Publication Type: Roundtable
Abstract: In this study I examine the process of victimization of Caribbean women. The extent of victimization includes wife battery, rape, sexism, patriarchy, family violence, classism, and racism. This study will also focus on the current domestic violence legislature.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The analysis of the international processes is essential in studies of international relations. In this regard, the review is relevant and creative development of the area-studies region particularly those in proximity, intensity, leaflets and interest re

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper offers a history of the embodied encounters of tourism through a reading of visual and verbal representations of Caribbean people by travellers and tourists, focusing on European and North American visitors to the Caribbean in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The data is drawn especially from a genre of popular travel writing that emerged with the development of organised tourism in the Caribbean in the late nineteenth century. It is argued that the ways in which tourists and local people face each other, look at each other, hear each other, smell each other, or touch each other in these ‘close encounters of empire’, are all part of the power relations by which forms of gender and racial inequality are brought into being along with national boundaries of belonging and exclusion. Inasmuch as the body is a key site in the exercise of gender and racial domination and resistance, representations and deployments of Caribbean peoples’ bodies occur around deeply contested power relations, vested in the history of forms of bodily proximity that begin with the power dynamics of the master-slave relation and extend to contemporary forms of tourism and service work. Beyond the power of the tourist gaze, however, this paper also explores some of the forms of ‘returning the tourist gaze’ – that is, modes of resisting the power of the gaze to define one’s being.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This study provides estimates of obesity and central obesity in six countries of Latin America and the Caribbean from a large representative sample of elderly individuals. Levels of obesity are so high this region that women in these countries are usually fatter than their counterparts in the United States. Elders from Uruguay have the highest obesity rate followed by those from Chile and Mexico. Elderly men and women from Cuba have the lowest average weight and the lowest prevalence of obesity. In terms of central obesity, Brazilians, Chileans and Mexicans have highest values of waist circumference and waist-to-hip ratio, which implies that elderly in these countries are at higher risk of developing diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Men are taller than women and heavier as well (Barbados is an exception), but average body mass index is higher among women (p<0.0001). Height tends to decline with age and this may be associated with historical trends and aging itself. There are also considerable declines in weight with age. Current levels of obesity among elderly require changes in lifestyle, changes on their diets and increases in physical activity, but in many cases professional help is already necessary to reduce body weight.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Political and cultural developments occurring in Hindu communities outside of India should act as a reminder that the study of Hinduism cannot be confined to the Indian subcontinent. The powerful influences that globalization and transnationalism have had in the area of ethno-nationalism demonstrate just how significant such processes are to the reshaping and reconstruction of identities and cultures in Diasporic contexts. This assumption finds empirical support in contexts where historically marginalized ethno-religious communities, such as Indo-Trinidadian Hindus, have been capitalizing on the Hindutva (radical Hindu nationalism) ideology as a way of culturally and politically empowering themselves. This paper attempts to delineate the influence and impact that the radical Hindu Right’s Hindutva ideology have had on the Hindu resurgence movement in Trinidad and Tobago. The Indo-Trinidadian Hindu political struggles must be understood from a perspective that can account for both the effects of past colonial projects and their enduring legacies visible in many of the post-colonial geographies of the modern world. One way of understanding the constantly shifting and changing character of Hinduism, and Hindu identities in particular, is to examine the strategies and tactics that the Hindu elite have deployed in its attempt to “ethnicize” Hinduism.