front cover of C. L. R. James's Caribbean
C. L. R. James's Caribbean
Paget Henry and Paul Buhle, eds.
Duke University Press, 1992
For more than half a century, C. L. R. James (1901–1989)—"the Black Plato," as coined by the London Times—has been an internationally renowned revolutionary thinker, writer, and activist. Born in Trinidad, his lifelong work was devoted to understanding and transforming race and class exploitation in his native West Indies, as well as in Britain and the United States. In C. L. R. James's Caribbean, noted scholars examine the roots of both James's life and oeuvre in connection with the economic, social, and political environment of the West Indies.

Drawing upon James's observations of his own life as revealed to interviewers and close friends, this volume provides an examination of James's childhood and early years as colonial literatteur and his massive contribution to West Indian political-cultural understanding. Moving beyond previous biographical interpretations, the contributors here take up the problem of reading James's texts in light of poststructuralist criticism, the implications of his texts for Marxist discourse, and for problems of Caribbean development.

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Captivating Technology
Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life
Ruha Benjamin, editor
Duke University Press, 2019
The contributors to Captivating Technology examine how carceral technologies such as electronic ankle monitors and predictive-policing algorithms are being deployed to classify and coerce specific populations and whether these innovations can be appropriated and reimagined for more liberatory ends.
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Caribbean Migrants
Environment Human Survival St. Kitts Nevis
Bonham C. Richardson
University of Tennessee Press, 1983

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Caribbean Spaces
Escapes from Twilight Zone
Carol Boyce Davies
University of Illinois Press, 2013
Drawing on both personal experience and critical theory, Carole Boyce Davies illuminates the dynamic complexity of Caribbean culture and traces its migratory patterns throughout the Americas. Both a memoir and a scholarly study, Caribbean Spaces: Escapes from Twilight Zones explores the multivalent meanings of Caribbean space and community in a cross-cultural and transdisciplinary perspective.
 
From her childhood in Trinidad and Tobago to life and work in communities and universities in Nigeria, Brazil, England, and the United States, Carole Boyce Davies portrays a rich and fluid set of personal experiences. She reflects on these movements to understand the interrelated dynamics of race, gender, and sexuality embedded in Caribbean spaces, as well as many Caribbean people's traumatic and transformative stories of displacement, migration, exile, and sometimes return. Ultimately, Boyce Davies reestablishes the connections between theory and practice, intellectual work and activism, and personal and private space.

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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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Caribes 2.0
New Media, Globalization, and the Afterlives of Disaster
Jossianna Arroyo
Rutgers University Press, 2023
In Caribes 2.0, author Jossianna Arroyo looks at the Caribbean mediasphere in the twenty-first century. Arroyo argues that we have seen a return to tropes such as blackface, brownface, cultural and ethnic stereotypes, and violent representations of the poor, the marginalized, and the racialized. Caribes 2.0 looks at these tropes as well as the work of writers, vloggers, performers, and photographers that have become media figures or have used new media platforms to promote their work and examines how they are challenging and negotiating these media representations. It analyzes contemporary Caribbean cultures to discuss, taste, guides, and actions (social and virtual) that shape Caribbean global communities today. Departing from Edouard Glissant’s insight that “Caribbean reality might not be accessed by remote control” the book considers what types of political and social agencies are created by mediation. Caribes 2.0 deviates from these historical-globalized views of subjected, colonized Caribbean bodies, and their material conditions, to examine the relationship between the local and the global in contemporary Caribbean cultures, and the role that media is playing in the invisibility or hyper-visibilty of Caribbean cultures in the islands and the U.S. diaspora.
 
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Cedric J. Robinson
On Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance
Cedric J. Robinson
Pluto Press, 2019
"Before the movement for black lives made black radicalism cool for millennials, Cedric Robinson did the work of excavating an intellectual history we rely upon today."—The Root

"Like W. E. B. Du Bois, Michel Foucault, Sylvia Wynter, and Edward Said, Robinson was that rare polymath capable of seeing the whole....He left behind a body of work to which we must return constantly and urgently"—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams


Cedric J. Robinson is one of the doyens of Black Studies and a pioneer in study of the Black Radical Tradition. His works have been essential texts, deconstructing racial capitalism and inspiring insurgent movements from Ferguson, Missouri to the West Bank. For the first time, Robinson's essays come together, spanning over four decades and reflective of his diverse interests in the interconnections between culture and politics, radical social theory, and classic and modern political philosophy.

