Showing 1-36 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.
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.
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 By poring through rare historical documents and conducting extensive interviews, Milagros Ricourt uncovers a complex and often contradictory Dominican racial imaginary.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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Far from Mecca
Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean
By Aliyah Khan
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Struggle of Non-Sovereign Caribbean Territories
Neoliberalism since the French Antillean Uprisings of 2009
Edited by H. Adlai Murdoch
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Creolized Sexualities
Undoing Heteronormativity in the Literary Imagination of the Anglo-Caribbean
Rutgers University Press
By showing how a wide, and surprising, range of Caribbean writers have contributed to the crafting of a supple and inclusive erotic repertoire across the second half of the twentieth century, the readings in this book aim to demonstrate that a recognition of creolized and pluralized sexualities already exists within the literary imagination.
Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships
Housing, Memory, and Daily Life in Haiti
By Vincent Joos
Rutgers University Press
Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships explores the failed international reconstruction of Port-au-Prince after the devastating 2010 earthquake. It describes how, in the meantime, people from various backgrounds use, transform, and create vibrant urban spaces and economies that enable them to rebuild their lives. By exploring how the state, international organizations, and everyday people transform the environment,the book reflects on the possibilities of dwelling in post-disaster landscapes.
Erotic Cartographies
Decolonization and the Queer Caribbean Imagination
Rutgers University Press
Erotic Cartographies uses maps drawn by Trinidadian same-sex-loving women to demonstrate how their gender performance, erotic autonomy, and space-making practices contest their invisibility and exclusion from discourses of belonging, and challenge colonial discourses and practices related to gender, knowledge, and power in Trinidadian society.
Equaliberty in the Dutch Caribbean
Ways of Being Non/Sovereign
Edited by Yvon van der Pijl and Francio Guadeloupe; Foreword by Linden F. Lewis; Epilogue by Anton Allahar
Rutgers University Press
Equaliberty in the Dutch Caribbean explores fundamental questions of equality and freedom on the various non-sovereign islands of the Dutch Caribbean. While this collection of essays recognizes the existence of nationalist independence movements, it challenges conventional assumptions about political non/sovereignty, opening a critical space to look at other forms of political articulation, autonomy, liberty, and a good life.
Equaliberty in the Dutch Caribbean
Ways of Being Non/Sovereign
Edited by Yvon van der Pijl and Francio Guadeloupe; Foreword by Linden F. Lewis; Epilogue by Anton Allahar
Rutgers University Press
Equaliberty in the Dutch Caribbean explores fundamental questions of equality and freedom on the various non-sovereign islands of the Dutch Caribbean. While this collection of essays recognizes the existence of nationalist independence movements, it challenges conventional assumptions about political non/sovereignty, opening a critical space to look at other forms of political articulation, autonomy, liberty, and a good life.
Buyers Beware
Insurgency and Consumption in Caribbean Popular Culture
Rutgers University Press
Buyers Beware treats Caribbean pop cultural texts with the same critical attention as dominant mass cultural representations of the region to read them against the grain and consider how, and whether, their “pulp” preoccupation with contemporary fashion, music, sex, fast food, and television, is instructive for how race, class, gender, sexuality, and national politics are disseminated and consumed within the Caribbean.
Contradictory Indianness
Indenture, Creolization, and Literary Imaginary
Rutgers University Press
As Contradictory Indianness endeavors to show, a postcolonial Caribbean aesthetics that has from its inception privileged inclusivity, interraciality, and resistance against Old World colonial orders requires taking into account Indo-Caribbean writers and their reimagining of Indianness in the region. This book’s unique contribution lies in an explicit privileging of Indo-Caribbean fiction as a creolizing literary imaginary to broaden its study beyond a narrow canon that has, inadvertently or not, enabled monolithic and unidimensional perceptions of Indian cultural identity and evolution in the Caribbean.
