Stuart Henry McPhail Hall was a Jamaican-born British Marxist sociologist, cultural theorist, and political activist. Hall — along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams — was one of the founding figures of the school of thought known as British Cultural Studies or the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies.
Paul Gilroy is an English sociologist and cultural studies scholar who is the founding Director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Race and Racism at University College London (UCL). Gilroy is the 2019 winner of the €660,000 Holberg Prize, for "his outstanding contributions to a number of academic fields, including cultural studies, critical race studies, sociology, history, anthropology and African-American studies".
Robert Neelly Bellah was an American sociologist and the Elliott Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was internationally known for his work related to the sociology of religion.
Creolization is the process through which creole languages and cultures emerge. Creolization was first used by linguists to explain how contact languages become creole languages, but now scholars in other social sciences use the term to describe new cultural expressions brought about by contact between societies and relocated peoples. Creolization is traditionally used to refer to the Caribbean, although it is not exclusive to the Caribbean and some scholars use the term to represent other diasporas. Furthermore, creolization occurs when participants select cultural elements that may become part of inherited culture. Sociologist Robin Cohen writes that creolization occurs when “participants select particular elements from incoming or inherited cultures, endow these with meanings different from those they possessed in the original cultures, and then creatively merge these to create new varieties that supersede the prior forms.”
Caribbean literature is the literature of the various territories of the Caribbean region. Literature in English from the former British West Indies may be referred to as Anglo-Caribbean or, in historical contexts, as West Indian literature. Most of these territories have become independent nations since the 1960s, though some retain colonial ties to the United Kingdom. They share, apart from the English language, a number of political, cultural, and social ties which make it useful to consider their literary output in a single category. Note that other non-independent islands may include the Caribbean unincorporated territories of the United States, however literature from this region has not yet been studied as a separate category and is independent from West Indian literature. The more wide-ranging term "Caribbean literature" generally refers to the literature of all Caribbean territories regardless of language—whether written in English, Spanish, French, Hindustani, or Dutch, or one of numerous creoles.
Sidney Wilfred Mintz was an American anthropologist best known for his studies of the Caribbean, creolization, and the anthropology of food. Mintz received his PhD at Columbia University in 1951 and conducted his primary fieldwork among sugar-cane workers in Puerto Rico. Later expanding his ethnographic research to Haiti and Jamaica, he produced historical and ethnographic studies of slavery and global capitalism, cultural hybridity, Caribbean peasants, and the political economy of food commodities. He taught for two decades at Yale University before helping to found the Anthropology Department at Johns Hopkins University, where he remained for the duration of his career. Mintz's history of sugar, Sweetness and Power, is considered one of the most influential publications in cultural anthropology and food studies.
Social death is the condition of people not accepted as fully human by wider society. It refers to when someone is treated as if they are dead or non-existent. It is used by sociologists such as Orlando Patterson and Zygmunt Bauman, and historians of slavery and the Holocaust to describe the part played by governmental and social segregation in that process. Social death is defined by "three aspects: a loss of social identity, a loss of social connectedness and losses associated with disintegration of the body."
Music of the African diaspora is a sound created, produced, or inspired by Black people, including African music traditions and African popular music as well as the music genres of the African diaspora, including some Caribbean music, Latin music, Brazilian music and African-American music.
Protestantism is the dominant religion in Jamaica. Protestants make up about 65% percent of the population. The five largest denominations in Jamaica are: The New Testament Church of God which is a part Church of God, Seventh-day Adventist, Baptist, Pentecostal and Anglican. The full list is below. Most of the Caribbean is Catholic; Jamaica's Protestantism is a legacy of missionaries that came to the island in the 18th and 19th centuries. Missionaries attempted to convert slaves to varying Protestant denominations of Moravians, Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians to name a few. As missionaries worked to convert slaves, African traditions mixed with the religion brought over by Europeans. Protestantism was associated with black nationalism in Jamaica, aiming to improve the lives of blacks who were governed by a white minority during colonial times. Today, Protestantism plays an important role in society by providing services to people in need.