Themes explored include Africa and Black internationalism, World politics, race and US Foreign Policy, representations of blackness in popular culture, and reflections on popular resistance to racial capitalism, white supremacy and more. Essays here include:

*The Black Detective and American Memory
*Slavery and the Platonic Origins of Anti-Democracy
*Africa: In Hock to History and the Banks
*Blaxploitation and the Misrepresentation of Liberalism
*The Mulatta on Film
*Race, Capitalism, and Anti-democracy
*The Killing in Ferguson
*And much more!


Accompanied by an introduction by H. L. T. Quan and a foreword by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, this collection, which includes previously unpublished materials, extends the many contributions by a giant in Black radical thought.
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Circuits of the Sacred
A Faggotology in the Black Latinx Caribbean
Carlos Ulises Decena
Duke University Press, 2023
In Circuits of the Sacred Carlos Ulises Decena examines transnational black Latinx Caribbean immigrant queer life and spirit. Decena models what he calls a faggotology—the erotic in the divine as found in the disreputable and the excessive—as foundational to queer black critical and expressive praxis of the future. Drawing on theoretical analysis, memoir, creative writing, and ethnography of Santería/Lucumí in Santo Domingo, Havana, and New Jersey, Decena moves between languages, locations, pronouns, and genres to map the itineraries of blackness as a “circuit,” a multipronged and multisensorial field. A feminist pilgrimage and extended conversation with the dead, Decena’s study is a provocative work that transforms the academic monograph into a gathering of stories, theoretical innovation, and expressive praxis to channel voices, ancestors, deities, theorists, artists, and spirits from the vantage point of radical feminism and queer-of-color thinking.
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Colonial Reckoning
Race and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Cuba
Louis A. Pérez Jr.
Duke University Press, 2023
In Colonial Reckoning Louis A. Pérez Jr. examines Cuba’s wars for independence in the second half of the nineteenth century, focusing specifically on those Cubans who remained loyal to Spain. Drawing on newspaper articles, personal letters, military battle reports, government commissions, consular reports, literature, and other materials, Pérez shows how everyday black, white, and creole Cubans defended the Spanish empire as paramilitary guerrillas alongside white elites. These loyalist Cubans helped the Spanish fight a separatist insurgency composed of a similarly diverse population of Cubans. Pérez demonstrates that these wars were so deadly and drawn out precisely because Cubans fought on both sides, each holding myriad competing visions of sovereignty and contested meanings of nation. Complicating mythical and historiographical narratives that Cuban national liberation was a struggle waged between Cubans of color and white elites beholden to Spain, Pérez shows that the fight consisted of a great number of factions with unique and evolving motivations. In so doing, he interrogates anew the multifaceted social dimensions and multiple political aspects of the complex drama of Cuban national formation.
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The Color Black
Enslavement and Erasure in Iran
Beeta Baghoolizadeh
Duke University Press, 2024
In The Color Black, Beeta Baghoolizadeh traces the twin processes of enslavement and erasure of Black people in Iran during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She illustrates how geopolitical changes and technological advancements in the nineteenth century made enslaved East Africans uniquely visible in their servitude in wealthy and elite Iranian households. During this time, Blackness, Africanness, and enslavement became intertwined—and interchangeable—in Iranian imaginations. After the end of slavery in 1929, the implementation of abolition involved an active process of erasure on a national scale, such that a collective amnesia regarding slavery and racism persists today. The erasure of enslavement resulted in the erasure of Black Iranians as well. Baghoolizadeh draws on photographs, architecture, theater, circus acts, newspapers, films, and more to document how the politics of visibility framed discussions around enslavement and abolition during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this way, Baghoolizadeh makes visible the people and histories that were erased from Iran and its diaspora.
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Community In-Between / Urur Dhex Dhexad Ah
Portraits of Somali-Americans in Columbus
Qorsho Hassan and Ruth M. Smith
The Ohio State University Press, 2017
Community In-Between / Urur Dhex Dhexad Ah: Portraits of Somali-Americans in Columbus by Qorsho Hassan and Ruth M. Smith is a collection of stories and portraits of fifteen young Somali Americans involved in community building in Columbus, Ohio. By using their unique skills, these individuals balance their identities, build bridges, and create spaces for success. The rich, multifaceted stories in this book represent the heterogeneous experiences of the participants and show the deep connection to the diaspora and the interconnectedness of individual experiences.
 
A combination of storytelling and research connect each narrative to another, creating a strong framework for capturing the roles of young Somali Americans in community building through innovative initiatives such as designing a mixer bottle, beginning charitable programs, and educating the Somali community on voter rights. Two community artists help to capture the participants in their natural spaces, and their journey, aided by their empowering mentor, Riya Jama, bridges the gap of Somali females and their access to photography.
 
