New Books in Caribbean Studies

Welcome to New Books in African American Studies, a channel on the New Books Network. I am your host Adam McNeil. Today is part 2 of my discussion about Dr. Jennifer L. Morgan’s 2004 Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. Instead of Dr. Morgan, who was featured in part 1 of the discussion, I enlisted a few #Blktwitterstorians to pull up to the pod and discuss the importance...

In 2004, Dr. Jennifer L. Morgan’s Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press) was published. Sixteen years later, Morgan’s Laboring Women stands tall as one of the most important historical texts in the history of the academy. Building on Dr. Deborah Gray White’s literal field building and seminal 1985 monograph, Ar’n’t I A Woman?: Female Slaves...

Saint Lucia’s rural landscape is more forested today than at any time in at least seventy-five years (probably much longer). This change is profoundly significant given widespread efforts to achieve sustainable development on small-island states like Saint Lucia. Yet, this seemingly good-news story runs contrary to most conventional narratives about the worsening state of the environment in the Ca...

In his new book Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s (Faber, 2020), Simon Hall, a Professor of Modern History at the University of Leeds, colorfully details an extraordinary visit by Fidel Castro to New York in the Autumn of 1960 for the opening of the UN General Assembly. Holding court from the iconic Hotel Theresa in Harlem, Castro's riotous stay in New York saw him conne...

The story of freedom and all of its ambiguities begins with intimate acts steeped in power. It is shaped by the peculiar oppressions faced by African women and women of African descent. And it pivots on the self-conscious choices black women made to retain control over their bodies and selves, their loved ones, and their futures. Slavery's rise in the Americas was institutional, carnal, and reprod...

There are two key elements of today’s professional baseball that are informed by Lou Hernandez’s wonderful book Bobby Maduro and the Cuban Sugar Kings (McFarland, 2019): the increased presence of Latinos both on the field and off in MLB, and the interest of MLB to promote its game internationally, particularly in places such as Latin America. The life and career of Bobby Maduro sheds light on both...

Despite being a minor contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions, like many other small island nations, The Bahamas’s ecology and society are especially vulnerable to current and expected changes to the oceans and the climate. Spectacular coral reefs, low-lying islands, and a social life oriented towards the sea makes The Bahamas a posterchild of the existential dangers of global warming. At t...

Through a feminist perspective, Carnival Is Woman: Feminism and Performance in Caribbean Mas (University Press of Mississippi, 2019) examines the presence of women in contemporary Carnival by demonstrating not only their strength in numbers, but also the ways in which they participate in the festivities. Exploring different themes, the authors in this volume explain the power of women in the evolu...

In today’s episode, I talk with Dr. Greg Beckett, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Western University, about his richly grounded book There is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince (2019, University of California Press – and it is coming out in a paperback edition this November). This book is an examination of “crisis” in Haiti, and pushes back against the widespread racist...

In his book The Hidden History of International Law in The Americas: Empires and Legal Networks (Oxford University Press, 2017), Juan Pablo Scarfi shows the central role of a coterie of elite Latin American jurists and intellectuals in constructing a Pan-American inflected conception of international law. In exploring the rise of so-called “American” international law, Scarfi’s monograph contribut...

In Sovereign Acts: Performing Race, Space, and Belonging in Panama and the Canal Zone (Rutgers University Press, 2017), Katherine Zien examines the ways politicians, activists, artists, and residents performed and interpreted sovereignty in the Canal Zone from U.S. control over the zone in 1903 to its withdrawal in 1999. Moving beyond the big ditch and construction of the interoceanic canal, Zien...

In her incisive study Baseball as Mediated Latinidad: Race, Masculinity, Nationalism, and Performances of Identity (Ohio State University Press, 2020), Jennifer Domino Rudolph analyzes major league baseball’s Latin/o American players—who now make up more than twenty-five percent of MLB—as sites of undesirable surveillance due to the historical, political, and sociological weight placed on them via...

