planter class through the rise of party politics and the efforts to join the anglophone West Indies into a federation, to the troubled sixties and seventies, decades marked by racial violence and the emergence of the former British territories from colonial control. This volume includes five autobiographical stories that have long been out of print.
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The Orchid House
Allfrey, Phyllis Shand
Rutgers University Press, 1996
Lally helps to raise three white sisters in the Orchid House on the Island of Dominica and observes as each flees to the cold northern lands of England and America only to return to their magical past and the man they love.
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