Precarity and the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the Caribbean: Structural stigma, constitutionality, legality in development practice

The social stigma of sexual immorality is inscripted in constitutions, laws, and statutes in the Caribbean and justified and legitimated through references to Christian doxa. This induces forms of structural stigma through policies and practices of governance. I employ country comparisons to demonstrate the critical effect on rates of HIV/AIDS of structural stigma induced by these inscriptions in Caribbean countries. By comparing rates of HIV/AIDS across selected countries, I analyse the differing patterns of structural stigma against the latter’s relationship with structural vulnerabilities associated with poverty, underdevelopment, government incapacities, and population flows. I conclude that significant reductions in rates of prevalence can be achieved when social stigma is minimised or meliorated through effective government action or through the influence of external actors, even in the presence of other forms of structural vulnerabilities. The intensity of population flows into a country can also act independently to increase rates of prevalence, even in the face of reductions in structural stigma related to sexual immorality

Reproducing Domination: On the Caribbean Postcolonial State

Reproducing Domination: On the Caribbean Postcolonial State collects thirteen key essays on the Caribbean by Percy C. Hintzen, the foremost political sociologist in Anglophone Caribbean studies. For the past forty years, Hintzen has been one of the most articulate and discerning critics of the postcolonial state in Caribbean scholarship, making seminal contributions to the study of Caribbean politics, sociology, political economy, and diaspora studies. His work on the postcolonial elites in the region, first given full articulation in his book The Costs of Regime Survival: Racial Mobilization, Elite Domination, and Control of the State in Guyana and Trinidad, is unparalleled. Reproducing Domination contains some of Hintzen’s most important Caribbean essays over a twenty-five-year period, from 1995 to the present. These works have broadened and deepened his earlier work in The Costs of Regime Survival to encompass the entire Anglophone Caribbean; interrogated the formation and consolidation of the postcolonial Anglophone Caribbean state; and theorized the role of race and ethnicity in Anglophone Caribbean politics. Given the recent global resurgence of interest in elite ownership patterns and their relationship to power and governance, Hintzen’s work assumes even more resonance beyond the shores of the Caribbean. This groundbreaking volume serves as an important guide for those concerned with tracing the consolidation of power in the new elite that emerged following flag independence in the 1960s. Source: Publisherhttps://scholarworks.smith.edu/afr_books/1003/thumbnail.jp

Introduction to the special issue: Applying a Caribbean perspective to an analysis of HIV/AIDS

This introduction presents a special issue of Global Public Health with a collection of articles that offer multidisciplinary perspectives on HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean. Since the 1990s, poverty, marginalisation, and social stigma have been strong foci of much social science research on HIV/AIDS in the region. These three interrelated phenomena have been offered as explanatory factors contributing to the high prevalence of cases observed in this region. Contributors to this special issue take these emphases in new directions, asking multi-level questions that require unique combinations of epidemiological, social scientific, theoretical, and policy-oriented perspectives and methodologies. Together, they identify several topical areas that intend to create dialogue across disciplines and dialectics, with the fundamental principle that the factors relevant to HIV/AIDS are broad and require intersectional lenses. The articles in this issue offer multi-level interventions into HIV/AIDS in the region, from the varied social circumstances that shape heightened risk factors to patient adherence programmes, with emphases on structural, social, and policy-level approaches. Collectively, this special issue establishes the importance of transdisciplinary approaches to HIV/AIDS that are macro-level in scope, but simultaneously attend to how large-scale dynamics are inflected in situated contexts and histories