New Books in Caribbean Studies

Even before we get to introduce ourselves by name, our hair has already started to tell stories about who we are, where we are from and where we are at. Our hair is tangled up in the interplay of race, gender, class, nationality, sexuality, power and beauty. It is an avid storyteller and a consummate performer - whether we like it or not. If our hair could talk, what stories would it tell about us...

P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance (Duke UP, 2026) explores the work of Puerto Rican musical superstar Bad Bunny (Benito A. Martinez Ocasio), focusing on his cultural and political significance. Global superstar Bad Bunny, like many other Puerto Ricans, has lived a life marked by public crises—blackouts, hurricanes, political corruption and oppression, among...

Shipping Out: Race, Performance, and Labor at Sea (University of Michigan Press, 2025) by Dr. Anita Gonzalez provides a rare perspective on performance by staff above and below deck on Caribbean cruise ships, as viewed through the lenses of race, class, and gender. Drawing on her experiences as a destination lecturer on Caribbean cruise lines for twenty years, Dr. Gonzalez offers a unique viewpoin...

Caste has been a huge topic of conversation in modern India. Yet debates and activism around caste discrimination have spread beyond South Asia. Caste activists looked to African-American literature and leaders to connect their fight with the battle against racism in the U.S. And as Indians moved around the world–to America, to elsewhere in Asia, and to the Middle East–they way they thought about...

The Caribbean port city of Veracruz is many things. It is where the Spanish first settled and last left the colony that would go on to become Mexico. It is a destination boasting the “happiest Carnival in the world,” nightly live music, and public dancing. It is also where Blackness is an integral and celebrated part of local culture and history, but not of the individual self. In Local Color: Rec...

Between King Cotton and Queen Victoria: How Pirates, Smugglers, and Scoundrels Almost Saved the Confederacy (U Georgia Press, 2025) by Dr. Beau Cleland recenters our understanding of the Civil War by framing it as a hemispheric affair, deeply influenced by the actions of a network of private parties and minor officials in the Confederacy and British territory in and around North America. John Wilk...

Analyzing dress, costume, and fashion in Puerto Rico, Dress, Fashion, and National Identity in Puerto Rico: Taínos to Beauty Queens (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. José Blanco F. & Raúl J. Vázquez-López utilizes case studies that explore national identity and nation formation as well as past and current practices in Puerto Rican visual culture. As the last Spanish-speaking colony with an ever-growing di...

In An Unformed Map: Geographies of Belonging Between Africa and the Caribbean (Duke UP, 2025), Philip Janzen traces the intellectual trajectories of Caribbean people who joined the British and French colonial administrations in Africa between 1890 and 1930. Caribbean administrators grew up in colonial societies, saw themselves as British and French, and tended to look down on Africans. Once in Af...

H. C. C. Astwood: minister and missionary, diplomat and politician, enigma in the annals of US history. In Dominican Crossroads: H.C.C. Astwood and the Moral Politics of Race-Making in the Age of Emancipation (Duke UP, 2024), Christina Cecelia Davidson explores Astwood’s extraordinary and complicated life and career. Born in 1844 in the British Caribbean, Astwood later moved to Reconstruction-er...

Despite twenty-first-century fears of nuclear conflagrations with North Korea, Russia, and Iran, the Cuban Missile Crisis is the closest the United States has come to nuclear war. That history has largely been a bilateral narrative of the US-USSR struggle for postwar domination, with Cuba as the central staging ground--a standard account that obscures the shock waves that reverberated throughout L...

Entangled Alliances is a reinterpretation of the American Revolution through analysis of diplomacy in the emerging United States during decades of hemispheric transformation. Ronald Angelo Johnson brings to light the fascinating story of American patriots and rebels from Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) allying against European tyranny. The American Revolution occurred between two of the greatest achi...

How do comics cross boarders? In Latin American Comics in the Twenty-First Century: Transgressing the Frame James Scorer, a Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Manchester, considers the rise of a distinctively Latin American comics culture, capturing the interconnections and differences as comics production have evolved in the region. The book covers a range of genres and comi...

