Views of the modern Caribbean have been constructed by a fiction of the absent aboriginal. Yet, all across the Caribbean Basin, individuals and communities are reasserting their identities as indigenous peoples, from Carib communities in the Lesser Antilles, the Garifuna of Central America, and the Taino of the Greater Antilles, to members of the Caribbean diaspora. Far from extinction, or permanent marginality, the region is witnessing a resurgence of native identification and organization. This is the only volume to date that focuses concerted attention on a phenomenon that can no longer be ignored. Territories covered include Belize, Cuba, Dominica, the Dominican Republic, French Guiana, Guyana, St. Vincent, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, and the Puerto Rican diaspora. Writing from a range of contemporary perspectives on indigenous presence, identities, the struggle for rights, relations with the nation-state, and globalization, fourteen scholars, including four indigenous representatives, contribute to this unique tesament to cultural survival. This book will be indispensable to students of Caribbean history and anthropology, indigenous studies, ethnicity, and globalization.

What happens to indigenous culture and identity when being rooted in a fixed cultural setting is no longer necessary - or even possible? Does cultural displacement mean that indigeneity vanishes? How is being and becoming indigenous (i.e., indigeneity) experienced and practiced along translocal pathways? How are "new" philosophies and politics of indigenous identification (indigenism) constructed in "new", translocal settings? The essays in this collection develop our understandings of cosmopolitanism and transnationalism, and related processes and experiences of social and cultural globalization, showing us that these do not spell the end of ways of being and becoming indigenous. Instead, indigeneity is reengaged in wider fields, finding alternative ways of being established and projected, or bolstering older ways of doing so, while reaching out to other cultures.