Strictly Facts: A Guide to Caribbean History and Culture

Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts.

Did you know Jamaica, the Cayman Islands, and Turks & Caicos used to make up the Colony of Jamaica, governed by the UK until 1959? In this episode, we trace the history of these islands and the others that were formerly part of the Colony of Jamaica and discuss why they disbanded.

Support the show

Connect with Strictly Facts -  Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | YouTube | Website

Looking to read more about the topics covered in this episode? Subscribe to the newsletter at www.strictlyfactspod.com to get the Strictly Facts Syllabus to your email!

Want to Support Strictly Facts?

• Rate & Leave a Review on your favorite platform
• Share this episode with someone or online and tag us
• Send us a DM or voice note to have your thoughts featured on an upcoming episode 
• Donate to help us continue empowering listeners with Caribbean history and education

Produced by Breadfruit Media

Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts.

With both Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean connections, Canada is one of the foremost locations of Caribbean life in the diaspora. Featuring Jamaican-Canadian historian Dr. Marlene Gaynair, we discuss Canada's longstanding, and at times problematic, historical relationship with the Caribbean and how West Indians abroad have created unity and community namely since the twentieth century. 

Dr. Marlene Gaynair is a historian of the Black Atlantic, with a particular focus on North America and the English-speaking Caribbean. She is an associate editor at Gotham, The Center for New York City History, and architect of "Islands in the North," an interactive, curated exhibit (re)creating Black cultural and spatial identities in Toronto. In the coming year, she will be the William Lyon Mackenzie King Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Weatherhead Center, and thereafter, assistant professor of History at Washington State University. Follow Dr. Gaynair on Twitter at @blkatlanticCDN. 

Support the show

Connect with Strictly Facts -  Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | YouTube | Website

Looking to read more about the topics covered in this episode? Subscribe to the newsletter at www.strictlyfactspod.com to get the Strictly Facts Syllabus to your email!

Want to Support Strictly Facts?

• Rate & Leave a Review on your favorite platform
• Share this episode with someone or online and tag us
• Send us a DM or voice note to have your thoughts featured on an upcoming episode 
• Donate to help us continue empowering listeners with Caribbean history and education

Produced by Breadfruit Media

Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts.

Before many of the formerly British Caribbean territories became independent nations, they attempted to create a political union known as the West Indian Federation. The short-lived union only lasted four years, but went on to influence future organizations for regional unity like the Caribbean Free Trade Association (CARIFTA), which later became the Caribbean Community (CARICOM). Joined by Dr. Patsy Lewis, we discuss the history of the West Indian Federation, its failures, and current and future possibilities for regional integration. 

Dr. Patsy Lewis is a Visiting Professor and Faculty Fellow of the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs and the Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown University. She is a graduate of Cambridge University (Mphil, PhD.) and the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica (BA). Before coming to Brown she was Professor of Regional Integration and Small States Development at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. Her work explores the development challenges of small Caribbean states, with a particular focus on regional integration, globalization, trade, agriculture, migration and environmental and political crises.

OECS- Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States
CSME- CARICOM Single Market and Economy

Support the show

Connect with Strictly Facts -  Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | YouTube | Website

Looking to read more about the topics covered in this episode? Subscribe to the newsletter at www.strictlyfactspod.com to get the Strictly Facts Syllabus to your email!

Want to Support Strictly Facts?

• Rate & Leave a Review on your favorite platform
• Share this episode with someone or online and tag us
• Send us a DM or voice note to have your thoughts featured on an upcoming episode 
• Donate to help us continue empowering listeners with Caribbean history and education

Produced by Breadfruit Media

Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts.

Caribbean carnival is one of the region's most famous annual celebrations comprised with lively music, dancing, and of course lavish costumes. Shauna Rigaud joins us this week to discuss carnival's history and the history of  Barbados' Crop Over festival.

Shauna holds a BA in African American Studies from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and a master’s in both Gender/Cultural Studies and Communication Management from Simmons University, in Boston. She is a PhD candidate in the Cultural Studies program at George Mason University. As a burgeoning scholar focused on the Caribbean, she hopes to highlight experiences and stories that give a more nuanced understand of the Caribbean, its history and postcolonial condition. Her research interests include a focus on the Caribbean Diaspora, Performance and Performativity, Black feminism and Caribbean feminism. She is also the co-founder of Mayhem246 a concierge company that specializes in providing entertainment experiences during Barbados’ Crop Over Festival.

Follow Shauna and Mayhem246 at @ne1nappy and @mayhem246.  

Support the show

Connect with Strictly Facts -  Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | YouTube | Website

Looking to read more about the topics covered in this episode? Subscribe to the newsletter at www.strictlyfactspod.com to get the Strictly Facts Syllabus to your email!

Want to Support Strictly Facts?

• Rate & Leave a Review on your favorite platform
• Share this episode with someone or online and tag us
• Send us a DM or voice note to have your thoughts featured on an upcoming episode 
• Donate to help us continue empowering listeners with Caribbean history and education

Produced by Breadfruit Media

Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts.

Our second "Big People Tings" highlight is Trinidadian Marxist, Black Feminist writer and political organizer Claudia Jones (1915-1964). Jones was one of the leading Black female organizers in the Communist Party in the USA and later went on to organize and celebrate the Afro-Caribbean community in the UK through her founding of the West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News, Britain's first major Black newspaper, and first Caribbean carnival in the 1950s.  

Support the show

Connect with Strictly Facts -  Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | YouTube | Website

Looking to read more about the topics covered in this episode? Subscribe to the newsletter at www.strictlyfactspod.com to get the Strictly Facts Syllabus to your email!

