New Books in Caribbean Studies

In Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast (New Press, 2020), historian Marjoleine Kars tells the story of a massive eighteenth-century slave rebellion in the Dutch colony of Berbice (in present-day Guyana). Drawing on some nine hundred pages of interrogation transcripts and letters that provide rare first person accounts from enslaved African-born rebels, Kars chronicles how nearly 5,000 of the total enslaved population held onto Berbice for over a year holding onto 135 plantations. Sorting through the competing political visions of the various African-born slave rebels, Kars provides an intimate look into a people demanding freedom and trying to figure out what that can mean to them. 

Sharika Crawford is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis and the author of The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean: Waterscapes of Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

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In The Haitians: A Decolonial History (UNC Press, 2020), leading Haitian intellectual Jean Casimir argues that the story of Haiti should not begin with the usual image of Saint-Domingue as the richest colony of the eighteenth century. Rather, it begins with a reconstruction of how individuals from Africa, in the midst of the golden age of imperialism, created a sovereign society based on political imagination and a radical rejection of the colonial order, persisting even through the U.S. occupation in 1915. The Haitians (UNC Press, 2020) also critically retheorizes the very nature of slavery, colonialism, and sovereignty. Here, Casimir centers the perspectives of Haiti's moun andeyo--the largely African-descended rural peasantry. Asking how these systematically marginalized and silenced people survived in the face of almost complete political disenfranchisement, Casimir identifies what he calls a counter-plantation system. Derived from Caribbean political and cultural practices, the counter-plantation encompassed consistent reliance on small-scale landholding. Casimir shows how lakou, small plots of land often inhabited by generations of the same family, were and continue to be sites of resistance even in the face of structural disadvantages originating in colonial times, some of which continue to be maintained by the Haitian government with support from outside powers.

Adam McNeil is a third year Ph.D. in History student at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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This is part of our Special Series on Third World Nationalism. In the wake of a rise in nationalism around the world, and its general condemnation by liberals and the left, in addition to the rise of China and Russia, we have put together this series on Third World Nationalism to nuance the present discourse on nationalism, note its centrality to anti-imperial, anti-colonial politics around the world, the reconfiguration of global power, and its inextricability from mainstream politics in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Today my guest is Isar Godreau, author of Scripts of Blackness: Race, Cultural Nationalism, and U.S. Colonialism in Puerto Rico (University of Illinois Press, 2015).

The geopolitical influence of the United States informs the processes of racialization in Puerto Rico, including the construction of black places. In Scripts of Blackness, Isar P. Godreau explores how Puerto Rican national discourses about race--created to overcome U.S. colonial power--simultaneously privilege whiteness, typecast blackness, and silence charges of racism.

Based on an ethnographic study of the barrio of San Antón in the city of Ponce, Scripts of Blackness examines institutional and local representations of blackness as developing from a power-laden process that is inherently selective and political, not neutral or natural. Godreau traces the presumed benevolence or triviality of slavery in Puerto Rico, the favoring of a Spanish colonial whiteness (under a hispanophile discourse), and the insistence on a harmonious race mixture as discourses that thrive on a presumed contrast with the United States that also characterize Puerto Rico as morally superior. In so doing, she outlines the debates, social hierarchies, and colonial discourses that inform the racialization of San Antón and its residents as black.

Mining ethnographic materials and anthropological and historical research, Scripts of Blackness provides powerful insights into the critical political, economic, and historical context behind the strategic deployment of blackness, whiteness, and racial mixture.

Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com.

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In From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity (Duke UP, 2018), Anne Garland Mahler traces the history and intellectual legacy of the understudied global justice movement called the Tricontinental—an alliance of liberation struggles from eighty-two countries, founded in Havana in 1966. Focusing on racial violence and inequality, the Tricontinental's critique of global capitalist exploitation has influenced historical radical thought, contemporary social movements such as the World Social Forum and Black Lives Matter, and a Global South political imaginary. The movement's discourse, which circulated in four languages, also found its way into radical artistic practices, like Cuban revolutionary film and Nuyorican literature. While recent social movements have revived Tricontinentalism's ideologies and aesthetics, they have largely abandoned its roots in black internationalism and its contribution to a global struggle for racial justice. In response to this fractured appropriation of Tricontinentalism, Mahler ultimately argues that a renewed engagement with black internationalist thought could be vital to the future of transnational political resistance.

Sharika Crawford is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis and the author of The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean: Waterscapes of Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

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Harmony and Normalization: US-Cuban Musical Diplomacy (University Press of Mississippi, 2020) explores the channels of musical exchange between Cuba and the United States during the eight-year presidency of Barack Obama, who eased the musical embargo of the island and restored relations with Cuba. Musical exchanges during this period act as a lens through which to view not only US-Cuban musical relations but also the larger political, economic, and cultural implications of musical dialogue between these two nations. In this first book on the subject since Obama’s presidency, musicologist Timothy P. Storhoff describes how, after specific policy changes, musicians were some of the first to take advantage of new opportunities for travel, push the boundaries of new regulations, and expose both the possibilities and limitations of licensing musical exchange. This ethnography demonstrates how performances reflect aspirations for stronger transnational ties and a common desire to restore the once-thriving US-Cuban musical relationship.

