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The negative economic impact of colonialism
The negative economic impact of colonialism
Impacts of poverty in the Caribbean
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Jamaica Kincaid is the author of “A Small Place”, a book about her real-life homeland Antigua, a struggling island. This island is doing poorly for a variety of reasons, such as the corrupt government, the economy being in shambles, the infrastructure crumbling, lack of resources. Almost all the people in Antigua are poor, with the few exceptions being privileged by the government.
A Broken Place
The government depends on tourism for nearly all of Antigua’s revenue. But that tourism can hurt unintentionally, as the ones in charge looked at how they were prospering from the current formation of the government, and decided to keep it. The government then thought to focus all of the resources on tourism, so they exploited the Antiguan people--
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The poisonous seeds were first planted the colonisation by the English, "Antigua no longer exists… partly because the bad minded people who used to rule over it, the English, no longer do so" (Kincaid 23). The English were also corrupt and discriminatory in their ways, but they were the rulers. So when that colonisation ended, the Antiguans there ruled in the only way they knew how, the same way the Englishmen did. “Have you ever wondered… why… that… [we] seem to have learned from you how to imprison and murder… how to govern badly, and how to take the wealth of our country and place it in Swiss bank accounts?… why it is that all we seem to have learned from you is how to corrupt our societies and how to be tyrants? You will have to accept that this is mostly your fault" (Kincaid 34). But this is just how societies are, there will always be people who are just corrupt. The difference is, Antigua is a small place; that corruption can spread faster, and have a bigger …show more content…
Because Antigua is such a small place, it is easier to take control of resources and power. There is just simply less of it. But if Antigua was, say continent sized, the society and government would be closer to that of a more modern one perhaps. Firstly the land, if there was more land, there would be more of a chance it would have at the very least some fertile land. Also corruption would take longer to take hold, giving a chance to root it out. Geographically speaking. Again, the way Antigua learned to rule was from the British, so it may not have had as big of an impact. But it is something to think about, that Antigua could have been something
“Jamaica’s a country of great dichotomy. On the one hand you have a tourist industry with great beaches and resorts, but on the other you have such great poverty and the violence that goes along with that.”(Michael Franti) In this paper, I will talk about the geography, the history of Jamaica, the people that live there now and that lived there in the past, the lifestyle of the society, and the society, like the government and economy.
The Europeans changed the land of the home of the Indians, which they renamed New England. In Changes in the Land, Cronon explains all the different aspects in how the Europeans changed the land. Changing by the culture and organization of the Indians lives, the land itself, including the region’s plants and animals. Cronon states, “The shift from Indian to European dominance in New England entailed important changes well known to historians in the ways these peoples organized their lives, but it also involved fundamental reorganizations less well known to historians in the region’s plant and animal communities,” (Cronon, xv). New England went through human development, environmental and ecological change from the Europeans.
Do we speak with a purpose? Are we using our words to make a difference? In today’s world, everyone uses language to express the way they feel. By doing this, we not only create feeling but we beautifully deepen and clarify them. It’s how we use our words; that makes what we say special. They can have a major impact on someone or something. Kay Ryan’s poem “Those Places” uses language that influences the entire course of her poem. In fact, Kay Ryan is very careful with her word choice because she knows it will be significant to the meaning of her writing. In her poem, “Those Places” Kay Ryan uses literal language to get to a metaphorical meaning.
Steven Gregory’s book entitled The Devil Behind The Mirror is an ethnographical study of the Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republic is in the Caribbean, it occupies the Western half of an island, while Haiti makes up the Eastern portion. Gregory attempts to study and analyze the political, social and cultural aspects of this nation by interviewing and observing both the tourists and locals of two towns Boca Chica and Andres. Gregory’s research centers on globalization and the transnational processes which affect the political and socio-economics of the Dominican Republic. He focuses on the social culture, gender roles, economy, individual and nation identity, also authority and power relations. Several of the major relevant issues facing Dominican society include racism, sexism, and discrimination, economy of resort tourism, sex tourism and the informal economy. The objective of Gregory’s ethnographic research is to decipher exclusionary practices incorporated by resort tourism, how it has affected locals by division of class, gender, and race, increasing poverty and reliance on an informal economy.
In “A Small Place” by Jamaica Kincaid written in 1983, she intensely expresses her belief and annoyance about the tourist at the first sentence of the quotation: "That the native does not like the tourist is not hard to explain”. "The native" here implies herself and she explains that tourism is all about people finding a way to leave from their routine life and enjoying themselves, yet every tourist is a native of somewhere. People who live in their native place seem to be boring for them but for tourists that place are very attractive. In my experience as a native of my hometown and as a tourist, I disagree with Kincaid's argument. She is very subjective and biased since she does not reveal the tourists side of the story. She pulls people
...first demonstrates the absence of knowledge by pointing out the absence of schools, hospitals, and monuments; the Antiguans’ ignorance to the importance of using unleaded gasoline; and the inaccessibility of education when the most reputable school is one of Hotel Training. Consequently, as Kincaid illustrates by pointing out that Antiguans do not have control of their own circumstances—not even the stamps they circulate—an absence of education and knowledge hinders realization of power. The relationship between knowledge and power is further solidified as Kincaid discloses that a lack of their own language hinders communication, and no control over access to education further inhibits acquisition of power. These examples Kincaid presents in A Small Place provide solid evidence that knowledge and access to it are necessary antecedents to the achievement of power.