Evelyn Seiko Nakano Glenn is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to her teaching and research responsibilities, she served as founding director of the university's Center for Race and Gender (CRG), a leading U.S. academic center for the study of intersectionality among gender, race and class social groups and institutions. In June 2008, Glenn was elected president of the 15,000-member American Sociological Association. She served as president-elect during the 2008–2009 academic year, assumed her presidency at the annual ASA national convention in San Francisco in August 2009, served as president of the association during the 2009–2010 year, and continued to serve on the ASA governing council as past-president until August 2011. Her presidential address, given at the 2010 meetings in Atlanta, was entitled "Constructing Citizenship: Exclusion, Subordination, and Resistance", and was printed as the lead article in the American Sociological Review.
Vincent Brown is Charles Warren Professor of History, Professor of African and African-American Studies, and Director of the History Design Studio at Harvard University. His research, writing, teaching, and other creative endeavors are focused on the political dimensions of cultural practice in the African Diaspora, with a particular emphasis on the early modern Atlantic world.
Black nationalism is a nationalist movement which seeks representation for black people as a distinct national identity, especially in racialized, colonial and postcolonial societies. Its earliest proponents saw it as a way to advocate for democratic representation in culturally plural societies or to establish self-governing independent nation-states for black people. Modern black nationalism often aims for the social, political, and economic empowerment of black communities within white majority societies, either as an alternative to assimilation or as a way to ensure greater representation and equality within predominantly Eurocentric or white cultures.
Jens Beckert is a German sociologist with a strong interest in economic sociology. The author of books on inherited wealth and the social foundations of economic efficiency and imagined futures in the economy, he focuses on the role of the economy in society – especially based on studies of markets – as well as organizational sociology, the sociology of inheritance, and sociological theory. He is director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG) in Cologne, Germany, and a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin was a Russian American sociologist and political activist, who contributed to the social cycle theory.
The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness is a 1993 history book about a distinct black Atlantic culture that incorporated elements from African, American, British, and Caribbean cultures. It was written by Paul Gilroy and was published by Harvard University Press and Verso Books.
Elsa Goveia was born in British Guiana and became a foremost scholar and historian of the Caribbean. She was the first woman to become a professor at the newly created University College of the West Indies (UCWI) and first professor of West Indian studies in the UCWI History Department. Her seminal work, Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century (1965), was a pioneering study of the institution of slavery and the first to put forth the concept of a "slave society" encompassing not just the slaves but the entire community. She was one of the pioneers of historical research on slavery and the Caribbean and is considered the "premier social historian" from the 1960s to her death.
Three-Fingered Jack a.k.a. Jack Mansong, led a band of runaway slaves in the Colony of Jamaica in the eighteenth century.
Cuffee was an escaped slave in Jamaica who led other runaway slaves to form a community of free black people in Jamaica in the island's forested interior, and they raided white plantation owners at the end of the eighteenth century. The name Cuffee is a variation of the Twi Akan name Kofi, which is the name given to a boy born on a Friday.
Racial capitalism is a concept reframing the history of capitalism as grounded in the extraction of social and economic value from people of marginalized racial identities, typically from Black people. It was described by Cedric J. Robinson in his book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, published in 1983, which, in contrast to both his predecessors and successors, theorized that all capitalism is inherently racial capitalism, and racialism is present in all layers of capitalism's socioeconomic stratification. Jodi Melamed has summarized the concept, explaining that capitalism "can only accumulate by producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups", and therefore, for capitalism to survive, it must exploit and prey upon the "unequal differentiation of human value."
Louis "Fernando" Henriques was a Jamaican educator and scholar. As a social anthropologist, he made significant contributions to British and Caribbean social sciences scholarship on colour, class, sexuality, and race relations. From a prominent Jamaican family, his mixed cultural heritage and experiences in both British and Caribbean cultures informed his research and academic practice. One of the first Black British professors in UK academic history, Fernando Henriques developed his scholarly expertise though positions at the Universities of Oxford, Leeds, Sussex and the West Indies, bridging the latter two institutions through his role as Director of The Centre for Multi-Racial Studies between 1964 and 1974.
