New Books in Caribbean Studies

On the 16th October 2023, I met with Claire Launchbury and Charles Forsdick to discuss the recent publication of Transnational French Studies (Liverpool UP, 2023), a collection of essays that draws attention to the diverse objects of study and methodologies that can be brought to bear on French cultural production. This is the latest in the “Transnational Modern Languages” series published by Liverpool University press. The series furnishes frameworks and concrete examples of how to study languages and cultures through their interactions, rather than as isolated national traditions. It is especially of note that Transnational French Studies has been conceived as a handbook for students of French (at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels). The key objective of the volume is to define the core set of skills and methodologies that constitute the study of French culture as a transnational, transcultural and translingual phenomenon. Written by leading scholars within the field, chapters demonstrate the type of inquiry that can be pursued into the transnational realities - both material and non-material - that are integral to what is referred to as French culture. The book is divided into four sections: Languages, Spaces, Temporalities and Subjectivities. These follow a detailed introduction written by the editors that comprehensively explains and situates “transnationalism” and its reception within contemporary French Studies.

The collection moves smoothly from literature to sociolinguistics to videogames and comics. In addition to its diverse subject matter, the edition makes a major contribution to French Studies by drawing attention to the complex ways that monolingualism can become conflated with monoculturalism in our discipline. Forsdick and Launchbury in their introduction stress that the “nation is a keyword that all students of France must interrogate in its historic and semantic complexity”. The collection’s historical breadth expands social scientific definitions of “transnationalism” and historicizes both “Frenchness” and the French language’s (and cultures’) evolutions. Individual essays explore histories of migration, flows of ideas and goods to demonstrate that “transnationalism” is not a contemporary phenomenon but a cultural disposition that extends back centuries.

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Mariana-Cecilia Velazquez's book Cultural Representations of Piracy in England, Spain, and the Caribbean: Travelers, Traders, and Traitors, 1570 to 1604 (Routledge, 2023) examines the concept of piracy as an instrument for the advancement of legal, economic, and political agendas associated with early modern imperial conflicts in the Caribbean. Drawing on historical accounts, literary texts, legal treatises, and maps, the book traces the visual and narrative representations of Sir Francis Drake, who serves as a case study to understand the various usages of the terms "pirate" and "corsair." Through a comparative analysis, the book considers the connotations of the categories related to maritime predation—pirate, corsair, buccaneer, and filibuster—and nationalistic and religious denominations—Lutheran, Catholic, heretic, Spaniard, English, and Creole—to argue that the flexible usage of these terms corresponds to unequal colonial and imperial relations and ideological struggles.

Jana Byars is an independent scholar located in Amsterdam.

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Coined in the middle of the nineteenth century, the term "voodoo" has been deployed largely by people in the U.S. to refer to spiritual practices--real or imagined--among people of African descent. "Voodoo" is one way that white people have invoked their anxieties and stereotypes about Black people--to call them uncivilised, superstitious, hypersexual, violent, and cannibalistic.

In Voodoo: The History of a Racial Slur (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dr. Danielle N. Boaz explores public perceptions of "voodoo" as they have varied over time, with an emphasis on the intricate connection between stereotypes of "voodoo" and debates about race and human rights. The term has its roots in the U.S. Civil War in the 1860s, especially following the Union takeover of New Orleans, when it was used to propagate the idea that Black Americans held certain "superstitions" that allegedly proved that they were unprepared for freedom, the right to vote, and the ability to hold public office. Similar stereotypes were later extended to Cuba and Haiti in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 1930s, Black religious movements like the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam were derided as "voodoo cults." More recently, ideas about "voodoo" have shaped U.S. policies toward Haitian immigrants in the 1980s, and international responses to rituals to bind Nigerian women to human traffickers in the twenty-first century. Drawing on newspapers, travelogues, magazines, legal documents, and books, Dr. Boaz shows that the term "voodoo" has often been a tool of racism, colonialism, and oppression.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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John Plotz of Recall This Book spoke in 2020 with Sanjay Krishnan, Boston University English professor and Conrad scholar about his marvelous new book on that grumpiest of Nobel laureates, V. S Naipaul’s Journeys.

Krishnan sees the “contrarian and unsentimental” Trinidad-born but globe-trotting novelist and essayist as early and brilliant at noticing the unevenness with which the blessings and curses of modernity were distributed in the era of decolonization. Centrally, Naipaul realized and reckoned with the always complex and messy question of the minority within postcolonial societies.

