Showing 1-20 of 36 items.

The Things That Fly in the Night

Female Vampires in Literature of the Circum-Caribbean and African Diaspora

Rutgers University Press

The Things That Fly in the Night explores images of vampirism in Caribbean and African diasporic folk traditions and in contemporary fiction. Giselle Anatol considers the explosion of soucouyant and other vampire narratives among writers of Caribbean and African heritage who in the past twenty years have rejected the demonic image of the character and used her instead to urge for female mobility, racial and cultural empowerment, and anti colonial resistance.

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Our Caribbean Kin

Race and Nation in the Neoliberal Antilles

Rutgers University Press

Our Caribbean Kin explores the extent to which Dominicans, Haitians, and Puerto Ricans have imagined one another as part of the same big family, rallying against the forces of European colonialism, US imperialism, and neoliberalism. Drawing from a vast archive of texts, ranging from nineteenth-century political tracts to twenty-first-century online forums, Alaí Reyes-Santos considers both the benefits and the limits of these kinship tropes, uncovering the conflicts and internal hierarchies among Antilleans, while also discovering how they have created cohesion across differences.  
 

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The Dominican Racial Imaginary

Surveying the Landscape of Race and Nation in Hispaniola

Rutgers University Press

This book begins with a simple question: why do so many Dominicans deny the African components of their DNA, culture, and history? By poring through rare historical documents and conducting extensive interviews, Milagros Ricourt uncovers a complex and often contradictory Dominican racial imaginary. Finding that the country’s social elite has long propagated a national creation myth that revolves around the union of native islanders and Spanish settlers, she also explores how many Dominicans subvert this official narrative and celebrate their African heritage. 

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Sovereign Acts

Performing Race, Space, and Belonging in Panama and the Canal Zone

Rutgers University Press

Sovereign Acts explores how artists, activists, and audiences performed and interpreted sovereignty struggles in the Panama Canal Zone over the last century. By demonstrating the place of performance in the legal landscape of U.S. Empire, Zien transforms our understanding of U.S. imperialism in the Panama Canal Zone and the Caribbean.  

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Thieving Three-Fingered Jack

Transatlantic Tales of a Jamaican Outlaw, 1780-2015

Rutgers University Press

Botkin has compiled and analyzed plays, novels, and folklore about Three-Fingered Jack in order to show how the story of this hero-villain has evolved as it traveled from the Caribbean to England and the United States, returning to Jamaica as a tale of heroic resistance.

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Becoming Creole

Nature and Race in Belize

Rutgers University Press

Taking the reader into the lived experience of Afro-Caribbean people who call the watery lowlands of Belize home, Melissa A. Johnson traces Belizean Creole peoples’ relationships with the plants, animals, water, and soils around them, and analyzes how these relationships intersect with transnational racial assemblages. 

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Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art

Space, Politics, and the Public Sphere

Rutgers University Press

Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art offers an innovative and systematic analysis of contemporary Caribbean art practices in the Francophone, Anglophone, and Hispanic Caribbean. Focusing on a broad range of artistic projects, the book assesses the potential of visual creativity to outline a unique approach to Caribbean visual practices based on individual and collective agency. 

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Phonographic Memories

Popular Music and the Contemporary Caribbean Novel

Rutgers University Press

Phonographic Memories is the first book-length analysis of Caribbean popular music in the Caribbean novel. Tracing a region-wide poetics that attends to the centrality of Caribbean music in retrieving and replaying personal and cultural memories, Hamilton offers a fresh perspective on musical nationalism and nostalgic memory in the era of globalization.

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In Plenty and in Time of Need

Popular Culture and the Remapping of Barbadian Identity

Rutgers University Press

In Plenty and in Time of Need uses music and performance as sites of analysis for the competing ideals and realities of Barbadian national culture. The book demonstrates complex relations between national, gendered, and sexual identities in Barbados, and how these identities are represented and interpreted on a global stage.
 

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Far from Mecca

Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean

Rutgers University Press

Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean is the first academic book on the fiction, poetry, and music of Islam and Muslims in the English-speaking Caribbean. Khan focuses on Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica to argue for a regional continuity of Afro- and Indo-Muslim historical and cultural presence.
 

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Race and Nation in Puerto Rican Folklore

Franz Boas and John Alden Mason in Porto Rico

Rutgers University Press

This book highlights Franz Boas’s historic trip to Puerto Rico in 1915, which included the documentation of oral folklore. On that trip, a rising anthropologist involved in the project, John Alden Mason, collected one of the largest oral folklore collections from any Spanish-speaking country or territory. The stories, many of them written by rural cultural informants, the Jibaros, offer an outstanding view of an early twentieth century Puerto Rican identity. 

