Thursday, March 27, 2008

Enriching caribbean bookshelves


Excerpt from Ricky Singh's article in The Sunday Observer Newspaper, Sunday March 23, 2008


ANYONE - Caribbean national or otherwise - with little more than a passing interest in today's Caribbean Community and Common Market (Caricom) will find a treasure trove of information and analyses in the latest collection of books released by Ian Randle Publishers as a joint project of the Caricom Secretariat and the University of the West Indies.


What could also inspire reading of the collection of seven publications - all of which should now be available at leading bookstores across the Caribbean region, including the UWI's - is a book just released separately by Ian Randle titled The Political History of Caricom by Anthony Payne.
First published in 1980, it is a significantly revised and updated new edition of developments since then, spanning the past 27 years in Caricom's political and economic history penned by the author, professor of politics at the University of Sheffield who has written extensively on Caribbean politics and international relations.
In this latest work, Payne has managed to avoid the path of burdensome quotes, clichés and jargon to offer a narrative on the background to the formation of Caricom, its struggles for survival, progress and failures that makes easy and compelling reading. In addition, there is a wealth of useful references, select bibliography and index.


Thursday, March 20, 2008

Out for Easter

Our offices in Kingston will be closed on Good Friday [March 21] and Easter Monday [March 24]. We will reopen, business as usual, on Tuesday March 25.

On the way to the Warehouse


Lloyd Best: Enduring Relevance of Independent Thought, Caribbean Freedom is off press and on its way to our warehouse.
Best was well known as a Caribbean icon. Outspoken and prolific, he sought to move Caribbean thought away from the European 'ideal' and instead through the New World Group and his theory of the Plantation Economy, identified the realities of Caribbean society, politics and culture.
Following his death in 2007, tributes poured in for Best and his contribution to the development of Caribbean Thought. In this collection, Best’s eloquent tributes to other Caribbean intellectuals and their contribution to the creation of a Caribbean Civilisation are brought together for the first time.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

REVIEW - I Want to Disturb my Neighbour

Review taken from Sunday Gleaner newspaper, March 9, 2008


There is nothing riotous about I Want to Disturb My Neighbour. Well, not in an unlawful way. For it is a scholarly collection of 21 lectures and speeches on slavery, emancipation and postcolonial Jamaica, delivered locally and internationally, from 1998-2005 by Professor A. Shepherd, lecturer and renowned social historian at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona.
The papers are arranged thematically in five main sections: Historiography and Knowledge Production in Jamaica and the Wider Caribbean; Enslavement and Resistance; Emancipation and Migration - Negotiating Free Society; Slavery's legacy in Postcolonial Jamaica; and 'I Want to Disturb my Neighbour' - Activism in an Age of Individualism.
In the preface, Professor Shepherd says while "the primary responsibilities of the university academic are to teach and advise graduate and undergraduate students, attend to examination duties, conduct research and publish the findings of such research ... historians at the UWI are among those who refuse to imprison themselves within the walls of academia, becoming heavily involved in public service ... and delivering public lectures locally, regionally and internationally".
So, in keeping with that philosophy, she has been making the rounds on the lecture circuit and has amassed volumes of written work. The lectures and speeches were given on different occasions to specific audiences of various backgrounds, suasions and sensibilities. Some have been published before, but the main purpose for publishing this particular compilation was "to share these lectures with a wider audience, especially those unexposed to the history of the Caribbean and to undergraduates who will benefit from these summaries and interpretation".
Between its glossy covers, there is something for every one. Apart from the deep intellectual academic issues, the collection addresses topics that are still current and relevant. There is The Case for Reparation - Historical Basis, in which Shepherd outlines three bases for reparation: "That the Caribbean was a primordial site of slavery"; "That slavery in Jamaica took its toll on the enslaved population", and "That the trade in captives, and slavery were crimes against humanity (as defined by the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal) as recognised a century earlier by anti-slavery activists".
In I Want to Disturb My Neighbour (from which the compilation is named) and The Man at the Door - In an Age of Individualism, Shepherd tells the 2002 graduating class of Brown's Town Community College "to become activists in the Jamaican society and adopt as your motto, as Bob Marley has done, 'I want to disturb My Neighbour'. She said that motto "can simply be a metaphor for adopting an activist stance in the age of liberalism".
The performance of boys in the Jamaican education system, which is a very hot topic, is discussed, among other things, in Challenging Masculine Myths: Gender, History Education and Development in Jamaica. Professor Shepherd says, inter alia, "obviously, the mass media must share a large part of the responsibility for how young men see themselves; how they construct their self-identity and masculinity". That was in November 2002 at the Planning Institute of Jamaica Dialogue for Development Lecture at the Jamaica Pegasus hotel.
This lecture could have well been given yesterday, today or tomorrow. More issues of gender are dealt with in Sex in the Tropics (Sect I); Petticoat Rebellion, and Beside Every Successful Man (Sect II); My feet is {sic} my Only Carriage (Sect III); and, Dear Mrs Seacole (Sect IV).
The joy of I Want to Disturb My Neighbour is that the selections are quite dynamic in their treatment; they are reflective, penetrative, instructive, yet all are underscored by the analytic approach that Shepherd is known for. Quite a few are punctuated with humour, such as the letter, Dear Mrs Seacole, delivered at the Institute of Jamaica's function to honour Mary Seacole, 'doctoress' of international renown, on November 21, 2005, to mark the bicentenary of Seacole's birth.
The letter reads in part: "Now, a single black woman roaming all over the world like Digicel and Cable and Wireless, and carrying herbs would certainly have attracted attention including a body scan! As an attractive Jamaican woman, brown or not, you would perhaps, have been mistaken for a drug mule, sniffed by colour-prejudice dogs and have your ample body 'feel-feel' up by strange men and women."
Well, men and women - strange and not so strange - should go and get a copy of I Want to Disturb My Neighbour; it's a must-have, even for the front cover, which is actually a pretty portrait of the professor herself.
BUY this book at www.ianrandlepublishers.com

Monday, March 10, 2008

Keep them Coming



Well it's off to press soon but the advance orders are pouring in. Business in Bim: A Business History of Barbados 1900-2000 is set to do well once its released next month. Read about the book here or contact us at marketing@ianrandlepublishers.com for more information.