The period of the "second slavery" was marked by geographic expansion of zones of slavery into the Upper US South, Cuba, and Brazil and chronological expansion into the industrial age. As The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean (Oxford UP, 2020) shows, ambitious planters throughout the Greater Caribbean hired a transnational group of ch...

In Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa (Cambridge UP, 2021), Kalle Kananoja tells the story of how pre-colonial communities throughout the west coast of Africa employed a wide range of medical and spiritual strategies to treat all kinds of diseases. In the sixteenth century, the arrival of European traders and colonists initiated an exchange of healing knowledge that moved across the Atlantic for...

“No country is ever just one thing.” In her new book Cuba: An American History (Scribner, 2021), NYU historian Ada Ferrer shows this again and again. In clear and engaging prose, Ferrer narrates five centuries of history from a decidedly different angle than previous one-volume studies; the main drivers of history in this book are not just familiar political figures and abstract historical forces,...

“My name has become a horror to all those who want slavery,” declared Jean‑Jacques Dessalines as he announced the independence of Haiti, the most radical nation‑state during the Age of Revolution and the first country ever to permanently outlaw slavery. Enslaved for the first thirty years of his life, Dessalines (c. 1758–1806) joined the revolution that abolished slavery within the French colony....

American anthropologist Oscar Lewis secured permission from Fidel Castro to undertake three years of field research on cultural and economic change in Cuba in the decade after the victory of Castro's M-26 Movement. Oscar Lewis in Cuba: La Partida Final (Berghahn Books, 2024) delves into Lewis' research goals, methods, the training and composition of his field team, and the difficulties of executin...

Muslims have lived in the Caribbean for centuries. Far From Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean (Rutgers University Press, 2020) examines the archive of autobiography, literature, music and public celebrations in Guyana and Trinidad, offering an analysis of the ways Islam became integral to the Caribbean, and the ways the Caribbean shaped Islamic practices. Aliyah Khan recovers stories that ha...

Why did Britons get up a play wherever they went? In Strolling Players of Empire: Theater and Performances of Power in the British Imperial Provinces, 1656–1833 (Cambridge UP, 2022), Dr. Kathleen Wilson reveals how the performance of English theater and a theatricalized way of viewing the world shaped the geopolitics and culture of empire in the long eighteenth century. Ranging across the Atlantic...

In the 1930s, musical Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton identified the influence of Latin American rhythms like the habanera in jazz, as a sonic “tinge” that fundamentally shaped his style as a stride pianist. In the Seventies, disco presented its own Latin tinge. The Latin American and Latino influence on 1970s New York disco extended far beyond the familiar narratives of the Paradise Garage and Stud...

As we now know, epidemics and pandemics are not new phenomena. In her new book The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the 19th-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade (Yale University Press, 2020), Manuel Barcia offers a striking rendition of the diseases that swept through the illegal slave trade Atlantic World. In fact, Barcia argues that the history of disease and the story of continuing traf...

Today we are joined by César Brioso, author of the book Last Seasons in Havana: The Castro Revolution and the End of Professional Baseball In Cuba (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). Blending the love for baseball fans in Cuba had during the 1950s with the political upheaval that led to Fidel Castro’s rise to power in 1959, Brioso weaves a fascinating tale. Brioso focuses on the last two seasons...

Classicism and Other Phobias (Princeton University Press, 2025) shows how the concept of “classicism” lacks the capacity to affirm the aesthetic value of Black life and asks whether a different kind of classicism—one of insurgence, fugitivity, and emancipation—is possible. Engaging with the work of Sylvia Wynter and other trailblazers in Black studies while drawing on his own experiences as a Blac...

Women and the Jet Age: A Global History of Aviation and Flight Attendants (Cornell University Press, 2025) is a global history of postwar aviation that examines how states nurtured airlines for competing political and economic goals during the Cold War. While previous histories almost exclusively stress US and Western European aviation progress, Dr. Phil Tiemeyer examines how smaller, poorer state...

Imagine a world in which clothing wasn't superabundant – cheap, disposable, indestructible – but perishable, threadbare and chronically scarce. Eighty years ago, when World War II ended, a textile famine loomed. What would everyone wear as uniforms were discarded and soldiers returned home, Nazi camps were liberated, and millions of uprooted people struggled to subsist? In Making Do: Britons and t...