Want to Support Strictly Facts?

• Rate & Leave a Review on your favorite platform
• Share this episode with someone or online and tag us
• Send us a DM or voice note to have your thoughts featured on an upcoming episode 
• Donate to help us continue empowering listeners with Caribbean history and education

Produced by Breadfruit Media

Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts.

Caribbean writers have undoubtedly left their mark on history. In this episode, we talk with  author Desiree C. Bailey about Caribbean literature, common themes that have inspired her story and her recently published book What Noise Against the Cane, which combines Caribbean history, music, and culture.

Desiree C. Bailey is the author of What Noise Against the Cane (Yale University Press, 2021), winner of the 2020 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. She is also the author of the fiction chapbook In Dirt or Saltwater (O'clock Press, 2016) and has short stories and poems published in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, American Short Fiction, Callaloo, the Academy of American Poets and elsewhere. Desiree has a BA from Georgetown University, an MFA in Fiction from Brown University and an MFA in Poetry from New York University. She has received fellowships from the Norman Mailer Center, Kimbilio Fiction, Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Poets House, The Conversation and Princeton in Africa. She has received awards from the New York State Council on the Arts/New York Foundation for the Arts and Poets & Writers. Desiree was born in Trinidad and Tobago, and lives in Brooklyn, NY. Connect with Desiree on Instagram and Twitter. 

Support the show

Connect with Strictly Facts -  Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | YouTube | Website

Looking to read more about the topics covered in this episode? Subscribe to the newsletter at www.strictlyfactspod.com to get the Strictly Facts Syllabus to your email!

Want to Support Strictly Facts?

• Rate & Leave a Review on your favorite platform
• Share this episode with someone or online and tag us
• Send us a DM or voice note to have your thoughts featured on an upcoming episode 
• Donate to help us continue empowering listeners with Caribbean history and education

Produced by Breadfruit Media

Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts.

Celebrate Caribbean American Heritage Month with us this June as we journey through movements of Caribbean people to the US in the latter twentieth century!

Support the show

Connect with Strictly Facts -  Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | YouTube | Website

Looking to read more about the topics covered in this episode? Subscribe to the newsletter at www.strictlyfactspod.com to get the Strictly Facts Syllabus to your email!

Want to Support Strictly Facts?

• Rate & Leave a Review on your favorite platform
• Share this episode with someone or online and tag us
• Send us a DM or voice note to have your thoughts featured on an upcoming episode 
• Donate to help us continue empowering listeners with Caribbean history and education

Produced by Breadfruit Media

Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts.

"Big People Tings" is a new continuing series where we highlight an individual Caribbean changemaker and discuss their contributions to our history and future. For our first episode of the series, we discuss Guyanese-born public intellectual and Pan-Africanist Dr. Walter Rodney (1942-1980) who played an integral role in the Black Power movement in the Caribbean and helped found the Working People's Alliance, a Guyanese political party for working class' rights, in the 1970s. 

Support the show

Connect with Strictly Facts -  Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | YouTube | Website

Looking to read more about the topics covered in this episode? Subscribe to the newsletter at www.strictlyfactspod.com to get the Strictly Facts Syllabus to your email!

Want to Support Strictly Facts?

• Rate & Leave a Review on your favorite platform
• Share this episode with someone or online and tag us
• Send us a DM or voice note to have your thoughts featured on an upcoming episode 
• Donate to help us continue empowering listeners with Caribbean history and education

Produced by Breadfruit Media

Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts.

The Caribbean is made up of a number of ethnic groups, mostly as a result of colonialism between the 18th and 20th centuries. To commemorate Indian Arrival Day throughout the Caribbean, this week's episode discusses the roots of Indian indentureship with doctoral student Cristine Khan and how connecting these histories is integral to Caribbean connections moving forward.  

Cristine Khan is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center where she works at the Teaching and Learning Center and also teaches at Hunter College and Queens College. With experience as a critical educator and researcher in Latin America and Europe, she currently conducts research on intergenerational Indo-Caribbean identity formations and racialization processes in New York City. She was born and raised in New York City to Guyanese parents, which has shaped her trajectory as a researcher and educator.

Support the show

Connect with Strictly Facts -  Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | YouTube | Website

Looking to read more about the topics covered in this episode? Subscribe to the newsletter at www.strictlyfactspod.com to get the Strictly Facts Syllabus to your email!

Want to Support Strictly Facts?

• Rate & Leave a Review on your favorite platform
• Share this episode with someone or online and tag us
• Send us a DM or voice note to have your thoughts featured on an upcoming episode 
• Donate to help us continue empowering listeners with Caribbean history and education

Produced by Breadfruit Media

Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts.

Class is in session! For this very brief episode, we recap major themes and takeaways from our first six episodes as part of our regular Review Sessions. With each Review Session, we ask you, our listeners, to fill out a brief survey on your thoughts and what you'd like to see from Strictly Facts moving forward. 

Support the show

Connect with Strictly Facts -  Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | YouTube | Website

Looking to read more about the topics covered in this episode? Subscribe to the newsletter at www.strictlyfactspod.com to get the Strictly Facts Syllabus to your email!

Want to Support Strictly Facts?

• Rate & Leave a Review on your favorite platform
• Share this episode with someone or online and tag us
• Send us a DM or voice note to have your thoughts featured on an upcoming episode 
• Donate to help us continue empowering listeners with Caribbean history and education

Produced by Breadfruit Media