Defiant Bodies
Making Queer Community in the Anglophone Caribbean
Rutgers University Press
Defiant Bodies: Making Queer Community in the Anglophone extends the discourse on Caribbean sexuality, queerness, and trans experiences by focusing on several moments of community-making across the Anglophone Caribbean -- Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago -- including legal challenges against Caribbean laws, drag pageantry, kinship formations, and a co-opting of mainstream urban nightclubs and bars. These offer readers new ways to understand the creative and complicated ways that queer Caribbean people are responding to the dominant sexual politics in the region. They also reveal how queer people are envisioning transgressive ways of existing despite the various forms of violence that they face.
The Cyborg Caribbean
Techno-Dominance in Twenty-First-Century Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican Science Fiction
Rutgers University Press
The Cyborg Caribbean examines twenty-first-century Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican science fiction, showing how it negotiates legacies of techno-colonialism and techno-authoritarianism. It traces histories of four different technologies—electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), nuclear weapons, space exploration, and digital avatars—that have transformed corporality and humanity in the Caribbean.
Forbes Burnham
The Life and Times of the Comrade Leader
Rutgers University Press
As Premier of British Guiana, Forbes Burnham led the country to independence in 1966 and spent two decades as its head of state. This biography examines how he rose to power by combining nationalist rhetoric, socialist policies, and Pan-Africanist philosophies, leading to a rule that was frequently dictatorial and corrupt, yet also sometimes surprisingly progressive.
Culinary Colonialism, Caribbean Cookbooks, and Recipes for National Independence
Rutgers University Press
Culinary Colonialism is the first book-length analysis of Caribbean cookbooks, tracing the multitude of ways they represent national identity, creolization, and working-class women’s food culture. Including full recipes from Cuban, Puerto Rican, Jamaican, Barbadian, Haitian, Dominican, and Antillean cookbooks, this groundbreaking work of scholarship doubles as a delicious cookbook.
Get Involved!
Stories of Bahamian Civil Society
Rutgers University Press
Using the Caribbean as a rich site of observance and concentrating on the island nation-state of The Bahamas, Get Involved! uncovers the hidden and under-documented practices of “philanthropy from below.” Williams-Pulfer shows the long history and continued significance of civil society and philanthropic engagement in The Bahamas, the circum-Caribbean, and the wider African Diaspora.
An Ordinary Landscape of Violence
Women Loving Women in Guyana
Rutgers University Press
An Ordinary Landscape of Violence focuses on the intertwining layers of violence experienced by women loving women in Guyana. This book offers readers insights into the complicated ways that violence as an affect is enacted, experienced, and used by several constituencies in the country, including women loving women in the forms of self-harm and intimate partner violence against their partners. It illustrates how women respond to violence in the Guyana and calls for a politics of collective healing.
Inside Tenement Time
Suss, Spirit, and Surveillance
By Kezia Page
Rutgers University Press
Inside Tenement Time is a study of Jamaican literary and cultural texts presenting surveillance in the Caribbean. The project introduces two Afro-Indigenous variations on surveillance--sussveillance and spiritveillance--as exemplars of vernacular arts and shows that Caribbean hegemonies are flexible. The book reads the Smile Jamaica concert (1976) and the Tivoli Incursion (2010) as states of high surveillance emergency.
Caribbean Inhospitality
The Poetics of Strangers at Home
Rutgers University Press
Caribbean Inhospitality juxtaposes the Caribbean’s reputation for being hospitable to foreigners with the alienation of the Caribbean citizen-subject from nations they call home. Reading literary, cinematic, and digital texts, Natalie Lauren Belisle demonstrates that the inhospitality is institutionalized through the aesthetic, reproducing itself in the laws that condition belonging and membership in the Caribbean nation/state.
Reclaiming Haiti's Futures
Returned Intellectuals, Placemaking, and Radical Imagination
Rutgers University Press
Reclaiming Haiti’s Futures traces the experiences of two generations of Haitian returned scholars who envisioned and sought to enact new worlds after crisis. An ethnography of the future, the book pursues concerns of home, belonging, and emplacement beyond coloniality’s fractures and displacements. These concerns ever more pressing amid overlapping crises that are displacing and enclosing the prospects of many, especially those living in post-colonial (outer) peripheries like Haiti.
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