 
The portraits, stories, and artifacts throughout the book create a modicum of belonging. This new generation resiliently overcomes challenges such as racism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia while still maintaining their hope in the future. Community In-Between captures their spirit and unwavering faith.
 
 
The portraits, stories, and artifacts throughout the book create a modicum of belonging. This new generation resiliently overcomes challenges such as racism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia while still maintaining their hope in the future. Community In-Between captures their spirit and unwavering faith.
 
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The Company We Keep
Interracial Friendships and Romantic Relationships from Adolescence to Adulthood
Grace Kao
Russell Sage Foundation, 2019
With hate crimes on the rise and social movements like Black Lives Matter bringing increased attention to the issue of police brutality, the American public continues to be divided by issues of race. How do adolescents and young adults form friendships and romantic relationships that bridge the racial divide? In The Company We Keep, sociologists Grace Kao, Kara Joyner, and Kelly Stamper Balistreri examine how race, gender, socioeconomic status, and other factors affect the formation of interracial friendships and romantic relationships among youth. They highlight two factors that increase the likelihood of interracial romantic relationships in young adulthood: attending a diverse school and having an interracial friendship or romance in adolescence.

While research on interracial social ties has often focused on whites and blacks, Hispanics are the largest minority group and Asian Americans are the fastest growing racial group in the United States. The Company We Keep examines friendships and romantic relationships among blacks, whites, Hispanics, and Asian Americans to better understand the full spectrum of contemporary race relations. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, the authors explore the social ties of more than 15,000 individuals from their first survey responses as middle and high school students in the mid-1990s through young adulthood nearly fifteen years later. They find that while approval for interracial marriages has increased and is nearly universal among young people, interracial friendships and romantic relationships remain relatively rare, especially for whites and blacks. Black women are particularly disadvantaged in forming interracial romantic relationships, while Asian men are disadvantaged in the formation of any romantic relationships, both as adolescents and as young adults. They also find that people in same-sex romantic relationships are more likely to have partners from a different racial group than are people in different-sex relationships. The authors pay close attention to how the formation of interracial friendships and romantic relationships depends on opportunities for interracial contact. They find that the number of students choosing different-race friends and romantic partners is greater in schools that are more racially diverse, indicating that school segregation has a profound impact on young people’s social ties.

Kao, Joyner, and Balistreri analyze the ways school diversity and adolescent interracial contact intersect to lay the groundwork for interracial relationships in young adulthood. The Company We Keep provides compelling insights and hope for the future of living and loving across racial divides.
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Counterlife
Slavery after Resistance and Social Death
Christopher Freeburg
Duke University Press, 2021
In Counterlife Christopher Freeburg poses a question to contemporary studies of slavery and its aftereffects: what if freedom, agency, and domination weren't the overarching terms used for thinking about Black life? In pursuit of this question, Freeburg submits that current scholarship is too preoccupied with demonstrating enslaved Africans' acts of political resistance, and instead he considers Black social life beyond such concepts. He examines a rich array of cultural texts that depict slavery—from works by Frederick Douglass, Radcliffe Bailey, and Edward Jones to spirituals, the television cartoon The Boondocks, and Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained—to show how enslaved Africans created meaning through artistic creativity, religious practice, and historical awareness both separate from and alongside concerns about freedom. By arguing for the impossibility of tracing slave subjects solely through their pursuits of freedom, Freeburg reminds readers of the arresting power and beauty that the enigmas of Black social life contain.
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Criminalized Lives
HIV and Legal Violence
Alexander McClelland
Rutgers University Press, 2024
Canada has been known as a hot spot for HIV criminalization where the act of not disclosing one’s HIV-positive status to sex partners has historically been regarded as a serious criminal offence. Criminalized Lives describes how this approach has disproportionately harmed the poor, Black and Indigenous people, gay men, and women in Canada. In this book, people who have been criminally accused of not disclosing their HIV-positive status, detail the many complexities of disclosure, and the violence that results from being criminalized. 
 