He talks with John about Naipaul’s early focus on postcolonial governments, and how unusual it was in the late 1950’s for colonial intellectuals to focus on “the discomfiting aspects of postcolonial life….and uneven consequences of the global transition into modernity.” Most generatively of all, Sanjay insists that the “troublesome aspect is what gives rise to what’s most positive in Naipaul.”

Discussed in the Episode



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43 Sanjay Krishnan on V. S. Naipaul: To make the Deformation the Formation

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How did a Caribbean child, born into plantation slavery, come to defeat Napoleon's armies in battle and crown himself king of the first free black nation in the Americas? Black Crown: Henry Christophe, the Haitian Revolution and the Caribbean's Forgotten Kingdom (Hurst, 2023) is the story of Henry Christophe: one of the most remarkable, yet least known, figures from the Age of Revolution.

Christophe fought as a child soldier in the American War of Independence, before rising to prominence during the Haitian Revolution as one of Toussaint Louverture's top generals, commanding troops against Bonaparte's invasion. Following Haitian independence, Christophe's ambition for rule helped plunge the country into civil war. He crowned himself King Henry I of Haiti, and his attempts to build a modern black state won the support of leading British abolitionists.

Christophe saw himself as an Enlightenment ruler, and his kingdom produced great literary works, epic fortresses and opulent palaces. But while he was a proud anti-imperialist and fought off French plots against him, the Haitian people chafed under his rule. After ten years on the throne, he committed suicide rather than face being overthrown. Christophe's mountaintop Citadelle still stands, as Haiti's sole World Heritage site-a monument to a revolutionary black monarchy, in a world of empire and slavery.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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In 1807, Parliament outlawed the slave trade in the British Empire, but for the next quarter of a century, despite heroic and bloody rebellions, more than 700,000 people in the British colonies remained enslaved. And when a renewed abolitionist campaign was mounted, making slave ownership the defining political and moral issue of the day, emancipation was fiercely resisted by the powerful 'West India Interest'. Supported by nearly every leading figure of the British establishment - including Canning, Peel and Gladstone, The Times and Spectator - the Interest ensured that slavery survived until 1833 and that when abolition came at last, compensation worth billions in today's money was given not to the enslaved but to the slaveholders, entrenching the power of their families to shape modern Britain to this day.

Drawing on major new research, Michael Taylor's The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery (Bodley Head, 2021) provides a gripping narrative account of the tumultuous and often violent battle that divided and scarred the nation during these years of upheaval. The Interest reveals the lengths to which British leaders went to defend the indefensible in the name of profit, showing that the ultimate triumph of abolition came at a bitter cost and was one of the darkest and most dramatic episodes in British history.

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Carmen Haydée Rivera and Jorge Duany's edited volume Cuba and Puerto Rico: Transdisciplinary Approaches to History, Literature, and Culture (U Florida Press, 2023) is the first systematic, comparative study of Cuba and Puerto Rico from both a historical and contemporary perspective. In these essays, contributors highlight the interconnectedness of the two archipelagos in social categories such as nation, race, class, and gender to encourage a more nuanced and multifaceted study of the relationships between the islands and their diasporas. Topics range from historical and anthropological perspectives on Cuba and Puerto Rico before and during the Cold War to cultural and sociological studies of diasporic communities in the United States. 

The volume features analyses of political coalitions, the formation of interisland sororities, and environmental issues. Along with sharing a similar early history, Cuba and Puerto Rico have closely intertwined cultures, including their linguistic, literary, food, musical, and religious practices. Contributors also discuss literature by Cuban and Puerto Rican authors by examining the aesthetics of literary techniques and discourses, the representation of psychological space on the stage, and the impacts of migration. Showing how the trajectories of both archipelagos have been linked together for centuries and how they have diverged recently, Cuba and Puerto Rico offers a transdisciplinary approach to the study of this intricate relationship and the formation of diasporic communities and continuities. 

Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Anna E. Lindner (Ph.D., Communication) is an Assistant Professor of Teaching at Wayne State University. On Twitter.

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A bold rethinking of the Haitian Revolution reveals the roots of the only successful slave uprising in the modern world.

Unearthing the progenitors of the Haitian Revolution has been a historical project of two hundred years. In A Secret Among the Blacks: Slave Resistance Before the Haitian Revolution (Harvard UP, 2023), John D. Garrigus introduces two dozen Black men and women and their communities whose decades of resistance to deadly environmental and political threats preceded and shaped the 1791 revolt.

