A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Addressing the use of geoinformatics in Caribbean archaeology, this volume is based on case studies drawn from specific island territories, namely, Barbados, St. John, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Nevis, St. Eustatius, and Trinidad and Tobago, as well as inter-island interaction and landscape conceptualization in the Caribbean region. Geoinformatics is especially critical within the Caribbean where site destruction is intense due to storm surges, hurricanes, ocean and riverine erosion, urbanization, industrialization, and agriculture, as well as commercial development along the very waterfronts that were home to many prehistoric peoples. By demonstrating that the region is fertile ground for the application of geoinformatics in archaeology, this volume places a well-needed scholarly spotlight on the Caribbean.
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 is a groundbreaking journey into the entwined histories of racism and ableism.
During the seventeenth century, sea raiders known as buccaneers controlled the Caribbean. Buccaneers were not pirates but privateers, licensed to attack the Spanish by the governments of England, France, and Holland. Jon Latimer charts the exploits of these men who followed few rules as they forged new empires.
Lacking effective naval power, the English, French, and Dutch developed privateering as the means of protecting their young New World colonies. They developed a form of semi-legal private warfare, often carried out regardless of political developments on the other side of the Atlantic, but usually with tacit approval from London, Paris, and Amsterdam. Drawing on letters, diaries, and memoirs of such figures as William Dampier, Sieur Raveneau de Lussan, Alexander Oliver Exquemelin, and Basil Ringrose, Jon Latimer portrays a world of madcap adventurers, daredevil seafarers, and dangerous rogues.
Piet Hein of the Dutch West India Company captured, off the coast of Cuba, the Spanish treasure fleet, laden with American silver, and funded the Dutch for eight months in their fight against Spain. The switch from tobacco to sugar transformed the Caribbean, and everyone scrambled for a quick profit in the slave trade. Oliver Cromwell’s ludicrous Western Design—a grand scheme to conquer Central America—fizzled spectacularly, while the surprising prosperity of Jamaica set England solidly on the road to empire. The infamous Henry Morgan conducted a dramatic raid through the tropical jungle of Panama that ended in the burning of Panama City.
From the crash of gunfire to the billowing sail on the horizon, Latimer brilliantly evokes the dramatic age of the buccaneers.
In Cannibal Writes, Njeri Githire concentrates on the gendered and sexualized dimensions of these visceral metaphors of consumption in works by women writers from Haiti, Jamaica, Mauritius, and elsewhere. Employing theoretical analysis and insightful readings of English- and French-language texts, she explores the prominence of alimentary-related tropes and their relationship to sexual consumption, writing, global geopolitics and economic dynamics, and migration. As she shows, the use of cannibalism in particular as a central motif opens up privileged modes for mediating historical and sociopolitical issues.
Ambitiously comparative, Cannibal Writes ranges across the works of well-known and lesser known writers to tie together two geographic and cultural spaces that have much in common but are seldom studied in parallel.
Combining fertile soils, vital trade routes, and a coveted strategic location, the islands and surrounding continental lowlands of the Caribbean were one of Europe’s earliest and most desirable colonial frontiers. The region was colonized over the course of five centuries by a revolving cast of Spanish, Dutch, French, and English forces, who imported first African slaves and later Asian indentured laborers to help realize the economic promise of sugar, coffee, and tobacco. The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples offers an authoritative one-volume survey of this complex and fascinating region.
This groundbreaking work traces the Caribbean from its pre-Columbian state through European contact and colonialism to the rise of U.S. hegemony and the economic turbulence of the twenty-first century. The volume begins with a discussion of the region’s diverse geography and challenging ecology and features an in-depth look at the transatlantic slave trade, including slave culture, resistance, and ultimately emancipation. Later sections treat Caribbean nationalist movements for independence and struggles with dictatorship and socialism, along with intractable problems of poverty, economic stagnation, and migrancy.
Written by a distinguished group of contributors, The Caribbean is an accessible yet thorough introduction to the region’s tumultuous heritage which offers enough nuance to interest scholars across disciplines. In its breadth of coverage and depth of detail, it will be the definitive guide to the region for years to come.
