New Books in Caribbean Studies

Edgardo Meléndez's book Patria: Puerto Rican Revolutionaries in Nineteenth Century New York (Centro Press, 2019) examines the activities and ideals of Puerto Rican revolutionary exiles in New York City at the end of the nineteenth century. The study is centered in the writings, news reports, and announcements by and about Puerto Ricans in Patria, the official newspaper of the Cuban Revolutionary Party. Both were founded and led by the Cuban patriot José Martí. The book looks at the political, organizational and ideological ties between Cuban and Puerto Rican revolutionaries in exile, as well as the events surrounding the war of 1898. It argues that what became major underpinnings of twentieth century Puerto Rico's nationalist thought were already present in the writings of Puerto Ricans found in Patria. The newspaper also offers a glimpse into the daily life and community of Puerto Rican exiles in late nineteenth century New York City. All of the writings in Patria about Puerto Rico are presented in their full English translation. Finally, the book presents a historical overview of how the Puerto Rican exile community living in the city developed at that time.

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Adom Getachew, the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, is the author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton University Press, 2019). The work has received immense praise from academics and non-specialists alike, winning a plethora of awards, including the Frantz Fanon Prize, the W.E.B. Du Bois Distinguished Book Award, and the J. David Greenstone Book Prize. Getachew renarrates the twentieth-century history of decolonization and shows that African, African American, and Caribbean anticolonial nationalists were not solely nation-builders. Responding to the experience of racialized sovereign inequality, dramatized in the book by interwar Ethiopia and Liberia, Black Atlantic thinkers and politicians challenged international racial hierarchies and articulated alternative visions of worldmaking. Seeking to create an egalitarian postimperial world, they attempted to secure a right to self-determination within the newly founded United Nations, constitute regional federations in Africa and the Caribbean, and structure a New International Economic Order. Worldmaking after Empire traces the richness and ambition of postwar efforts to reimagine the international order, uncovering a multiplicity of political projects that decolonization entailed.

Vladislav Lilic is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University.

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Allison B. Wolf's Just Immigration in the Americas: A Feminist Account (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020) proposes a pioneering, interdisciplinary, feminist approach to immigration justice, which defines immigration justice as being about identifying and resisting global oppression in immigration structures, policies, practices, and norms.

In contrast to most philosophical work on immigration (which begins with abstract ideas and philosophical debates and then makes claims based on them), this book begins with concrete cases and immigration policies from throughout the United States, Mexico, Central America, and Colombia to assess the nature of immigration injustice and set us up to address it. Every chapter of the book begins with specific immigration policies, practices or sets of immigrant experiences in the U.S. and Latin America and then explores them through the lens of global oppression to better identify what makes it unjust and to put us in a better position to respond to that injustice and improve immigrants’ lives. It is one of the first sustained studies of immigration justice that focuses on Central and South America in addition to the U.S. and Mexico.

Ethan Besser Fredrick is a graduate student in Modern Latin American history seeking his PhD at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the Transatlantic Catholic movements in Mexico and Spain during the early 20th century.

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Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 2017)highlights how transnational forces—including (im)migration, trade, and tourism—to and from the Caribbean shaped Miami’s queer past. The book has received six awards and honors, including the Charles S. Sydnor Award from the Southern Historical Association for the best book written on Southern history.

Dr. Julio Capó, Jr. is a transnational historian whose research and teaching interests include modern U.S. history, especially the United States’s relationship to the Caribbean and Latin America. He addresses how gender and sexuality have historically intersected with constructions of ethnicity, race, class, nation, age, and ability. He teaches introductory and specialized courses on all these subjects, as well as courses on public history.

Leo Valdes is a graduate student in the History Department at Rutgers University. In addition to being a host for the LGBTQ Studies channel on the New Books Network, they are an oral historian with the Latino New Jersey Oral History Project at Rutgers University and Voces of the Pandemic, a collaborative oral history project with Voces Oral History Center at UT Austin. Their dissertation explores how criminalization and race shaped trans cultures and politics in the 20th century.

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The American Revolution has traditionally been presented as one of the thirteen colonies standing up to a tyrannical empire. Not only does this gloss over the involvement of the thousands of American colonists who remained loyal to the British crown, but it also leaves out the response of the colonies who were also affected by British policies yet did not rebel against British rule. In Resisting Independence: Popular Loyalism in the Revolutionary British Atlantic (Cornell University Press, 2021), Brad A. Jones examines four communities in the British Atlantic – New York City, Halifax, Glasgow, and Kingston, Jamaica – to describe how an emergent loyalist culture reacted to the events of the 1760s and 1770s. Jones demonstrates the existence of this common culture by describing the information networks that developed in the British Empire in the 1750s and 1760s, as ships carrying mail and newspapers crisscrossed the Atlantic. The ideology nurtured by this was one that emphasized a British identity grounded in Protestantism and Whig values of political liberty and economic freedom, and fostered a shared outrage to the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765.

Yet while the colonial communities in Halifax and Kingston saw protests similar to those in New York, Jones describes how local conditions inhibited the same degree of overt resistance to the tax’s implementation. By the mid-1770s, these distinctions had created a divergence within the British colonies, as Loyalist writers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean stressed the importance of monarchy and legitimate government over the coerciveness of the non-importation committees set up by the Patriots. The Franco-American alliance in 1778 played into this, invoking the fears of Catholic tyranny that were the counterpoint to Protestant Whiggery that even fueled protests in Britain over Catholic relief laws. Though the rebellious colonies eventually won their independence, Jones sees as one of their legacies a renewed commitment to the king and parliamentary government, one that bound the remaining elements of the empire closer together with a more sharply defined identity.