Ismael Garcia-Colon, Colonial Migrants at the Heart of Empire: Puerto Rican Workers on U.S. Farms (University of California Press, 2020) is the first in-depth look at the experiences of Puerto Rican migrant workers in continental U.S. agriculture in the twentieth century. The Farm Labor Program, established by the government of Puerto Rico in 1947, placed hundreds of thousands of migrant workers o...

In Food In Cuba: The Pursuit of a Decent Meal (Stanford University Press, 2020), Hanna Garth examines the processes of acquiring food and preparing meals in the midst of food shortages. Garth draws our attention to the social, cultural, and historical factors Cuban’s draw upon to define an appropriate or decent meal and the struggle they undergo to produce a decent meal. Often, studies of food sec...

Juan Francisco Manzano and Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (Plácido) were perhaps the most important and innovative Cuban writers of African descent during the Spanish colonial era. Both nineteenth-century authors used Catholicism as a symbolic language for African-inspired spirituality. Likewise, Plácido and Manzano subverted the popular imagery of neoclassicism and Romanticism in order to envisi...

How did Africans become 'blacks' in the Americas? Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (Cambridge University Press, 2020) tells the story of enslaved and free people of color who used the law to claim freedom and citizenship for themselves and their loved ones. Their communities challenged slaveholders' efforts to make blackness synonymous with sla...

The Caribbean has figuratively and literally been entangled in processes of global integration earlier than other parts of the Americas. In Isles of Noise: Sonic Media in the Caribbean (UNC Press, 2016), Alejandra Bronfman offers a refreshing perspective to this well-trodden story. In this book, she traces the emergence and growth of telecommunications technologies in Haiti, Jamaica, and Cuba duri...

In Borderline Citizens: The United States, Puerto Rico, and the Politics of Colonial Migration (Cornell University Press 2018), Robert C. McGreevey explores the contested meaning and limits of citizenship for Puerto Ricans from the late nineteenth century to the late 1930s. This timely monograph brings together legal, cultural, and labour history to understand the complicated ways that Puerto Rica...

In Tides of Revolution: Information, Insurgencies, and the Crisis of Colonial Rule in Venezuela (University of New Mexico Press, 2018), Cristina Soriano examines the links between the spread of radical ideas, literacy, and the circulation of information in a society without a printing press. In doing so, Soriano shows the ways Caribbean revolutionary ideas flowed into the ports and coastal communi...

Tanya Harmer’s new biography, Beatriz Allende: A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), explores how a young Chilean woman pursued her political commitments and navigated patriarchal strictures as a militant leftist. The daughter of Salvador Allende, Beatriz Allende was born in 1942 and came of age in a tumultuous period of Chilean history. As a yo...

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-s...

Jah Kingdom: Rastafarians, Tanzania, and Pan-Africanism in the Age of Decolonization (UNC Press, 2017), examines Rastafarian repatriation to Tanzania in the 1970s and 1980s. In doing so, Monique A. Bedasse situates Rastafarianism’s connection to black radical politics and internationalism within Tanzania, the site for pan-African solidarity in independent Africa after 1966. In doing so, she reveal...

In his book, Rice in the Time of Sugar: The Political Economy of Food in Cuba (UNC Press, 2019), Louis A. Pérez, Jr. explores how Cuba’s dependency on the sugar economy also made the island’s population dependent on food imports like rice. Despite efforts to diversify agricultural production and produce rice domestically, U.S. rice producers consistently resisted Cuban efforts to rid them of a pri...

In Troubling Freedom: Antigua and the Aftermath of British Emancipation (Duke University Press, 2015), Natasha J. Lightfoot traces the ways Antiguans and Barbudans experienced freedom in the immediate years before and decades after British emancipation in 1834. With the exception of a handful of places, slavery ended immediately without a period of apprenticeship. However, Lightfoot deftly shows h...

The history of the Caribbean Island of Trinidad bears witness to an important interplay between the religious practices of peoples of South Asian and those of peoples of African descent, and in particular the manner in which colonial religious categories shaped that interplay. In The Regulation of Religion and the Making of Hinduism in Colonial Trinidad (University of North Carolina Press, 2019),...