The story has been passed through generations for more than two centuries. Details vary depending on who is doing the telling, but all refer to this momentous maritime event as the Wreck of the Ten Sail. Sometimes misunderstood as the loss of a single ship, it was in fact the wreck of ten vessels at once, comprising one of the most dramatic maritime disasters in all of Caribbean naval history. Surviving historical documents and the remains of the wrecked ships in the sea confirm that the narrative is more than folklore. It is a legend based on a historical event in which HMS Convert, formerly L’Inconstante, a recent prize from the French, and 9 of her 58-ship merchant convoy sailing from Jamaica to Britain, wrecked on the jagged eastern reefs of Grand Cayman in 1794.
The incident has historical significance far beyond the boundaries of the Cayman Islands. It is tied to British and French history during the French Revolution, when these and other European nations were competing for military and commercial dominance around the globe. The Wreck of the Ten Sail attests to the worldwide distribution of European war and trade at the close of the eighteenth century.
In Cayman’s 1794 Wreck of the Ten Sail: Peace, War, and Peril in the Caribbean, Margaret E. Leshikar-Denton focuses on the ships, the people, and the wreck itself to define their place in Caymanian, Caribbean, and European history. This well-researched volume weaves together rich oral folklore accounts, invaluable supporting documents found in archives in the United Kingdom, Jamaica, and France, and tangible evidence of the disaster from archaeological sites on the reefs of the East End.
Informed and up to date, Challenged Sovereignty explains the effects of today’s globalized problems on the contemporary Caribbean.
In a stunning combination of scholarship and storytelling, the award-winning anthropologist Richard Price draws on long-term ethnography, archival documents, cinema and street theater, and Caribbean fiction and poetry to explore how one generation’s powerful historical metaphors could so quickly become the next generation’s trivial pursuit, how memories of oppression, inequality, and struggle could so easily become replaced by nostalgia, complicity, and celebration.
“A superb callaloo of a book. . . . Richard Price has a remarkable grasp of the literatures of the Caribbean, and draws on this resource to explore the underlying insanity of the colonial experience, as well as the bewildering complexities of the postcolonial world where memory is erased or invented according to the demands of a market modernity.”—George Lamming, author of The Pleasures of Exile
“By beautifully crafting elements as disparate as biographical data, sociological studies, literary sources, and archival documents, Richard Price’s research is more fascinating than a piece of fiction.”—Maryse Condé, author of I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem
“Price does it again. Mixing eras, genres, and voices, he carries the reader through the contradictory streams of historical consciousness in the Caribbean island of Martinique. The result is as complex and as enticing as the sea it evokes.”—Michel-Rolph Trouillot, author of Silencing the Past
“Filled with insights that are at once theoretical, methodological, and ethnographic, The Convict and the Colonel is required reading for anyone interested in colonialism, memory, and contemporary Caribbean societies.”—Jennifer Cole, American Ethnologist
Art historians, anthropologists, and sociologists from Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States discuss artwork from Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Suriname, and Puerto Rico, and many of their essays focus on indigenous artists. They highlight the complex webs of social relations from which folk art emerges. For instance, while several pieces describe the similar creative and technical processes of indigenous pottery-making communities of the Amazon and of mestiza potters in Mexico and Colombia, they also reveal the widely varying functions of the ceramics and meanings of the iconography. Integrating the social, historical, political, geographical, and economic factors that shape folk art in Latin America and the Caribbean, Crafting Gender sheds much-needed light on a rich body of art and the women who create it.
Contributors
Eli Bartra
Ronald J. Duncan
Dolores Juliano
Betty LaDuke
Lourdes Rejón Patrón
Sally Price
María de Jesús Rodríguez-Shadow
Mari Lyn Salvador
Norma Valle
Dorothea Scott Whitten
During the colonial period in Guyana, the country’s coastal lands were worked by enslaved Africans and indentured Indians. In Creole Indigeneity, Shona N. Jackson investigates how their descendants, collectively called Creoles, have remade themselves as Guyana’s new natives, displacing indigenous peoples in the Caribbean through an extension of colonial attitudes and policies.