In the twenty-five miles surrounding the revolt’s first fires, enslaved people of diverse origins lived in a crucible of forces that arose from the French colonial project. When a combination of drought, trade blockade, and deadly anthrax bacteria caused waves of death among the enslaved in the 1750s, poison investigations spiraled across plantations. Planters accused, tortured, and killed enslaved healers, survivors, and community leaders for deaths the French regime had caused. Facing inquisition, exploitation, starvation, and disease, enslaved people devised resistance strategies that they practiced for decades. Enslaved men and women organized labor stoppages and allied with free Blacks to force the French into negotiations. They sought enforcement of freedom promises and legal protection from abuse. Some killed their abusers.

Through remarkable archival discoveries and creative interpretations of the worlds endured by the enslaved, A Secret Among the Blacks reveals the range of complex, long-term political visions pursued by enslaved people who organized across plantations located in the seedbed of the Haitian Revolution. When the call to rebellion came, these men and women were prepared to answer.

Brigid Wallace is a Graduate Student in the History Department at Lehigh University. (Twitter: @faithismine51)

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Raised in Jamaica, Mary Seacole first came to England in the 1850s after working in Panama. She wanted to volunteer as a nurse and aide during the Crimean War. When her services were rejected, she financed her own expedition to Balaclava, where her reputation for her nursing—and for her compassion—became almost legendary. Popularly known as ‘Mother Seacole’, she was the most famous Black celebrity of her generation—an extraordinary achievement in Victorian Britain.

She regularly mixed with illustrious royal and military patrons and they, along with grateful war veterans, helped her recover financially when she faced bankruptcy. However, after her death in 1881, she was largely forgotten.

More recently, her profile has been revived and her reputation lionized, with a statue of her standing outside St Thomas's Hospital in London and her portrait—rediscovered by the author—now on display in the National Portrait Gallery. In Search of Mary Seacole is the fruit of almost twenty years of research and reveals the truth about Seacole's personal life, her "rivalry" with Florence Nightingale, and other misconceptions.

Vivid and moving, In Search of Mary Seacole: The Making of a Black Cultural Icon (Pegasus Books, 2022) shows that reality is often more remarkable and more dramatic than the legend.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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In The House on G Street: A Cuban Family Saga (NYU Press, 2023), award-winning author Lisandro Pérez tells Cuba’s story through the lens of a single family: his own. His book relays the tales of two officers who fought against the Spanish for Cuban independence; a plantation owner who smuggles himself onto a ship; families divided by political loyalties; an orphaned boy from central Cuba who would go on to amass a fortune; a fatal love triangle; violence; and the ever-growing presence of the United States. It all culminates with an unforgettable portrait of a childhood spent in a world that was giving way to another one. The House on G Street is a unique depiction of one of the most consequential events of the twentieth century, told through generations of ancestors whose lives were shaped by dramatic historical forces.

Pérez disentangles the complex history by following his family’s thread, imbuing political events with personal meaning. Their story begins with emigration to Cuba and follows the waning years of the colony. The end of Spanish rule gives way to pervasive American influence, and Perez’s family turned to New York as they adapted to the realities of a new republic with compromised sovereignty: privileged educations in boarding schools in Long Island and the Hudson Valley; a family business that took tobacco leaves from the soil of central Cuba to the docks of the East River; and grandparents who met and fell in love one night in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. His family learned to navigate the uneasy relationship between the United States and Cuba, a relationship that was destined to end in dramatic fashion.

More than sixty years later, the Cuban Revolution resists receding into the past, sparking continued discussion, debate, and reinterpretation. There is a great deal that is known about the broad historical conditions that inexorably pushed Cuba towards revolution, but much less is known about the people who lived that dramatic history. It is a story that, if not recovered and told, will be lost, for Pérez’s ancestors lived in a world that no longer exists, swept away by a tide of revolutionary change.

The House on G Street follows a family whose lives mirror the history of a nation. The result is a compelling blend of memoir and in-depth historical research, a remarkable new view of the path to revolution as seen from the first person.

Lisandro Pérez is Professor in the Department of Latin American and Latinx Studies at John Jay College, City University of New York and author of Sugar, Cigars, and Revolution: The Making of Cuban New York. He is also the founding director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University.

Katie Coldiron is the Outreach Program Manager for the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) and PhD student in History at Florida International University.

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