ethnohistory – ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY

Land, Labour, and Power in a Colonial Catholic Mission in Trinidad

Colonial propaganda that masks “humanitarianism” behind self-interest, and breeds euphemisms that are inversions of reality, constitute the recurring subjects of the critiques produced on Zero Anthropology. Little of what we encounter in the present is either new or “original”: much of the “foreign policy” language of elite geopolitical strategists is in fact derived from much […]

New Book: ARIMA BORN

Arima Born Revealing the History of Arima and its Mission through the Catholic Church’s Baptismal Registers, 1820–1916 by Maximilian C. Forte Montreal: Alert Press, 2019 The Catholic Mission of Santa Rosa is something that helped to make Arima a distinctive town in Trinidad, accounting for nearly half of the Amerindian population of the colony in […]

Here is not “West India”: Roi Kwabena

A production of “West India,” a musical spoken poem of my late friend and collaborator, Dr. Roi Kwabena, from his Y42K album. This video plays on the weight of Eurocentric constructions of Caribbean history and identity, a zone where hegemonic European and American fantasies were played out. In response, Kwabena calls for a reclamation of […]