Looking particularly at the nation’s politically fraught decades from the 1950s to the present, Jackson explores aboriginal and Creole identities in Guyanese society. Through government documents, interviews, and political speeches, she reveals how Creoles, though unable to usurp the place of aboriginals as First Peoples in the New World, nonetheless managed to introduce a new, more socially viable definition of belonging, through labor. The very reason for bringing enslaved and indentured workers into Caribbean labor became the organizing principle for Creoles’ new identities.
Creoles linked true belonging, and so political and material right, to having performed modern labor on the land; labor thus became the basis for their subaltern, settler modes of indigeneity—a contradiction for belonging under postcoloniality that Jackson terms “Creole indigeneity.” In doing so, her work establishes a new and productive way of understanding the relationship between national power and identity in colonial, postcolonial, and anticolonial contexts.
The contradance and quadrille, in their diverse forms, were the most popular, widespread, and important genres of creole caribbean music and dance in the nineteenth century. Throughout the region they constituted sites for interaction of musicians and musical elements of different racial, social, and ethnic origins, and they became crucibles for the evolution of genres like the Cuban danzón and son, the Dominican merengue, and the Haitian mereng.
Creolizing Contradance in the Caribbean is the first book to explore this phenomenon in detail and with a pan-regional perspective. Individual chapters by respected area experts discuss the Spanish, French, and English-speaking Caribbean. For each area they cover the musical and choreographic features, social dynamics, historical development and significance, and discuss them in relation to the broader Caribbean historical context. This groundbreaking text fills a significant gap in studies of Caribbean cultural history and of social dance.
Muslims have been shaping the Americas and the Caribbean for more than five hundred years, yet this interplay is frequently overlooked or misconstrued. Brimming with revelations that synthesize area and ethnic studies, Crescent over Another Horizon presents a portrait of Islam’s unity as it evolved through plural formulations of identity, power, and belonging. Offering a Latino American perspective on a wider Islamic world, the editors overturn the conventional perception of Muslim communities in the New World, arguing that their characterization as “minorities” obscures the interplay of ethnicity and religion that continues to foster transnational ties.
Bringing together studies of Iberian colonists, enslaved Africans, indentured South Asians, migrant Arabs, and Latino and Latin American converts, the volume captures the power-laden processes at work in religious conversion or resistance. Throughout each analysis—spanning times of inquisition, conquest, repressive nationalism, and anti-terror security protocols—the authors offer innovative frameworks to probe the ways in which racialized Islam has facilitated the building of new national identities while fostering a double-edged marginalization. The subjects of the essays transition from imperialism (with studies of morisco converts to Christianity, West African slave uprisings, and Muslim and Hindu South Asian indentured laborers in Dutch Suriname) to the contemporary Muslim presence in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Trinidad, completed by a timely examination of the United States, including Muslim communities in “Hispanicized” South Florida and the agency of Latina conversion. The result is a fresh perspective that opens new horizons for a vibrant range of fields.
China is emerging as a truly global economic and political power. China’s impact on Latin America and the Caribbean region is mixed, however—fostering a trade market for some countries, but creating competition for others.
This pioneering volume, produced by the Inter-American Development Bank’s Integration and Regional Programs Department and Research Department, provides a comprehensive overview of China’s economic policy and performance over recent decades and contrasts them with the Latin American experience. What are the underlying factors behind China’s competitive edge? What are the strategic implications of China’s rise for growth and development in Latin America? These questions open new avenues for thinking about revitalizing development strategies in Latin America in the face of China’s successful development and reduction of poverty. This insightful report is a must-read for analysts, policymakers, and development practitioners, not only in Latin America and the Caribbean, but wherever China’s presence is being felt.
The Emergence of China is a copublication of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies and the Inter-American Development Bank.
The ten prominent scholars contributing to this book focus on the significance of ethnicity for social structure and national identity in the Caribbean. Their essays span a period from the initial European colonization right through today’s paradoxical balance sheet of decolonization. They deal with the entire region as well as the significance of the diaspora and the continuing impact of metropolitan linkages. The topics addressed vary from the international repercussions of Haiti’s black revolution through the position of French Caribbean békés and the Barbadian ‘redlegs’ to race in revolutionary Cuba; from Puerto Rican dance etiquette through the Latin American and Caribbean identity essay to the discourse of Dominican nationhood; and from a musée imaginaire in Guyane through Jamaica’s post independence culture to the predicament of Dutch Caribbean decolonization. Taken together, these essays provide a rare and extraordinarily rich comparative perspective to the study of ethnicity as a crucial factor shaping both intimate relations and the public and even international dimension of Caribbean societies.
