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Beautiful Cosmos
Performance and Belonging in the Caribbean Diaspora
Tina K. Ramnarine
Pluto Press, 2007
What are the musical sounds that people remember in the diaspora? What are the sounds they create? Recognizing the importance that people attach to musical performances, this book explores the significance of widespread Caribbean genres in diaspora politics. Ramnarine uses ethnographic approaches to unravel creative processes of memory, innovation and production and to interrogate geographies of musical canons, hybridity discourses and culture theory. She challenges us to rethink diaspora as only being about displacement, to move beyond the limits of marginalization and otherness, and to imagine the possibilities of "beautiful cosmos". Asking "where is home in the diaspora?" this book presents radical perspectives in the study of diaspora.
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Caribbean Migration to Western Europe and the United States
Essays on Incorporation, Identity, and Citizenship
edited by Margarita Cervantes-Rodriguez, Ramon Grosfoguel and Eric Mielants
Temple University Press, 2009

Caribbean Migration to Western Europe and the United States features a diverse group of scholars from across academic disciplines studying the transnational paths of Caribbean migration. How has the colonial path of the Caribbean influenced migration with regard to power relations, ethnic identities and transnational processes?

Through a series of case studies, the contributors to this volume examine the experiences of Caribbean immigrants to Spain, France, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands as well as the United States. They show the demographic, socioeconomic, political and cultural impact migrants have, as well as their role in the development of transnational social fields. Caribbean Migration to Western Europe and the United States also examines how contrasting discourses of democracy and racism, xenophobia and globalization shape issues pertaining to citizenship and identity.

Contributors: Elizabeth Aranda, Mary Chamberlain, Michel Giraud, Lisa Maya Knauer, John R. Logan, Monique Milia-Marie-Luce, Laura Oso Casas, Livio Sansone, Nina Glick Schiller,Charles (Wenquan) Zhang and the editors.

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Caribbean Migrations
The Legacies of Colonialism
Anke Birkenmaier
Rutgers University Press, 2021
2021 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

With mass migration changing the configuration of societies worldwide, we can look to the Caribbean to reflect on the long-standing, entangled relations between countries and areas as uneven in size and influence as the United States, Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica. More so than other world regions, the Caribbean has been characterized as an always already colonial region. It has long been a key area for empires warring over influence spheres in the new world, and where migration waves from Africa, Europe, and Asia accompanied every political transformation over the last five centuries. In Caribbean Migrations, an interdisciplinary group of humanities and social science scholars study migration from a long-term perspective, analyzing the Caribbean's "unincorporated subjects" from a legal, historical, and cultural standpoint, and exploring how despite often fractured public spheres, Caribbean intellectuals, artists, filmmakers, and writers have been resourceful at showcasing migration as the hallmark of our modern age.
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Caribbean Transnational Experience
Harry Goulbourne
Pluto Press, 2002
Caribbean Transnational Experience examines today's vibrant and creative trans-Atlantic Caribbean community. Harry Goulbourne advances three central arguments: first, the concepts of Diaspora and of Caribbean Diaspora are problematic; second, the African Diaspora and its variant Caribbean Diaspora are integral parts of the wider Atlantic world making it disingenuous to speak of the West and the rest where Caribbeans in the Atlantic are concerned. Third, Goulbourne insists that meaningful discussions about these aspects of the modern world must be empirically validated while being theoretically informed.

Unlike much cultural and literary studies, Caribbean Transnational Experience makes a plea for verifiable evidence to inform academic and popular discussions about the exciting experiences of Caribbeans across the Atlantic. Chapters explore questions of definition and theory, the common Atlantic heritage and fate, social and economic contexts of Caribbean transnationality, Africa, the USA and the Caribbean in popular discourses in Britain, transnationality of families and the propensity for Caribbean-born and their offspring to return to the Caribbean from the mother country. Caribbean Transnational Experience concludes with a speculative discussion about possible future directions of what is increasingly being described as the Caribbean Diaspora.
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Decolonizing the Republic
African and Caribbean Migrants in Postwar Paris, 1946–1974
Félix F. Germain
Michigan State University Press, 2016
Decolonizing the Republic is a conscientious discussion of the African diaspora in Paris in the post–World War II period. This book is the first to examine the intersection of black activism and the migration of Caribbeans and Africans to Paris during this era and, as Patrick Manning notes in the foreword, successfully shows how “black Parisians—in their daily labors, weekend celebrations, and periodic protests—opened the way to ‘decolonizing the Republic,’ advancing the respect for their rights as citizens.” Contrasted to earlier works focusing on the black intellectual elite, Decolonizing the Republic maps the formation of a working-class black France. Readers will better comprehend how those peoples of African descent who settled in France and fought to improve their socioeconomic conditions changed the French perception of Caribbean and African identity, laying the foundation for contemporary black activists to deploy a new politics of social inclusion across the demographics of race, class, gender, and nationality. This book complicates conventional understandings of decolonization, and in doing so opens a new and much-needed chapter in the history of the black Atlantic.
 
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The Emigrants
George Lamming
University of Michigan Press, 1994
The Emigrants is an elaborately conceived novel, dense with dynamic characters and evocative details. First published in 1954, it focuses initially on the emigrant journey, then on the settling-in process. The journey by sea and subsequent attempts at resettlement provide the fictional framework for Lamming's exploration of the alienation and displacement caused by colonialism.

