Guides: Global Diasporas: Contemporary African and Caribbean Migration: Oral Histories and Primary Sources

Oral History

What Is Oral History?

Oral history is the systematic collection of people's testimony about their own experiences. Oral historians attempt to verify their findings, analyze them, and place them in an accurate historical context. Oral historians are also concerned with storage of their findings for use by later scholars.

In oral history projects, an interviewee recalls an event for an interviewer who records the recollections and creates a historical record.

Oral history depends upon human memory and the spoken word. The means of collection can vary from taking notes by hand to elaborate electronic aural and video recordings.

Step-by-Step Guide to Oral History

Step-by-Step Guide to Oral History

Primary Sources

Latin American & Caribbean Digital Primary Sources
This site provides links to open access digitized collections of primary sources that relate to Latin America and the Caribbean. The materials listed are freely available to the public and were created or are hosted at an academic institution associated with SALALM (Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials), either through institutional membership or through the personal membership of a staff member. Sources range from collections of Mexican incunabula (1559-1600), to Latin American posters and are grouped “Historical Texts by Country“, “Historical Texts General“, “Statistics“, “Visual Material by Country“, “Visual Material General“, and “Miscellaneous.”

Oral History

Let Spirit Speak! : cultural journeys through the African diaspora by Vanessa Kimberly Valdés
Call Number: DT16.5 .L48 Hillman Library
In this unique and groundbreaking collection, writers, critics, historians, and poets celebrate the cultural contributions of members of the African diaspora in the Western Hemisphere. Beginning with the cries and prayers of Gina Athena Ulysse to the Haitian Ioa Erzulie in the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, each writer in the collection engages in the recovering of the past, highlighting that which has been buried in the history of time.
The Black Renaissance in Francophone African and Caribbean Literatures by K. Martial Frindéthié
Call Number: PQ3980.5 .F75 Hillman Library - General Collection
This work explores the limits and prospects of Afro-Caribbean Francophone writers in reshaping or producing action-oriented literature. It shows how Francophone literatures have followed a hegemonic discourse that leaves little room for thinking outside of traditional cultural and ideological conventions.
Identity and Secession in the Caribbean by Learie B. Luke
Call Number: Available Online
The book chronicles the Tobago movement for autonomy from Trinidad from the time of the union of these two Caribbean islands from 1889 to 1980 when Tobago gained internal self-government.
Family Love in the Diaspora: migration and the Anglo-Caribbean experience by Mary Chamberlain
Call Number: F2191.B5 C43 Hillman Library - General Collection
Divided into four parts, the chapters within each present an oral history of migrant African-Caribbean families, demonstrating the varieties, organization, and dynamics of family through their memories and narratives. It traces the evolution of Caribbean life; argues how the family can be seen as the tool that helps transmit and transform historical mentalities; examines the dynamics of family life; and makes comparisons with Indo-Caribbean families. Above all, this is a story of families that evolved, against the odds of slavery and poverty, to form a distinct Creole form, through which much of the social history of the English-speaking Caribbean is refracted.
Writing in the air : heterogeneity and the persistence of oral tradition in Andean literatures by Antonio Cornejo Polar; translated by Lynda J. Jentsch
Call Number: PQ7551 .C6713 Hillman Library - General Collection