Fernando Ortiz (1881–1969) coined the term “transculturation” in 1940. This was an early case of theory from the South: concepts developed from an explicitly peripheral epistemological vantage point and launched as a corrective to European and North American theoretical formulations. What Ortiz proposed was a contrapuntal vision of complexly entangled processes that we, today, would conceptualize as cultural emergence.
Inspired by Ortiz, this volume engineers an unprecedented conversation between Mediterraneanists and Caribbeanists. It harnesses Ortiz’s mid-twentieth-century theoretical formulations to early twenty-first-century issues pertinent to both regions, including migration, territorial sovereignty, and cultural diversity. The contributors explore this perspective (arguably formed during Ortiz’s youth in late nineteenth-century Menorca) in a dialogue between scholars of the contemporary Caribbean and Mediterranean to enable novel analytics for both regions and to more broadly to probe the promises and limits of Ortiz’s contribution for contemporary anthropological research and theorizing.
A multidisciplinary examination of the role of military forts in the Caribbean during the age of European colonial expansion
A Fortified Sea illuminates the key role of military forts in the greater Caribbean during the long eighteenth century. The historical Caribbean, with its multiple contested boundaries at the periphery of European western expansion, typically has been analyzed as part of an empire. European powers, including Spain, the Netherlands, England, and Denmark, carved up the Caribbean Sea into a cultural patchwork. These varied cultural contexts were especially evident during regional and national conflicts throughout the eighteenth century and prompted the construction of more fortifications to protect imperial interests. The emergence of Anglo-American colonies during the eighteenth century and later the United States gradually altered previous geopolitical balances, redefining the cultural and geopolitical boundaries of the region.
This collection of essays incorporates several historiographical traditions—from Spanish to American—all portraying the borderland as a breakthrough contested cultural, social, economic, and military boundary. A multinational roster of contributors approaches topics through a war studies lens as well as architecturally and historically, enriching a usually monothematic view. As well, discussion of cultural management of the historical remains of forts shows local communities trying to preserve and interpret the role of forts in society.
Part I defines the training of military engineers in Spain. Part II engages with British defensive military plans and settlements in the Caribbean and shows how the British dealt with the rhetorical image of the empire. Part III clarifies the building processes of fortifications in Santiago de Cuba, Cartagena de Indias, Havana, and Veracruz, among other places. Copious period maps complement the prodigious research. The book will appeal to readers interested in the history of the Caribbean, military history, and European imperial expansion.
CONTRIBUTORS
Mónica Cejudo Collera / Pedro Cruz Freire / María Mercedes Fernández Martín / Aaron Graham / Manuel Gámez Casado / Francisco Javier Herrera García / Nuria Hinarejos Martín / Pedro Luengo / Ignacio J. López-Hernández / José Miguel Morales Folguera / Alfredo J. Morales / Juan Miguel Muñoz Corbalán / Jesús Maria Ruiz Carrasco / Germán Segura García / Gene Allen Smith / Christopher K. Waters
The beautiful Caribbean basin is fertile ground for a study of capitalism past and present. Transnational corporations move money and labor around the region, as national regulations are reworked to promote conditions benefiting private capital. Globalizing the Caribbean offers a probing account of the region’s experience of economic globalization while considering gendered and racialized social relations and the frequent exploitation of workers.
Jeb Sprague focuses on the social and material nature of this new era in the history of world capitalism. He combines an historical overview of capitalism in the region with theoretical analysis backed by case studies. Sprague elaborates upon the role of class formation and the restructuring of local states. He considers both U.S. hegemony, and how various upsurges from below and crises occur. He examines the globalization of the cruise ship and mining businesses, looks at the growth of migrant labor and reverse flow of remittances, and describes the evolving role of export processing and supranational associations. In doing so, Sprague shows how transnationally oriented elites have come to rule the Caribbean, and how capitalist globalization in the region occurs alongside shifting political, institutional, and organizational dynamics.