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Picking up where most historians conclude, Chelsea Stieber explores the critical internal challenge to Haiti’s post-independence sovereignty: a civil war between monarchy and republic. What transpired was a war of swords and of pens, waged in newspapers and periodicals, in literature, broadsheets, and fliers. 

In Haiti's Paper War: Post-Independence Writing, Civil War, and the Making of the Republic, 1804-1954 (NYU Press, 2020) — her analysis of Haitian writing that followed independence — Stieber composes a new literary history of Haiti, that challenges our interpretations of both freedom struggles and the postcolonial. By examining internal dissent during the revolution, Stieber reveals that the very concept of freedom was itself hotly contested in the public sphere, and it was this inherent tension that became the central battleground for the guerre de plume — the paper war — that vied to shape public sentiment and the very idea of Haiti.

Alejandra Bronfman is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies Latin American, Caribbean & U.S. Latino Studies at SUNY, Albany.

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Edited by Drs. Erica Ball, Tatiana Seijas, and Terri L. Snyder, As if She Were Free (Cambridge University Press, 2020) is a collective biography of African and African-descended women across the Americas. 

This collection of twenty-four beautifully crafted chapters, spans across centuries and geographies, giving us a varied and textured reading of women’s lives and experiences. More importantly than that, and herein lies the revolutionary character of this book, As If She Were Free changes our ways of understanding and conceptualizing freedom and emancipation, ultimately transforming how we narrate the past of our societies and understand our present. 

As the editors of the book tell us in this interview, this is a feminist project at its core, a useful history for today because African and African-descended women in the Americas, both in the past and present, have crafted their own understandings of freedom, advocated for new ways of defining and living freely, and achieved revolutionary changes in our societies. Enjoy this wonderful conversation!

PS. By the end of the interview, you may notice Tatiana Seijas does not answer some questions. The recording of this episode occurred during the Texas Winter storms, and she had to rush home before sunset. Her commitment to this interview, even under such circumstances, was remarkable even if not surprising for those of us who know her and her love for history.

Lisette Varón-Carvajal is a PhD Candidate at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. You can tweet her and suggest books at @LisetteVaron

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Dr. Juan José Ponce Vázquez's new book, Islanders and Empire: Smuggling and Political Defiance in Hispaniola, 1580-1690 (Cambridge UP, 2020) tracks the importance of smuggling to the society, economy, and politics of the island of Hispaniola in this “long seventeenth century.” Smuggling, in his words, made people's lives on the island, an island that had suffered from imperial commercial neglect and a declining sugar industry. Concomitant with this endemic smuggling, local elites began asserting their authority over local and imperial institutions on the island, taking advantage of royal officials’ isolation from the Spanish metropole and their need for local alliances. These factors, Dr. Ponce Vásquez argues, allowed local elites to gain immense wealth and power, alter the course of European inter-imperial struggles, limit, redirect, and suppress the Spanish crown’s policies, and thus take control of the destinies of Hispaniola, other Spanish Caribbean territories, and the Spanish Empire in the region during this period.

R. Grant Kleiser is a Ph.D. candidate in the Columbia University History Department. His dissertation researches the development of the free-port system in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, investigating the rationale for such moves towards “free trade” and the impact these policies had on subsequent philosophers, policy-makers, and revolutionaries in the Atlantic world. 

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In Chocolate Surrealism: Music, Movement, Memory, and History in the Circum-Caribbean (University Press of Mississippi, 2016), Dr. Njoroge M. Njoroge highlights connections among the production, performance, and reception of popular music at critical historical junctures in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Njoroge illuminates musics of the circum-Caribbean as culturally and conceptually integrated within the larger history of the region. Njoroge examines the deep interrelations between music, movement, memory, and history in the African diaspora. He finds the music both a theoretical anchor and a mode of expression and representation of Black identities and political cultures. Music and performance offer ways for the author to re-theorize the intersections of race, nationalism and musical practice, and geopolitical connections. Further, music allows Njoroge a reassessment of the development of the modern world system in the context of local, popular responses to the global age. The book analyzes different styles, times, and politics to render a brief history of Black Atlantic sound.

Dr. Njoroge Njoroge is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Hawai’i, Mānoa.

Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) is a PhD candidate in Musicology at Florida State University. She is currently working on a dissertation about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations

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How can ethnographers use multimedia presentations of their work to reach new audiences, build different relationships with their participants, and promote new practices of witnessing and representation? On today’s episode we talk with Dr. Deborah Thomas, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She tells us about her collaborative and multimodal project, Tivoli Stories (tivolistories.com), based on the 2010 police and military incursion into a West Kingston community in search of a notorious drug trafficker and community don that left at least 75 dead. 

The project includes a documentary film titled Four Days in May, a museum exhibit, and the 2019 book Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Entanglement, Witnessing, Repair (Duke UP, 2019). Deborah explains how a background in dance led her to become an accidental anthropologist with an interest in both sovereignty and experimental ethnographic practices. She then discusses the Tivoli Stories project, describing how collaborative attempts to gather testimonies of the incursion led to first a documentary and then her book. She takes us behind the curtains for some of the simultaneously aesthetic and political choices of the film and book, including the use of portraits to humanize participants as distinct from the common images of suffering that may be termed ghetto porn. Her reflections offer a concrete and insightful look at an alternative means of ethnographic practice attuned to the lives, experiences, and politics of the communities we study.

Alex Diamond is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Texas, Austin. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Dr. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago.

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