04 Nov Latest edition New West Indian Guide now online available
The latest edition of the New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids (NWIG), volume 90, issue 3-4, is now online available (open access). This edition also includes the articles of KITLV researcher Wouter Veenendaal and former KITLV fellow Chelsea Schields.
‘The ties that bind: Smallness, nonsovereignty, and political reform in St. Eustatius’, by Wouter Veenendaal:
Whereas small island territories are known to face a variety of obstacles to democracy and good governance, it is largely unclear if a nonsovereign relationship with a larger metropolitan country can alleviate these challenges, and which constitutional status provides the best results in this regard. This article aims to address these questions by providing an in-depth case study of St. Eustatius, a Dutch Caribbean island that in 2010 was politically integrated into the Netherlands as a public entity or special municipality. Based on two weeks of field research consisting of nineteen in-depth interviews with a variety of respondents on the island, the article finds that the changes of 2010 have not been able to function as a remedy to the profuse governance problems on the island, while the increased Dutch involvement and dominance have resulted in widespread frustration and resentment.
‘This is the soul of Aruba speaking: The 1951 Campo Alegre protest and insular identity on Aruba’, by Chelsea Schields:
In 1951, at the onset of major decolonization initiatives in the Netherlands Antilles, thousands of residents on Aruba successfully joined in protest to defeat Campo Alegre, a proposed brothel near the Aruban oil-refining city of San Nicolas. This article considers the protest movement within the context of Antillean decolonization and argues that debates over sexual politics played an important role in popularizing an Aruban identity separate from neighboring Curaçao—then seat of the government of the Netherlands Antilles and site of the first Campo Alegre brothel. Through analysis of Aruban archival sources, this article examines how the protest movement exploited decolonization policy while also drawing on the rhetoric of leading local political parties who claimed racial and cultural superiority to Curaçao.
NWIG is the oldest scholarly journal on the Caribbean, featuring English-language articles in the fields of anthropology, art, archaeology, economics, geography, geology, history, international relations, linguistics, literature, music, political science and sociology, and includes the world’s most complete review section on Caribbean books – covering some 150 books each year. NWIG is a peer-reviewed journal and regularly publishes contributions by authors from Brazil, Canada, Colombia, France, England, Germany, Guyana, the Netherlands, Suriname, the United States, and Venezuela, as well as every part of the insular Caribbean.
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