Lillian Guerra, "Patriots and Traitors in Revolutionary Cuba, 1961-1981" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2023)
New Books in Caribbean Studies
by Marshall Poe
4d ago
Authorities in postrevolutionary Cuba worked to establish a binary society in which citizens were either patriots or traitors. This all-or-nothing approach reflected in the familiar slogan “patria o muerte” (fatherland or death) has recently been challenged in protests that have adopted the theme song “patria y vida” (fatherland and life), a collaboration by exiles that, predictably, has been banned in Cuba itself.  In Patriots & Traitors in Revolutionary Cuba, 1961-1981 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023) Lillian Guerra excavates the rise of a Soviet-advised Communi ..read more
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Imani D. Owens, "Turn the World Upside Down: Empire and Unruly Forms of Black Folk Culture in the U.S. and Caribbean" (Columbia UP, 2023)
New Books in Caribbean Studies
by Marshall Poe
1M ago
In the first half of the twentieth century, Black hemispheric culture grappled with the legacies of colonialism, U.S. empire, and Jim Crow. As writers and performers sought to convey the terror and the beauty of Black life under oppressive conditions, they increasingly turned to the labor, movement, speech, sound, and ritual of everyday “folk.” Many critics have perceived these representations of folk culture as efforts to reclaim an authentic past. Imani D. Owens recasts Black creators’ relationship to folk culture, emphasizing their formal and stylistic innovations and experiments in self-in ..read more
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Mirelsie Velazquez, "Puerto Rican Chicago: Schooling the City, 1940-1977" (U Illinois Press, 2022)
New Books in Caribbean Studies
by Marshall Poe
1M ago
The postwar migration of Puerto Rican men and women to Chicago brought thousands of their children into city schools. These children's classroom experience continued the colonial project begun in their homeland, where American ideologies had dominated Puerto Rican education since the island became a US territory. Mirelsie Velázquez tells how Chicago's Puerto Ricans pursued their educational needs in a society that constantly reminded them of their status as second-class citizens. Communities organized a media culture that addressed their concerns while creating and affirming Puerto Rican ident ..read more
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Pablo Alonso González, "Cuban Cultural Heritage: A Rebel Past for a Revolutionary Nation" (UP of Florida, 2018)
New Books in Caribbean Studies
by Marshall Poe
1M ago
Cuban Cultural Heritage: A Rebel Past for a Revolutionary Nation (UP of Florida, 2018) explores the role that cultural heritage and museums played in the construction of a national identity in postcolonial Cuba. Starting with independence from Spain in 1898 and moving through Cuban-American rapprochement in 2014, Pablo Alonso González illustrates how political and ideological shifts have influenced ideas about heritage and how, in turn, heritage has been used by different social actors to reiterate their status, spread new ideologies, and consolidate political regimes. Unveiling the conne ..read more
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The Culture Trap, with Sociologist Derron Wallace (EF, JP)
New Books in Caribbean Studies
by Marshall Poe
1M ago
In this episode, Elizabeth and John talk with Derron Wallace, sociologist of education and Brandeis colleague, about his new book The Culture Trap, which explores "ethnic expectations" for Caribbean schoolchildren in New York and London. His work starts with the basic puzzle that while black Caribbean schoolchildren in New York are often considered as "high-achieving," in London, they have been, conversely thought to be "chronically underachieving." Yet in each case the main cause -- of high achievement in New York and low achievement in London -- is said to be cultural. We discuss t ..read more
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Nicholas Radburn, "Traders in Men: Merchants and the Transformation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade" (Yale UP, 2023)
New Books in Caribbean Studies
by Marshall Poe
2M ago
During the eighteenth century, Britain’s slave trade exploded in size. Formerly a small and geographically constricted business, the trade had, by the eve of the American Revolution, grown into an Atlantic-wide system through which fifty thousand men, women, and children were enslaved every year. In Traders in Men: Merchants and the Transformation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Yale UP, 2023), Nicholas Radburn explains how thousands of slaving merchants in Africa, Britain, and the British Americas collectively created this cancerous system by devising highly efficient, but also vi ..read more
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Chelsea Schields, "Offshore Attachments: Oil and Intimacy in the Caribbean" (U California Press, 2023)
New Books in Caribbean Studies
by Marshall Poe
2M ago
Chelsea Schields's book Offshore Attachments: Oil and Intimacy in the Caribbean (U California Press, 2023) reveals how the contested management of sex and race transformed the Caribbean into a crucial site in the global oil economy. By the mid-twentieth century, the Dutch islands of Curaçao and Aruba housed the world's largest oil refineries. To bolster this massive industrial experiment, oil corporations and political authorities offshored intimacy, circumventing laws regulating sex, reproduction, and the family in a bid to maximize profits and turn Caribbean subjects into citizens.  ..read more
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Gustav Cederlof, "The Low-Carbon Contradiction: Energy Transition, Geopolitics, and the Infrastructural State in Cuba" (U California Press, 2023)
New Books in Caribbean Studies
by Marshall Poe
2M ago
In the pursuit of socialism, Cuba became Latin America’s most oil-dependent economy. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the country lost 86 percent of its crude oil supplies, resulting in a severe energy crisis. In the face of this shock, Cuba started to develop a low-carbon economy based on economic and social reform rather than high-tech innovation. The Low-Carbon Contradiction: Energy Transition, Geopolitics, and the Infrastructural State in Cuba (University of California Press, 2023) by Dr. Gustav Cederlöf examines this period of rapid low-carbon energy transition, which many have descr ..read more
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Trent Masiki, "The Afro-Latino Memoir: Race, Ethnicity, and Literary Interculturalism" (UNC Press, 2023)
New Books in Caribbean Studies
by Marshall Poe
2M ago
Despite their literary and cultural significance, Afro-Latino memoirs have been marginalized in both Latino and African American studies. Trent Masiki remedies this problem by bringing critical attention to the understudied African American influences in Afro-Latino memoirs published after the advent of the Black Arts movement. In The Afro-Latino Memoir: Race, Ethnicity and Literary Interculturalism (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) Masiki argues that these memoirs expand on the meaning of racial identity for both Latinos and African Americans.  Using interpretive ..read more
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Sandro R. Barros et al., "The Dissidence of Reinaldo Arenas: Queering Literature, Politics, and the Activist Curriculum" (U Florida Press, 2022)
New Books in Caribbean Studies
by Marshall Poe
2M ago
Focusing on the didactic nature of the work of Reinaldo Arenas, The Dissidence of Reinaldo Arenas: Queering Literature, Politics, and the Activist Curriculum (U Florida Press, 2022) demonstrates the Cuban writer’s influence as public pedagogue, mentor, and social activist whose teaching on resistance to normative ideologies resonates in societies past, present, and future. Through a multidisciplinary approach bridging educational, historiographic, and literary perspectives, The Dissidence of Reinaldo Arenas illuminates how Arenas’s work remains a cutting-edge source of insp ..read more
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