Accompanied by portraits from artist Eric Kostiuk Williams, the profiles examine whether the criminal legal system is really prepared to handle the nuances and ethical dilemmas faced everyday by people living with HIV. By offering personal stories of people who have faced criminalization first-hand, Alexander McClelland questions common assumptions about HIV, the role of punishment, and the violence that results from the criminal legal system’s legacy of categorizing people as either victims or perpetrators. 
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Critique of Black Reason
Achille Mbembe
Duke University Press, 2017
In Critique of Black Reason eminent critic Achille Mbembe offers a capacious genealogy of the category of Blackness—from the Atlantic slave trade to the present—to critically reevaluate history, racism, and the future of humanity. Mbembe teases out the intellectual consequences of the reality that Europe is no longer the world's center of gravity while mapping the relations among colonialism, slavery, and contemporary financial and extractive capital. Tracing the conjunction of Blackness with the biological fiction of race, he theorizes Black reason as the collection of discourses and practices that equated Blackness with the nonhuman in order to uphold forms of oppression. Mbembe powerfully argues that this equation of Blackness with the nonhuman will serve as the template for all new forms of exclusion. With Critique of Black Reason, Mbembe offers nothing less than a map of the world as it has been constituted through colonialism and racial thinking while providing the first glimpses of a more just future. 
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The Cry of the Senses
Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics
Ren Ellis Neyra
Duke University Press, 2020
In The Cry of the Senses, Ren Ellis Neyra examines the imaginative possibility for sound and poetics to foster new modes of sensorial solidarity in the Caribbean Americas. Weaving together the black radical tradition with Caribbean and Latinx performance, cinema, music, and literature, Ellis Neyra highlights the ways Latinx and Caribbean sonic practices challenge antiblack, colonial, post-Enlightenment, and humanist epistemologies. They locate and address the sonic in its myriad manifestations—across genres and forms, in a legal trial, and in the art and writing of Xandra Ibarra, the Fania All-Stars, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Édouard Glissant, and Eduardo Corral—while demonstrating how it operates as a raucous form of diasporic dissent and connectivity. Throughout, Ellis Neyra emphasizes Caribbean and Latinx sensorial practices while attuning readers to the many forms of blackness and queerness. Tracking the sonic through their method of multisensorial, poetic listening, Ellis Neyra shows how attending to the senses can inspire alternate, ethical ways of collective listening and being.
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Cuban Underground Hip Hop
Black Thoughts, Black Revolution, Black Modernity
By Tanya L. Saunders
University of Texas Press, 2015

Honorable Mention, Barbara T. Christian Literary Award, Caribbean Studies Association, 2017

In the wake of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, a key state ideology developed: racism was a systemic cultural issue that ceased to exist after the Revolution, and any racism that did persist was a result of contained cases of individual prejudice perpetuated by US influence. Even after the state officially pronounced the end of racism within its borders, social inequalities tied to racism, sexism, and homophobia endured, and, during the economic liberalization of the 1990s, widespread economic disparities began to reemerge.

Cuban Underground Hip Hop focuses on a group of self-described antiracist, revolutionary youth who initiated a social movement (1996–2006) to educate and fight against these inequalities through the use of arts-based political activism intended to spur debate and enact social change. Their “revolution” was manifest in altering individual and collective consciousness by critiquing nearly all aspects of social and economic life tied to colonial legacies. Using over a decade of research and interviews with those directly involved, Tanya L. Saunders traces the history of the movement from its inception and the national and international debates that it spawned to the exodus of these activists/artists from Cuba and the creative vacuum they left behind. Shedding light on identity politics, race, sexuality, and gender in Cuba and the Americas, Cuban Underground Hip Hop is a valuable case study of a social movement that is a part of Cuba’s longer historical process of decolonization.

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Cultural Heritage in Mali in the Neoliberal Era
Rosa De Jorio
University of Illinois Press, 2016
Up to 2012, Mali was a poster child of African democracy, despite multiple signs of growing dissatisfaction with the democratic experiment. Then disaster struck, bringing many of the nation's unresolved contradictions to international attention. A military coup carved off the country's south. A revolt by a coalition of Tuareg and extremist Islamist forces shook the north. The events, so violent and unexpected, forced experts to reassess Mali's democratic institutions and the neoliberal economic reforms enacted in conjunction with the move toward democracy. Rosa De Jorio's detailed study of cultural heritage and its transformations provides a key to understanding the impasse that confronts Malian democracy. As she shows, postcolonial Mali privileged its cultural heritage to display itself on the regional and international scene. The neoliberal reforms both intensified and altered this trend. Profiling heritage sites ranging from statues of colonial leaders to women's museums to historic Timbuktu, De Jorio portrays how various actors have deployed and contested notions of heritage. These actors include not just Malian administrators and politicians but UNESCO, and non-state NGOs. She also delves into the intricacies of heritage politics from the perspective of Malian actors and groups, as producers and receivers--but always highly informed and critically engaged--of international, national and local cultural initiatives.
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