This chapter explores how Black youth in the British colony of Bermuda engaged decolonization, Black Power, and Black internationalism through Reggae, Dancehall, and sound system culture in the “global 1990s.” Centered on a racially charged 1995 referendum on independence in which, out of 58.8 percent of eligible voters, 73.6 percent voted against and 25.7 percent voted for independence, it argues that it is critical to explore Black anticolonialism through soundscapes and not just ballot politics, as Black Bermuda is a sonic culture. The era’s Reggae sound system clashes often invoked long-standing racial and colonial tensions, such as one between Bermuda’s Souljah One and British DJ David Rodigan. Through archives drawn from print media, government surveillance, and audio recordings, it shows that while sound system culture could not “free decolonization,” it played a crucial role in galvanizing the Black and working-class Progressive Labor Party’s youth base in its first political victory in 1998.

During the 1600s, the southwards and westwards expansion of Germanic, which had begun 2,000 years earlier in northern Europe, regained a new impetus. There was an explosive expansion of the English language into and across the Atlantic Ocean, which was to lead to the eventual death of a very large number of the indigenous languages of the Western Hemisphere. During the 1600s, 350,000 people left the British Isles for the Americas. Some of this expansion of English was the outcome of large-scale, planned, quasi-official attempts at colonisation. Others were haphazard settlements by refugees, pirates, runaway slaves, sailors, shipwrecked mariners and passengers and military deserters such those from the English army of Oliver Cromwell which had captured Jamaica from the Spanish in the 1650s.

Prisoner-made objects held immense monetary, national, and emotional value for their makers and consumers. In Britain and its colonies, partially dismantled wooden warships known as hulks were employed to ease prison overcrowding. Between 1775 and 1815, they housed both prisoners of war and convicts, often in neighboring ships. Although operating under different systems of administration, both types of prisoner crafted objects from whatever materials could be stolen, scavenged or bartered, and they concealed, smuggled, and hid them from authorities. This chapter begins by examining the intricate bone- and straw-work models made and traded by French prisoners of war, who altered their handicrafts to reflect shifts in consumer culture, before moving to focus on the personal and religious mementoes crafted by convicts in England and the penal colony of Bermuda, established in 1824. It concludes by illuminating the risks and rewards of illicit industries by considering the shared practices of gambling and forgery. This comparative chapter argues that the act of making – and selling – items provided both prisoners of war and convicts with the means to gain some small freedoms on board. Ultimately, it shows that objects of confinement represented sociability, human resilience, and adaptability in the face of hardship.

This chapter establishes the reach of punitive relocation across a range of imperial contexts, from the late Middle Ages into the twentieth century. It employs a series of case studies from the European empires to stress its importance as a source of unfree labour and as a means of governing colonized populations. Sometimes, convicts and their descendants became settlers, and when they did not, they laid the ground for free migration or satisfied wider imperial ambitions by clearing land and building basic infrastructure. Sometimes, they were also able to work for their own profit. Of especial importance to the British Empire was the use of convicts to build naval infrastructure in the nineteenth-century stations of Bermuda and Gibraltar. All the convicts were men, and they were prohibited from settling, revealing the importance of a temporary, mobile labour force for bolstering naval power. This was quite different to practice in the Australian colonies. In all these penal sites, convicts resisted their fate in numerous ways. However, imperial administrations responded to it with brutal retribution and spectacular levels of violence, and this meant that though everyday forms of resistance impacted on working practices and productivity, rebellions, mutinies, and escapes usually failed.

The Tempest reflects early modern European trends in racial perceptions, especially in the play’s foregrounding of Caliban, who embodies many of the era’s cultural prejudices. Although Caliban was born on a remote island and is its sole human inhabitant when Prospero and Miranda arrive, his sexual assault on Miranda and their contempt for Caliban as savage, pagan, monstrous, and perhaps cannibalistic provokes Prospero to enslave him. This chapter contextualizes those demeaning categories in light of Caliban’s African and perhaps American roots. Among the developments that profoundly shaped England’s (and presumably Shakespeare’s) attitudes toward “Blackamoores” were the increasingly numerous Africans arriving as offshoots of the international slave trade. Concurrently, Spain’s and Portugal’s settlements in Central and South America and their exploitation, often enslavement, of the natives strongly influenced English policies toward racial “others” at home and in England’s colonies, as did Iberian America’s extensive importation of African slaves.

Born Callie Russell Porter in Indian Creek, Texas, Katherine Anne Porter cultivated an elaborate fiction of genteel southernness: she adopted the name of her Kentucky-born grandmother, along with an apocryphal genealogy of illustrious ancestors and landed gentry. Yet Porter, who rarely lived in the South or even in Texas, would claim other home spaces throughout her life - or, more accurately, her stake in a southern narrative would emerge only circuitously, by way of alternative geographies and narratives in which she identified variously with the elite and the dispossessed. She eventually imported a nativist southern identity that bore the traces of a much deeper American chronicle and called frequently upon an Indigenous motif to both account for and ameliorate the anxieties of dispossession. In Porter’s fiction, an Indigenous frame narrative provides a tempting window onto a reorienting, and finally mythical, humanity unscathed by modernity’s ills. Her long career would bear the traces of an entwined southern-Indigenous imaginary steeped in the lessons and vexations of early American settler colonialism.