Decolonizing the Caribbean Record

This book is number 8 the Series on Archives, Archivists, and Society, Richard J. Cox, editor.

Decolonizing the Caribbean Record: An Archives Reader is a compendium of forty essays by archivists and academics within and outside of the Caribbean region that address challenges of collecting, representing and preserving the records and cultural expressions of former colonial societies, exploring the contribution of these records to nation-building. How the power of the archives can be subverted to serve the oppressed rather than the oppressors, the colonized rather than the colonizers, is the central theme of this Reader. This collection seeks to disrupt traditional notions of archives, instead re-imagining records within the context of Caribbean cultures and identities where the oral may be privileged over the written, the creative design over text, the marginal over the mainstream. Envisioned initially as a foundational text that supports the archives education program at the University of the West Indies and documents the history and development of archives and records in the Caribbean, this volume addresses such issues as oral traditions, records repatriation, community archives, cultural forms and format and diasporic collections. Although focused on the Caribbean region, the essays, ranging from the theoretical to the practice-based to the personal are applicable to the global archival concerns of all decolonized societies.

Jeannette A. Bastian is professor and director of the Archives Management concentration at the School of Library and Information Science, Simmons College, Boston. She is the former Territorial director of Libraries and Archives in the United States Virgin Islands.

Stanley H. Griffin is the Archivist-in-Charge of the UWI Archives and currently coordinates the Masters in Archival Studies program at The University of the West Indies.

John A. Aarons is former National Archivist of Jamaica. He currently teaching in the Master of Archival Science program at the University of the West Indies.