This is the epic journey of a group of West Indians who emigrate to Great Britain in the 1950s in search of educational opportunities unattainable at home. Seeking to redefine themselves in the "mother country," an idealized landscape that they have been taught to revere, the emigrants settle uncomfortably in England's industrial cities. Within two years, ghettoization is firmly in place. The emigrants discover the meaning of their marginality in the British Empire in an environment that is unexpectedly hostile and strange. For some, alienation prompts a new sense of community, a new sense of identity as West Indians. For others, alienation leads to a crisis of confrontation with the law and fugitive status.

There is a wealth of information here about the genesis of the black British community and about the cultural differences between the black British and West Indian/Caribbean.
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Immigration and the Remaking of Black America
Tod G. Hamilton
Russell Sage Foundation, 2019
Winner of the 2020 Otis Dudley Duncan Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Social Demography
Honorable Mention for the 2020 Thomas and Znaniecki Award from the International Migration Section of the American Sociological Association​​​​​​​


Over the last four decades, immigration from the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa to the U. S. has increased rapidly. In several states, African immigrants are now major drivers of growth in the black population. While social scientists and commentators have noted that these black immigrants’ social and economic outcomes often differ from those of their native-born counterparts, few studies have carefully analyzed the mechanisms that produce these disparities. In Immigration and the Remaking of Black America, sociologist and demographer Tod Hamilton shows how immigration is reshaping black America. He weaves together interdisciplinary scholarship with new data to enhance our understanding of the causes of socioeconomic stratification among both the native-born and newcomers.
 
Hamilton demonstrates that immigration from the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa is driven by selective migration, meaning that newcomers from these countries tend to have higher educational attainment than those who stay behind. As a result, they arrive in the U.S. with some advantages over native-born blacks, and, in some cases, over whites. He also shows the importance of historical context: prior to the Civil Rights Movement, black immigrants’ socioeconomic outcomes resembled native-born blacks’ much more closely, regardless of their educational attainment in their country of origin. Today, however, certain groups of black immigrants have better outcomes than native-born black Americans—such as lower unemployment rates and higher rates of homeownership—in part because they immigrated at a time of expanding opportunities for minorities and women in general. Hamilton further finds that rates of marriage and labor force participation among native-born blacks that move away from their birth states resemble those of many black immigrants, suggesting that some disparities within the black population stem from processes associated with migration, rather than from nativity alone.
 
Hamilton argues that failing to account for this diversity among the black population can lead to incorrect estimates of the social progress made by black Americans and the persistence of racism and discrimination. He calls for future research on racial inequality to disaggregate different black populations. By richly detailing the changing nature of black America, Immigration and the Remaking of Black America helps scholars and policymakers to better understand the complexity of racial disparities in the twenty-first century.
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Left of Karl Marx
The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones
Carole Boyce Davies
Duke University Press, 2007
In Left of Karl Marx, Carole Boyce Davies assesses the activism, writing, and legacy of Claudia Jones (1915–1964), a pioneering Afro-Caribbean radical intellectual, dedicated communist, and feminist. Jones is buried in London’s Highgate Cemetery, to the left of Karl Marx—a location that Boyce Davies finds fitting given how Jones expanded Marxism-Leninism to incorporate gender and race in her political critique and activism.

Claudia Cumberbatch Jones was born in Trinidad. In 1924, she moved to New York, where she lived for the next thirty years. She was active in the Communist Party from her early twenties onward. A talented writer and speaker, she traveled throughout the United States lecturing and organizing. In the early 1950s, she wrote a well-known column, “Half the World,” for the Daily Worker. As the U.S. government intensified its efforts to prosecute communists, Jones was arrested several times. She served nearly a year in a U.S. prison before being deported and given asylum by Great Britain in 1955. There she founded The West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News and the Caribbean Carnival, an annual London festival that continues today as the Notting Hill Carnival. Boyce Davies examines Jones’s thought and journalism, her political and community organizing, and poetry that the activist wrote while she was imprisoned. Looking at the contents of the FBI file on Jones, Boyce Davies contrasts Jones’s own narration of her life with the federal government’s. Left of Karl Marx establishes Jones as a significant figure within Caribbean intellectual traditions, black U.S. feminism, and the history of communism.

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A Motorcycle on Hell Run
Tanzania, Black Power, and the Uncertain Future of Pan-Africanism, 1964–1974
Seth M. Markle
Michigan State University Press, 2017
Between 1964 and 1974 Tanzania came to be regarded as a model nation and a leading frontline state in the struggle for African liberation on the continent and beyond. During this time, a number of African American and Caribbean nationalists, leftists, and pan-Africanists traveled to and settled in Tanzania to join the country that many believed to be leading Africa’s liberation struggle. This historical study examines the political landscape of that crucial moment when African American, Caribbean, and Tanzanian histories overlapped, shedding light on the challenges of creating a new nation and the nature of African American and Caribbean participation in Tanzania’s nationalist project. In examining the pragmatic partnerships and exchanges between socialist Tanzania and activists and organizations associated with the Black Power movements in the United States and the Caribbean, this study argues that the Tanzanian one-party government actively engaged with the diaspora and sought to utilize its political, cultural, labor, and intellectual capital to further its national building agenda, but on its own terms, creating tension within the pan-Africanism movement. An excellent resource for academics and nonacademics alike, this work is the first of its kind, revealing the significance of the radical political and social movements of Tanzania and what it means for us today.
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Passage To England
Barbadian Londoners Speak of Home
John Western
University of Minnesota Press, 1992

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Reimaging Britain
500 Years of Black and Asian History
Ron Ramdin
Pluto Press, 1999


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