Historical Archaeologies of the Caribbean: Contextualizing Sites through Colonialism, Capitalism, and Globalism addresses issues in Caribbean history and historical archaeology such as freedom, frontiers, urbanism, postemancipation life, trade, plantation life, and new heritage. This collection moves beyond plantation archaeology by expanding the knowledge of the diverse Caribbean experiences from the late seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries.
The essays in this volume are grounded in strong research programs and data analysis that incorporate humanistic narratives in their discussions of Amerindian, freedmen, plantation, institutional, military, and urban sites. Sites include a sample of the many different types found across the Caribbean from a variety of colonial contexts that are seldom reported in archaeological research, yet constitute components essential to understanding the full range and depth of Caribbean history.
Contributors examine urban contexts in Nevis and St. John and explore the economic connections between Europeans and enslaved Africans in urban and plantation settings in St. Eustatius. The volume contains a pioneering study of frontier exchange with Amerindians in Dominica and a synthesis of ceramic exchange networks among enslaved Africans in the Leeward Islands. Chapters on military forts in Nevis and St. Kitts call attention to this often-neglected aspect of the Caribbean colonial landscape. Contributors also directly address culture heritage issues relating to community participation and interpretation. On St. Kitts, the legacy of forced confinement of lepers ties into debates of current public health policy. Plantation site studies from Antigua and Martinique are especially relevant because they detail comparisons of French and British patterns of African enslavement and provide insights into how each addressed the social and economic changes that occurred with emancipation.
Contributors
Todd M. Ahlman / Douglas V. Armstrong / Samantha Rebovich Bardoe / Paul Farnsworth / Jeffrey R. Ferguson / R. Grant Gilmore III / Diana González-Tennant / Edward González-Tennant / Barbara J. Heath / Carter L. Hudgins Kenneth G. Kelly / Eric Klingelhofer / Roger H. Leech / Stephan Lenik / Gerald F. Schroedl / Diane Wallman / Christian Williamson
In Horizon, Sea, Sound: Caribbean and African Women’s Cultural Critiques of Nation, Andrea Davis imagines new reciprocal relationships beyond the competitive forms of belonging suggested by the nation-state. The book employs the tropes of horizon, sea, and sound as a critique of nation-state discourses and formations, including multicultural citizenship, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and the hierarchical nuclear family.
Drawing on Tina Campt’s discussion of Black feminist futurity, Davis offers the concept future now, which is both central to Black freedom and a joint social justice project that rejects existing structures of white supremacy. Calling for new affiliations of community among Black, Indigenous, and other racialized women, and offering new reflections on the relationship between the Caribbean and Canada, she articulates a diaspora poetics that privileges our shared humanity. In advancing these claims, Davis turns to the expressive cultures (novels, poetry, theater, and music) of Caribbean and African women artists in Canada, including work by Dionne Brand, M. NourbeSe Philip, Esi Edugyan, Ramabai Espinet, Nalo Hopkinson, Amai Kuda, and Djanet Sears. Davis considers the ways in which the diasporic characters these artists create redraw the boundaries of their horizons, invoke the fluid histories of the Caribbean Sea to overcome the brutalization of plantation histories, use sound to enter and reenter archives, and shapeshift to survive in the face of conquest. The book will interest readers of literary and cultural studies, critical race theories, and Black diasporic studies.
This comprehensive study of the historical archaeology of the Caribbean provides sociopolitical context for the ongoing development of national identities.
Long before the founding of Jamestown in 1607, there were Spanish forts, bustling towns, sugar plantations, and sea trade flourishing in the Caribbean. While richer nations, particularly the United States, may view the Caribbean today as merely a place for sun and fun, the island colonies were at one time far more important and lucrative to their European empire countries than their North American counterparts. From the 15th to the 19th centuries, as competing colonial powers vied with each other for military and economic advantage in the Western Hemisphere, events in the Caribbean directly influenced the American mainland.
