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2 results

The Yoruba Are on a Rock
  • Recaptured Africans and the Orisas of Grenada
  • Shantel A. George
  • Published online:
    18 September 2025
    Print publication:
    09 October 2025
  • The Yoruba Are on a Rock focuses on the Africans who arrived in Grenada decades after the abolition of the British slave trade and how they radically shaped the religious and cultural landscape of the island. Rooted in extensive archival and ethnographic research, Shantel A. George carefully traces and unpacks the complex movements of people and ideas between various points in western Africa and the Eastern Caribbean to argue that Orisa worship in Grenada is not, as has been generally supposed, a residue of recaptive Yoruba peoples, but emerged from dynamic and multi-layered exchanges within and beyond Grenada. Further, the book shows how recaptives pursued freedom by drawing on shared African histories and experiences in the homeland and in Grenada, and recovers intriguing individual biographies of the recaptives, their descendants, and religious custodians. By historicising this island's little-known and fascinating tradition, the book advances our knowledge of African diaspora cultures and histories.

  • Chapter 8 - John Jacob Thomas and the Grammar of Freedom

  • from Part II - Cultural and Political Transitions
  • Edited by Evelyn O'Callaghan, University of the West Indies, Tim Watson, University of Miami
  • Book:
    Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1800–1920
    Published online:
    16 December 2020
    Print publication:
    14 January 2021, pp 137-150

  • Summary

    John Jacob Thomas’s mid-nineteenth-century career exemplifies the contradictions of the post-abolition period. A schoolteacher who authored Theory and Practice of Creole Grammar (1869) and Froudacity: West Indian Fables Explained (1888), he parsed, literally and symbolically, the grammar of freedom. What did it mean to be free in a world in which non-whiteness was synonymous with servitude, and in which blackness and intellect were considered to be oxymoronic? Thomas’s efforts to vindicate 'freedom’s children' – the successors of the generation of enslavement – shed light on conceptions of mimicry, respectability, and literary and political authority that continue to shadow our postcolonial moment.