· January, 2006

Stories about Trinidad & Tobago from January, 2006

The Caribbean Single Market

  31 January 2006

It's rare to find Caribbean bloggers across different islands talking about the same issue at the same time, but one would have thought that yesterday's historic signing in Jamaica of the document ratifying the Caribbean Single Market (CSM), might have created a little buzz. That, however, is exactly what it...

Caribbean: The Taíno & Catholicism

  31 January 2006

Indigenous issues blog Voice of the Taino people links to an article entitled “Christianity, Capitalism, Corporations, and the Myth of Dominion”, noting that the “Roman” Catholic Church still has not properly addressed the call by the Taíno and other Indigenous Peoples world wide for the revocation of the 1493 Inter-Ceatera...

Trinidad & Tobago: Carnival

31 January 2006

Nicholas Laughlin is finally embracing Carnival, the national festival of his homeland of Trinidad and Tobago. Caribbean Free Radio, on the other hand, may just have seen a few too many.

Trinidad & Tobago: The sacred and the profane

30 January 2006

CaribPundit notes with delight that Trinidadian Carnival designer Peter Minshall is back after a two-year absence with a Carnival band called “The Sacred Heart”, reporting in the same post on an incident in southern Trinidad where police attempted to quell a demonstration over poor road conditions using tear gas, mace...

Trinidad & Tobago: Calypso exhibition

30 January 2006

Richard Bolai discusses the travelling exhibition “Calypso Music, Photographs and Illustrations in Postwar America from 1945 to 1960″, now on in Port of Spain, Trinidad.

Caribbean: McWatt wins literary prizes

  30 January 2006

The Caribbean Beat Blog announces that Guyanese writer Mark McWatt has taken both the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best first book in the Canada/Caribbean region, and the prestigious Casa de las Americas prize for Caribbean literature in English or Creole.

Caribbean: Musical collaborations

  27 January 2006

The Dancehall Blog notes some of the collaborations happening between artists from different Caribbean islands. Among those involved in inter-island projects are Kevin Lyttle of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Spragga Benz, Macka Diamond, Mr. Vegas and Elephant Man from Jamaica, Machel Montano and Denise Belfon from Trinidad & Tobago,...

Trinidad & Tobago: Trinidadianness

  26 January 2006

J9 takes a break from some Carnival-related work to think about what makes Trinidadians Trinidadian, while Caribbean Free Radio‘s 41st podcast investigates the truth of the song lyric “Trinidad and Brazil we have the same vibration” by talking to a friend in Salvador da Bahia. Meanwhile, Elspeth Duncan continues her...

Trinidad & Tobago: Carnival critique

23 January 2006

Caribbean Free Radio posts its 40th podcast, an interview with Trinidadian rapso ground 3canal in which the band's members are highly critical of some of the new trends in the national Carnival.

Trinidad & Tobago: Chinese heritage

  19 January 2006

Christopher Yee Mon learns about his heritage from a newspaper article on the Chinese presence in Trinidad; and in an international business course he learns that anyone of Chinese descent is considered a citizen of China under Chinese law. “Nice to know I still have a home to go back...

Trinidad & Tobago, India: Hutch prize for Naipaul?

  18 January 2006

The Caribbean Beat Blog speculates on whether V. S. Naipaul may have Indian citizenship. The Trinidad-born Nobel laureate, a long-time British subject, has been nominated for a Hutch Crossword Book Award — “the Indian ‘Booker Prize'” — whose eligibility rules state that authors “must be Indian citizens or must hold...

Trinidad & Tobago: Prime minister wannabes & music

17 January 2006

Elspeth Duncan conducts the first interview in her “If I were prime minister” project, and concludes that she needs to make some adjustments to her questions and approach. Attillah Springer primes for writing an article for a UK publication by making a playlist of her top 11 jouvay tunes.

Caribbean: A blogger's book awards

  16 January 2006

For the fourth year in a row, Trinidadian Nicholas Laughlin publishes the “Nicholas Laughlin Book Awards” for Caribbean books — “i.e. books written by Caribbean authors, set in the Caribbean, or otherwise of particular Caribbean interest”. As interesting as the selections is Laughlin's analysis of his own reading patterns over...

Caribbean: Caribbeing

  13 January 2006

“In this CSME time. In this time of dancehall self-righteousness versus soca wutlessness. In this time when Trinis don't want to hear about “small islanders” reaching to the Billboard charts with soca music. In this time when Haitians still call out for our help and we still studiously ignore them....