BiblioVault - Books about Caribbean Area

Unbordering Migration Studies in the Caribbean and Latin America

Patsy Lewis

Rutgers University Press, 2026

Unbordering Migration Studies in the Caribbean and Latin America brings together scholars and artists across regions, generations, disciplines, and modes of expression to decenter the US-Mexico border as both a site and a concept. Calling for renewed attention to the spaces, identities, and conflicts that remain understudied and excluded from our hemispheric knowledge of forced movement, the volume reveals a wider diversity of migratory realities and considers race, ethnicity, and class beyond the hegemonic formations that eclipse non-US histories. Through multidisciplinary and geographically expansive essays that draw from history, social anthropology, environmental studies, feminist studies, and lived experience, the volume examines diverse migratory flows from Chile and Argentina in the South to Georgia and New York in the North. Individually and collectively, the essays remap migratory movements other than through the most studied South-to-North trajectories and remove the US and US-based racial formations from the center of analysis. By tracking East-West flows, intraregional mobilities, and changing conceptions of racial identity, Unbordering Migration Studies in the Caribbean and Latin America complicates the concepts of forced mobility and border crossing by highlighting alternative liminalities in sites of transit, destination, and return. Demanding engagement with the submerged histories of racism and the production of ethnoracial categories beyond the Black/white binary, the collection brings into focus identities, sites, and forces that have not yet occupied the foreground of global migration study.

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Undoing Empire

Race And Nation In The Mulatto Caribbean

Jose F. Buscaglia-Salgado

University of Minnesota Press, 2003

A revelatory account that places mulatto experience at the center of Caribbean history

This ambitious book brings to light the story of what José F. Buscaglia-Salgado terms mulataje—the ways Caribbean aesthetics offer the possibility of the ultimate erasure of racial difference. Undoing Empire gives a broad panorama stretching from the complex politics of medieval Iberian societies to the beginning of direct U.S. hegemony in the Caribbean at the end of the nineteenth century.

Buscaglia-Salgado begins with an examination of Washington Irving’s “American Columbiad” as an act of historical and territorial plundering. He then traces the roots of mulatto society to the pre-1492 Iberian world, not only finding a connection between the Moors of “Old Spain” and the morenos—the blacks and mulattoes of the New World—but also offering a profound critique of creole and imperial discourses. Buscaglia-Salgado reads the pursuit and contestation of what he terms the European Ideal in colonial texts, architecture, and paintings, then identifies the mulatto movement of “undoing” the Ideal in the wars that shook the nineteenth-century Caribbean from Haiti to Cuba, arguing that certain projects of national liberation have moved contrary to the historical claims to freedom in the mulatto world.

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An Unformed Map

Geographies of Belonging between Africa and the Caribbean

Philip Janzen

Duke University Press, 2025

In An Unformed Map, Philip Janzen traces the intellectual trajectories of Caribbean people who joined the British and French colonial administrations in Africa between 1890 and 1930. Caribbean administrators grew up in colonial societies, saw themselves as British and French, and tended to look down on Africans. Once in Africa, however, they were doubly marginalized—excluded by Europeans and unwelcome among Africans. This marginalization was then reproduced in colonial archives, where their lives appear only in fragments. Drawing on sources beyond the archives of empire, from dictionaries and language exams to a suitcase full of poems, Janzen considers how Caribbean administrators reckoned with the profound effects of assimilation, racism, and dislocation. As they learned African languages, formed relationships with African intellectuals, and engaged with African cultures and histories, they began to rethink their positions in the British and French empires. They also created new geographies of belonging across the Atlantic, foundations from which others imagined new political horizons. Ultimately, Janzen offers a model for reading across sources and writing history in the face of archival fragmentation.

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A Universal Theory of Pottery Production

Irving Rouse, Attributes, Modes, and Ethnography

Richard A. Krause

University of Alabama Press, 2016

In A Universal Theory of Pottery Production, award-winning archaeologist Richard A. Krause presents an ethnographic account of pottery production based on archaeological evidence.

Krause posits that the careful study of an archaeological site’s ceramics can be used to formulate a step-and-stage theory of pottery production for the area. Krause’s work suggests that by comparing the results of inquiries conducted at different sites and for different times, archaeologists may be able to create a general ethnographic theory of pottery production.

Krause demonstrates this process through a comprehensive analysis of potsherds from the highly stratified Puerto Rican site of Paso del Indio. He first provides a comprehensive explanation of the archaeological concepts of attribute, mode, feature, association, site, analysis, and classification. Using these seven concepts, he categorizes the production and decorative techniques in the Paso del Indio site. Krause then applies the concept of “focal form vessels” to the site’s largest fragments to test his step-and-stage theory of production against the evidence they provide. Finally, he assigns the ceramics at Paso del Indio to previously discussed potting traditions.

Unlike other books on the subject that use statistical methods to frame basic archaeological concepts, Krause approaches these topics from the perspective of epistemology and the explicatory practices of empirical science. In A Universal Theory of Pottery Production Krause offers much of interest to North American, Caribbean, and South American archaeologists interested in the manufacture, decoration, and classification of prehistoric pottery, as well as for archaeologists interested in archaeological theory.

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