Kincaid, Jamaica. The autobiography of my mother . New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996. Print.
Hart, Richard. (1999). Towards Decolonisation: Political, Labour, and Economic Development in Jamaica. Kingston: Canoe Press.
Jamaica Kincaid’s success as a writer was not easily attained as she endured struggles of having to often sleep on the floor of her apartment because she could not afford to buy a bed. She described herself as being a struggling writer, who did not know how to write, but sheer determination and a fortunate encounter with the editor of The New Yorker, William Shawn who set the epitome for her writing success. Ms. Kincaid was a West-Indian American writer who was the first writer and the first individual from her island of Antigua to achieve this goal. Her genre of work includes novelists, essayist, and a gardener. Her writing style has been described as having dreamlike repetition, emotional truth and autobiographical underpinnings (Tahree, 2013). Oftentimes her work have been criticized for its anger and simplicity and praised for its keen observation of character, wit and lyrical quality. But according to Ms. Kincaid her writing, which are mostly autobiographical, was an act of saving her life by being able to express herself in words. She used her life experiences and placed them on paper as a way to make sense of her past. Her experience of growing up in a strict single-parent West-Indian home was the motivation for many of her writings. The knowledge we garnered at an early age influenced the choice we make throughout our life and this is no more evident than in the writings of Jamaica Kincaid.
To complicate matters even more, there was no evidence in Guyana of a right-wing force capable of countering the left. The major right -wing party, the United Force, which was at its height in the early 1960s, was not nearly as active as it w...
“Here’s the grocery store and here’s Mr. Morgan’s Drugstore. Most everybody in town manages to look into those two stores once a day (5.Stage Manager.) A small town without a lot of people, that’s exactly what the line above just told us. In the Play Our Town the stage manager tells us about a small town called Grover’s Corner. According to Professor Willard “within the town’s limits: 2, 640. (23 Willard)” That’s the population of this little town. Living in a small community can have its up’s and down. Grover’s Corner doesn’t want to modernize, nor is there any privacy, but there are some good qualities like knowing who ever you fall in love with in the town has basically grown up like you, or that you know everyone in the community.
Imagine your culture being thrown aside and a new one was all that was taught to you? How would you react to it? In this story the author, Jamaica Kincaid, is talking about how she reacted to this and what happened to her. The author grows up in a place where England colonization had taken place. She grew up in Antigua, a small island in the Caribbean. She is taught all her life about England, a place she has never seen. At an early age she started to realize that the English had taken over her culture. After many years of hating this country she had to see the place that had taught her a different culture and ideas. When she arrives there the hate for the country tripled and she starts to pick apart the entire place and everywhere she goes. As she moves through the countryside her feelings of hate start to show them self’s in her thought and words. The feeling of deja vu, she has been there before, starts to come in after all of the years of maps and description of the foreign land.
In the short story, “Girl,” the narrator describes certain tasks a woman should be responsible for based on the narrator’s culture, time period, and social standing. This story also reflects the coming of age of this girl, her transition into a lady, and shows the age gap between the mother and the daughter. The mother has certain beliefs that she is trying to pass to her daughter for her well-being, but the daughter is confused by this regimented life style. The author, Jamaica Kincaid, uses various tones to show a second person point of view and repetition to demonstrate what these responsibilities felt like, how she had to behave based on her social standing, and how to follow traditional customs.
...xtent will this essay bring about a change in Antigua? The Antiguan scene can only be modified by the government choosing to run the country in a more manner that will benefit everyone associated with Antigua, especially its natives. The native’s behaviours are related to their jealousy of tourists, and of the tourist’s ability to escape their own hometown to take a vacation. While a tourist can relate to the idea that the exhaustion felt after a vacation comes from dealing with the invisible animosity in the air between the natives and themselves, having this knowledge is almost as good as not having it, because there is nothing that the tourist, or the reader, can really DO about it! If Kincaid’s purpose is solely to make tourists aware of their actions, she has succeeded. If Kincaid’s purpose is to help Antigua, she may not have succeeded to the same magnitude.
...bbean territories that odopt the model has bicarmel system unique to these Caribbean countries “ it is based on nomination through patronage with no security of tenure.” These small territories has very few representative in Parilimiament due to amount and thus there is a lack of backbenchers. This situation creates a competive nature in the political sytem , which further separate it from being a model of the British Westminster model. This competiviness in the political arean leads to several problems of undermining democracy as well as underdevelopement for several of these territories.