Diasporic Sources and Caribbean History

Abstract

Oral history is crucial to two ongoing research projects: the first focuses on the history of childhood and family in the twentieth-century Anglophone Caribbean, and the second concentrates on the construction and nature of the Caribbean interviews archived in the Multicultural History Society of Ontario (MHSO) collections. The following examination of some of the scholarship on oral sources and Caribbean migration raises significant questions for my analysis of two Caribbean interviews in the MHSO West Indies Collection: what can interviews conducted with Caribbean-born people living in the diaspora tell us about memories of life in the region itself, especially those of childhood and family life, and how can scholars use them to explore Caribbean history?