This is one rationale for the close study of historical archaeology in the Caribbean. Another is the growing recognition of how archaeological research can support the defining of national identities for the islands, many of them young independent states struggling to establish themselves economically and politically. By looking at cases in the French West Indies, specifically on Guadeloupe, in the Dutch Antilles and Aruba, in the British Bahamas, on Montserrat and St. Eustatius, on Barbados, and the within the U.S. Virgin Islands, the contributors to Island Lives have produced a broad overview of Caribbean historical archaeology.
Island Lives makes clear that historical archaeology in the Caribbean will continue to grow and diversify due to the interest Caribbean peoples have in recording, preserving, and promoting their culture and heritage; the value it adds to their "heritage tourism"; and the connection it has to African American history and archaeology. In addition, the contributors point to the future by suggesting different trajectories that historical archaeology and its practitioners may take in the Caribbean arena. In so doing, they elucidate the problems and issues faced worldwide by researchers working in colonial and post-colonial societies.
Paul Farnsworth is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Louisiana State University.
Numerous labor regulations that were introduced or reformed in Latin America in the past thirty years have had important economic consequences. Nobel Prize-winning economist James J. Heckman and Carmen Pagés document the behavior of firms attempting to stay in business and be competitive while facing the high costs of complying with these labor laws. They challenge the prevailing view that labor market regulations affect only the distribution of labor incomes and have little or no impact on efficiency or the performance of labor markets. Using new micro-evidence, this volume shows that labor regulations reduce labor market turnover rates and flexibility, promote inequality, and discriminate against marginal workers.
Along with in-depth studies of Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Jamaica, and Trinidad, Law and Employment provides comparative analysis of Latin American economies against a range of European countries and the United States. The book breaks new ground by quantifying not only the cost of regulation in Latin America, the Caribbean, and in the OECD, but also the broader impact of this regulation.
An ambitious reassessment of the political uses of masking.
Does the mask reveal more than it conceals? What, this book asks, becomes visible and invisible in the masking practiced in Caribbean cultures-not only in the familiar milieu of the carnival but in political language, social conduct, and cultural expressions that mimic, misrepresent, and mislead? Focusing on masking as a socially significant practice in Caribbean cultures, Gerard Aching’s analysis articulates masking, mimicry, and misrecognition as a means of describing and interrogating strategies of visibility and invisibility in Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, Martinique, and beyond.
Masking and Power uses ethnographic fieldwork, psychoanalysis, and close literary readings to examine encounters between cultural insiders as these locals mask themselves and one another either to counter the social invisibility imposed on them or to maintain their socioeconomic privileges. Aching exposes the ways in which strategies of masking and mimicry, once employed to negotiate subjectivities within colonial regimes, have been appropriated for state purposes and have become, with the arrival of self-government in the islands, the means by which certain privileged locals make a show of national and cultural unity even as they engage in the privatization of popular culture and its public performances.
The Latin American and Caribbean regions’ historical trajectories have been shaped by complex human-nonhuman interactions. In these histories, people are important, even crucial, actors, but not the only ones. Offering a novel approach to the writing of Latin American history, this book brings eight thought-provoking chapters together with a historiographical introduction and critical afterword to center nonhuman beings and things. The oscillating glare of the sun, the allure and resourcefulness of animals, the reluctant genetic malleability of plant seeds, and the life-giving and intractable impassivity of rivers are some of the other-than-human agents driving history in the volume’s chapters.
This book problematizes Latin American(ist) historiography’s tendency to frame “nature” as a separate ontological domain that is only acted upon—conquered, manipulated, devastated—lacking the self-propelled dynamics capable of shaping the course of events. With broad regional and temporal coverage across Latin America and the Caribbean from the pre-colonial period to the present day, More-than-Human Histories of Latin America and the Caribbean responds to environmental history’s call to write biophysical environments into the human past—a reconsideration of historical agency that, in this era of climate change, is more necessary than ever.
Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient
In Neither Hee Nor Any of His Companie Did Return Againe: Failed Colonies in the Caribbean and Latin America, 1492–1865, historians David MacDonald and Raine Waters examine the European, and later American, failures to establish permanent settlements in the region. Beginning with Columbus’s ill-conceived ventures, the authors discuss the efforts, from German claims in Venezuela and Scottish attempts in Panama to defeated Confederates fleeing to Mexico, Brazil, and elsewhere. For each colony, the primary source information is contextualized and evaluated. Along the way, the authors determine commonalities across these ill-fated colonies as well as underscore the fact that while Indigenous peoples of the region often vigorously resisted predatory European colonization, their numbers were decimated by relentless warfare, slave raids, and European diseases. As Indian populations declined, colonists imported African slaves in large numbers. The brutal treatment of slaves resulted in those who escaped creating their own settlements that existed in a state of endemic warfare with European colonists. An important contribution to Atlantic World studies, this volume reveals the fine line between colonies that thrived and those that failed.
Contributors. Donald Cosentino, Maarit Forde, Yanique Hume, Paul Christopher Johnson, Aisha Khan, Keith E. McNeal, George Mentore, Richard Price, Karen Richman, Ineke (Wilhelmina) van Wetering, Bonno (H.U.E.) Thoden van Velzen
Raising the Living Dead is a history of Puerto Rico’s carceral rehabilitation system that brings to life the interactions of incarcerated people, their wider social networks, and health care professionals. Alberto Ortiz Díaz describes the ways that multiple communities of care came together both inside and outside of prisons to imagine and enact solution-oriented cultures of rehabilitation from the 1930s to the 1960s. Scientific and humanistic approaches to well-being were deliberately fused to raise the “living dead,” an expression that reemerged in the modern Caribbean to refer to prisoners. These reform groups sought to raise incarcerated people physically, mentally, socially, spiritually, and civically.
The book is based on deep, original archival research into the Oso Blanco (White Bear) penitentiary in Puerto Rico, yet it situates its study within Puerto Rico’s broader carceral archipelago and other Caribbean prisons. The agents of this history include not only physical health professionals, but also psychologists and psychiatrists, social workers, spiritual and religious practitioners, and, of course, the prisoners and their families. By following all these groups and emphasizing the interpersonal exercise of power, Ortiz Díaz tells a story that goes beyond debates about structural and social control.
The book addresses key issues in the history of prisons and the histories of medicine and belief, including how prisoners’ different racial, class, and cultural identities shaped their incarceration and how professionals living in a colonial society dealt with the challenge of rehabilitating prisoners for citizenship.
Raising the Living Dead is not just about convicts, their immediate interlocutors, and their contexts, however, but about how together these open a window into the history of social uplift projects within the (neo)colonial societies of the Caribbean. There is no book like this in Caribbean historiography; few examine these themes in the larger literature on the history of prisons.
How is it that a great swath of the independent, English-speaking Caribbean continues to accept the judicial oversight of their former colonizer via the British institution of the Privy Council? And what possibilities might the Caribbean Court of Justice—a judicial institution responsive to the region, not to any single nation—offer for untangling sovereignty and regionhood, law and modernity, and postcolonial Caribbean identity?
Joining the Court as an intern, Lee Cabatingan studied its work up close: she attended each court hearing and numerous staff meetings, served on committees, assisted with the organization of conferences, and helped prepare speeches and presentations for the judges. She now offers insight into not only how the Court positions itself vis-à-vis the Caribbean region and the world but also whether the Court—and, perhaps, the region itself as an overarching construct—might ever achieve a real measure of popular success. In their quest for an accepting, eager constituency, the Court is undertaking a project of extrajudicial region building that borrows from the toolbox of the nation-state. In each chapter, Cabatingan takes us into an analytical dimension familiar from studies of nation and state building—myth, territory, people, language, and brand—to help us understand not only the Court and its ambitions but also the regionalist project, beset as it is with false starts and disappointments, as a potential alternative to the sovereign state.
Many of these stories are in some way lessons in resistance and survival in a world where “the toughest kid on the block,” often an outsider, demands that a group of children “play or pay,” on his terms. González demonstrates that where traditional strategies have proposed the model of the “trickster” or the “paradoxically astute fool,” to mock the pretensions of the would-be oppressor, new trends indicate that the region’s children—and those who write for them—show increasing interest in playing the game on their own terms, getting to know the Other, embracing difference, and redefining their identity and role within the new global culture.
Resistance and Survival emphasizes the hope underlying this contemporary children’s literature for a world in which all voices can be heard and valued—the hope of an authentic happy ending.