Dr. Timothy Storhoff is an orchestra administrator, fundraiser, and ethnomusicologist in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

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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Jeppe Mulich's new book, In A Sea of Empires: Networks and Crossings in the Revolutionary Caribbean (Cambridge University Press, 2020) highlights the revolutionary fervor, political turmoil, conflict, and chaos in the Leeward Island region of the Caribbean in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These tense dynamics created opportunities for interconnected politics, laws, and networks in this "microregion" as British, Danish, French, Spanish, and Swedish actors both competed and cooperated with one another. By exploring the transnational networks involved in trade, slavery, smuggling, privateering, and marronage, he emphasizes the border-crossing nature of life in the Leeward Islands that fostered conflicts between local interests and imperial policy and subverted formal imperial boundaries and claims to sovereignty. All-in-all, Dr. Mulich argues that this early period of "globalization" was in-part initiated from the bottom-up, with local peoples, local concerns, and various cross-border networks encouraging regional integration.

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What if the Haitian Revolution, perhaps the only “successful” Black revolution in history, weren’t over?

On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Dr. Jeremy Matthew Glick (h/h) about how and why the Haitian Revolution, which was the only slave rebellion to achieve state sovereignty, remains an inspired site of investigation for artists and activist-intellectuals in the African Diaspora.

In The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution (NYU Press, 2016), Dr. Glick examines twentieth-century performances engaging the revolution as laboratories for political thinking. Asking readers to consider the revolution less a fixed event than an ongoing and open-ended history resonating across the work of Atlantic world intellectuals, Glick argues that these writers use the Haitian Revolution as a watershed to chart their own radical political paths, animating, enriching, and framing their artistic and scholarly projects. Spanning the disciplines of literature, philosophy, and political thought, The Black Radical Tragic explores work from Lorraine Hansberry, Sergei Eisenstein, Edouard Glissant, Malcolm X, and others, ultimately enacting a speculative encounter between Bertolt Brecht and C.L.R. James to reconsider the relationship between tragedy and revolution. In its grand refusal to forget, The Black Radical Tragic demonstrates how the Haitian Revolution has influenced the ideas of freedom and self-determination that have propelled Black radical struggles throughout the modern era.

Read Slavoj Zizek’s review of The Black Radical Tragic in the Los Angeles Review of Books: “A Prophetic Vision of Haiti’s Past”

We hope you enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed chatting about this fascinating book. Connect with your host, Lee Pierce, on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for interview previews, the best book selfies, and new episode alerts.

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Long before the English became involved in the African slave trade, they imagined Africans as monstrous and deformed beings. The English drew on pre-existing European ideas about monstrosity and deformity to argue that Africans were a monstrous race, suspended between human and animal, and as such only fit for servitude. Joining blackness to disability transformed English ideas about defective bodies and minds. It also influenced understandings of race and ability even as it shaped the embodied reality of people enslaved in the British Caribbean.

Dr. Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy provides a three-pronged analysis of disability in the context of Atlantic slavery. First, she examines the connections of enslavement and representations of disability and the parallel development of English anti-black racism. From there, she moves from realms of representation to reality in order to illuminate the physical, emotional, and psychological impairments inflicted by slavery and endured by the enslaved. Finally, she looks at slave law as a system of enforced disablement.

Audacious and powerful, Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean (University of Illinois Press, 2020) is a groundbreaking journey into the entwined histories of racism and ableism.

Adam McNeil is a third-year PhD Student in the Department of History at Rutgers University. McNeil regularly contributes to the academic blogs Black Perspectives and The Junto.

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What is the relationship between race, technology and sound? How can we access the ways that Latin Americans in the 19th and early 20th centuries thought about, and importantly, heard, race? In his book Audible Geographies in Latin America: Sounds of Race and Place (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Dylon Robbins approaches this question in a stunning series of chapters that move between Cuba and Brazil just as both nations were moving into post-emancipation and increasingly intense appeals to nationalist ideologies. New media such as the phonograph, as well as changing techniques in medicine and ethnography contributed to the complex entanglements of race, place and voice. Robbins uncovers new sites in which to explore these questions, such as the Experimental Phonetics Laboratory in Havana and revisits more familiar material, such as the work of Alejo Carpentier, with new frameworks.

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In No Limits to Their Sway: Cartagena’s Privateers and the Masterless Caribbean in the Age of Revolutions (Vanderbilt UP, 2018), Edgardo Pérez Morales investigates the hemispheric connections between the Spanish American colony of New Granada (or Colombia) and the greater Caribbean in the wake of the Haitian Revolution. Residents in the port city of Cartagena enjoyed independence from Spain creating a radically egalitarian revolutionary state in the years 1812 to 1815. Seeking to maintain their tenuous liberty while building diplomatic contact with the Republic of Haiti, the port attracted hundreds of Haitians, men of full or partial African ancestry, where they enlisted as privateers and obtained citizenship. Joined by other masterless crew from ports throughout the Atlantic world, these privateers traversed the Caribbean, attacking Spanish ships outside of Cuba to weaken Spanish power. In doing so, these men helped to construct a radical vision of the revolutionary Atlantic where mostly Afro-Caribbean privateers established supranational networks and communities, which supported and disrupted elite political visions. This work offers a perspective of the maritime dimensions of Latin American sovereignty in the age of revolutions.

Sharika Crawford is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy. 

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