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Caribbean Migrations

The Legacies of Colonialism

Rutgers University Press

The Caribbean has long been a key area for empires warring over influence spheres, and where migration waves from Africa, Europe, and Asia accompanied every political transformation. In this volume, an interdisciplinary group of scholars studies the Caribbean’s “unincorporated subjects”, and explores how against all odds, Caribbean artists, filmmakers, and writers have been resourceful at showcasing migration as the hallmark of our modern age.
 

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Streetwalking

LGBTQ Lives and Protest in the Dominican Republic

Rutgers University Press

In Streetwalking: LGBTQ Lives and Protest in the Dominican Republic, Lara draws on ethnographic encounters, interviews, films, and videos to discuss the specific strategies employed by LGBTQ community leaders in the Dominican Republic in the exercise of streetwalker subjectivities as those who actively transform silence - verbal, bodily, spiritual - into power.

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A Contested Caribbean Indigeneity

Language, Social Practice, and Identity within Puerto Rican Taíno Activism

Rutgers University Press

This book is an in-depth analysis of the debates surrounding Taíno/Boricua activism in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean diaspora in New York City. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic research, media analysis, and historical documents, the book explores the varied experiences and motivations of Taíno/Boricua activists claiming what is commonly thought to be an extinct ethnic category.
 

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The Struggle of Non-Sovereign Caribbean Territories

Neoliberalism since the French Antillean Uprisings of 2009

Rutgers University Press

This essay collection examines the social upheaval that shook Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, and Réunion in February and March of 2009, and the ways in which capital accumulation and centralization instantiated hierarchies of profit, capital accumulation, and economic exploitation in the wider non-sovereign Caribbean from Haiti to the Dutch Antilles to Puerto Rico.
 

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The Guise of Exceptionalism

Unmasking the National Narratives of Haiti and the United States

Rutgers University Press

The Guise of Exceptionalism compares the historical origins of Haitian and American exceptionalisms. It also traces how exceptionalism as a narrative of uniqueness has shaped relations between the two countries, from their early days of independence through the contemporary period. As a social invention, it changes over time, but always within the parameters of its original principles.
 

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Folk Stories from the Hills of Puerto Rico / Cuentos folklóricos de las montañas de Puerto Rico

Edited by Rafael Ocasio
Rutgers University Press

This exciting new bilingual anthology gathers Puerto Rican folktales that were passed down orally for generations before being transcribed beginning in 1914 by the team of famous anthropologist Franz Boas. It includes stories about historical figures like pirate Roberto Cofresí, unique twists on “Snow White” and “Cinderella,” and beloved local characters like the kind cockroach Cucarachita Martina.
 

Esta nueva y emocionante antología bilingüe reúne cuentos populares puertorriqueños que se transmitieron oralmente durante generaciones antes de ser transcritos comenzando en 1914 por el equipo del famoso antropólogo Franz Boas. La colección incluye historias sobre personajes históricos como el pirata Roberto Cofresí, versiones criollas de “Blanca Nieves” y “Cenicienta” y otros queridos personajes locales como la amable cucaracha Cucarachita Martina.
 

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Dreams of Archives Unfolded

Absence and Caribbean Life Writing

Rutgers University Press

Dreams of Archives Unfolded: Absence and Caribbean Life Writing makes a significant contribution to studies of Caribbean literature by demonstrating that women’s autobiographical narratives published in the past twenty years are feminist epistemological projects that rework Caribbean studies’ longstanding commitment to creating counter-archives.

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Haiti Fights Back

The Life and Legacy of Charlemagne Péralte

Rutgers University Press

Haiti Fights Back: The Life and Legacy of Charlemagne Péralte is the first US study of the politician and caco leader (guerrilla fighter) who fought against the US occupation of Haiti from 1915-1934. Alexis locates rare multilingual sources from both nations and documents Péralte’s political movement and citizens’ protests. The interdisciplinary work offers a new approach to studies of the US invasion period by documenting how Caribbean people fought back.

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Writing the Caribbean in Magazine Time

Rutgers University Press

This book demonstrates the material, political, and aesthetic dimensions of Pan-Caribbean literary discourse in magazine texts by Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, Nicolás Guillén, José Lezama Lima, Alejo Carpentier, George Lamming, Derek Walcott and their contemporaries. Thus far, the canonical centrality of literary magazines to Caribbean literature, politics, and social theory has been obscured. Up against the global book industry, Caribbean literary magazines have waged a guerrilla pursuit for the terms of Caribbean representation.

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