Sacred Possessions is an unprecedented collection of thirteen comparative and interdisciplinary essays exploring the cross-cultural dynamics of African-based religious systems in the Caribbean. The contributors analyze the nature and liturgies of Vodou, Santeria, Obeah, Quimbois, and Gaga as they form one central cultural matrix in the region. They ask how these belief systems were affected by differing colonial histories and landscapes, and how they affected other cultural expressions (from the oral tradition to popular art and literature), and how they have been perceived and (mis)represented by the West.
The book is a unique contribution to the study of the Caribbean as a site of multiculturalism, demonstrating the linkages between anthropology, religion, literature, and popular culture. Also included are a stunning photoessay on Cuban Santeria, a glossary of terms, and an insightful introduction by the editors.
Sacred Possessions is an unprecedented collection of thirteen comparative and interdisciplinary essays exploring the cross-cultural dynamics of African-based religious systems in the Caribbean. The contributors analyze the nature and liturgies of Vodou, Santeria, Obeah, Quimbois, and Gaga as they form one central cultural matrix in the region. They ask how these belief systems were affected by differing colonial histories and landscapes, and how they affected other cultural expressions (from the oral tradition to popular art and literature), and how they have been perceived and (mis)represented by the West.
The book is a unique contribution to the study of the Caribbean as a site of multiculturalism, demonstrating the linkages between anthropology, religion, literature, and popular culture. Also included are a stunning photoessay on Cuban Santeria, a glossary of terms, and an insightful introduction by the editors.
Salt, once a highly prized trade commodity essential for human survival, is often overlooked in research because it is invisible in the archaeological record. Salt in Eastern North America and the Caribbean: History and Archaeology brings salt back into archaeology, showing that it was valued as a dietary additive, had curative powers, and was a substance of political power and religious significance for Native Americans. Major salines were embedded in collective memories and oral traditions for thousands of years as places where physical and spiritual needs could be met. Ethnohistoric documents for many Indian cultures describe the uses of and taboos and other beliefs about salt.
The volume is organized into two parts: Salt Histories and Salt in Society. Case studies from prehistory to post-Contact and from New York to Jamaica address what techniques were used to make salt, who was responsible for producing it, how it was used, the impact it had on settlement patterns and sociopolitical complexity, and how economies of salt changed after European contact. Noted salt archaeologist Heather McKillop provides commentary to conclude the volume.
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Despite declining stocks worldwide and increasing health risks, artisanal whaling remains a cultural practice tied to nature’s rhythms. The Wake of the Whale presents the art, history, and challenge of whaling in the Caribbean and North Atlantic, based on a decade of award-winning fieldwork.
Sightings of pilot whales in the frigid Nordic waters have drawn residents of the Faroe Islands to their boats and beaches for nearly a thousand years. Down in the tropics, around the islands of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, artisanal whaling is a younger trade, shaped by the legacies of slavery and colonialism but no less important to the local population. Each culture, Russell Fielding shows, has developed a distinct approach to whaling that preserves key traditions while adapting to threats of scarcity, the requirements of regulation, and a growing awareness of the humane treatment of animals.
Yet these strategies struggle to account for the risks of regularly eating meat contaminated with methylmercury and other environmental pollutants introduced from abroad. Fielding considers how these and other factors may change whaling cultures forever, perhaps even bringing an end to this way of life.
A rare mix of scientific and social insight, The Wake of the Whale raises compelling questions about the place of cultural traditions in the contemporary world and the sacrifices we must make for sustainability.
Publication of this book was supported, in part, by a grant from Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.
Written by a top scholar on social security in Latin America and the Caribbean, this book assesses the effects of the world economic crisis on social security and welfare in the region. Drawing on the impact of and lessons from previous crises, Carmelo Mesa-Lago identifies the strengths and weakness of Latin American social security before the current global crisis. He evaluates the event's actual and potential effects on pensions, health care, and social assistance programs, based on a taxonomy of three groups of countries.
The book ends with a summary of policies adopted by some countries and the author's own recommendations on social policies to lessen the adverse outcomes of the financial crisis. Latin America's pioneering social-welfare reforms make this book important for other regions of the world, both developed and developing.
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