Post-Colonial Trinidad: An Ethnographic Journal

"This work is truly unique, both in terms of its focus and its location at the very beginnings of a post-colonial Caribbean society. Although the journal was created almost fifty years ago, and much has changed, the central issues continue to inform theory and practical politics. The journal itself is well written and lively, and full of rich ethnographic detail."---B.W. Higman, Australian National University

Colin and Gillian Clarke have created a journal that provides an ethnographic record of the East Indians and Creoles of San Fernando---and the entire sugar belt south of the town known as Naparima. They record socio-political relations during the second year of Trinidad's independence (1964), and provide first-hand evidence for the workings of a complex, plural society in which race, religion, and politics had become, and have remained, deeply intertwined. Entries occur whenever there is evidence of social scientific importance to the project, and these range from descriptions of weddings and pujas (prayer ceremonies devoted to a Hindu deity) to interviews with religious leaders, politicians, and members of the south Trinidad elite.

Colin Clarke is Emeritus Professor of Geography at Oxford University and Emeritus Fellow of Jesus College. He has been Professor of Urban and Social Geography, Head of the School of Geography, and Director of the Graduate Programme in Geography at Oxford University. He taught at the universities of Liverpool and Toronto and has carried out numerous research projects in Mexico and the Caribbean. His principal research interests are in urbanization in developing countries; race, ethnicity, and class in urban and rural social structures; peasant transformations; and the problems of small states. He is the author of Kingston, Jamaica: Urban Development and Social Change, 1692-1962, (1975), and East Indians in a West Indian Town: San Fernando, Trinidad, 1930-70 (1986). His most recent publications include Class, Community and Ethnicity in Southern Mexico (2000); Kingston, Jamaica: Urban Development and Social Change, 1692-2002 (2006); and Decolonizing the Colonial City: Urbanization and Stratification in Kingston, Jamaica (2006).
Gillian Clarke has degrees in German (London University) and English (University of Liverpool) and a Diploma in Education (Oxford University). She has taught in secondary schools on Merseyside and in the Oxford-London region, and her final post was as Head of German and Head of Careers at Wycombe Abbey School, a leading academic girls' school. In addition, she has served for almost 20 years as a magistrate on the Oxford Bench.