This book provides a much-needed study of the lived experience of militarization in the Caribbean from 1914 to the present. It offers an alternative to policy and security studies by drawing on the perspectives of literary and cultural studies, history, anthropology, ethnography, music, and visual art. Rather than opposing or defending militarization per se, this book focuses attention on how Caribbean people negotiate militarization in their everyday lives. The volume explores topics such as the US occupation of Haiti; British West Indians in World War I; the British naval invasion of Anguilla; military bases including Chaguaramas, Vieques and Guantanamo; the militarization of the police; sex work and the military; drug wars and surveillance; calypso commentaries; private security armies; and border patrol operations.

Exploring the relationship between discourses of cultural hybridity and projects for social equality, The Caribbean Postcolonial reveals a far greater diversity of political and aesthetic practices of cultural hybridity than has been generally recognized in postcolonial and cultural studies. It uncovers the logics according to which some forms of hybridity are enshrined and others disavowed in the Caribbean imagination and in the disciplinary imagination of postcolonial studies. Exploring cultural formations ranging from mestizaje and creolization to mulatto and dougla aesthetics, from literature to music, theater, Hosay, and carnival, it examines the sources of the appeal of cultural hybridity for both nationalist and postnationalist agendas. The first book-length study to offer an explicitly comparative account of cultural hybridity in the postcolonial arena, The Caribbean Postcolonial is a forceful argument for historicizing theory. It intervenes in key debates around popular agency and cultural resistance, feminism and cultural nationalism, the relations between postmodernism and postcolonialism, and the status of nationalism in an era of globalization.

This volume, the first of its kind, launches a conversation amongst humanities scholars doing fieldwork on the global south. It both offers indispensable tools and demonstrates the value of such work inside and outside of the academy. The contributors reflect upon their experiences of fieldwork, the methods they improvised, their dilemmas and insights, and the ways in which fieldwork shifted their frames of analysis. They explore how to make fieldwork legible to their disciplines and how fieldwork might extend the work of the humanities. The volume is for both those who are already deeply immersed in fieldwork in the humanities and those who are seeking ways to undertake it.

The year 2009 marked the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution and the thirtieth anniversary of the Grenadian and Nicaraguan Revolutions, and as such offered an occasion to assess the complex legacies of revolutionary politics in the Caribbean. This volume considers what we might learn from such revolutionary projects and their afterlives, from their successes and their errors. It explores what struggles, currently underway in the Caribbean, share with these earlier and longer revolutionary traditions, and how they depart from them. It analyzes radical movements in Jamaica, Grenada, Cuba, Venezuela, Guadeloupe, Suriname, and Guyana, not only in their national dimensions, but in terms of their regional linkages and mutual influences. The chapters are drawn from various disciplines and a range of democratic leftist projects. They consider not only state and party politics, but also civil society, cultural politics and artistic production, strikes, and grassroots activism. This book was published as a special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.

The year 2009 marked the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution and the thirtieth anniversary of the Grenadian and Nicaraguan Revolutions, and as such offered an occasion to assess the complex legacies of revolutionary politics in the Caribbean. This volume considers what we might learn from such revolutionary projects and their afterlives, from their successes and their errors. It explores what struggles, currently underway in the Caribbean, share with these earlier and longer revolutionary traditions, and how they depart from them. It analyzes radical movements in Jamaica, Grenada, Cuba, Venezuela, Guadeloupe, Suriname, and Guyana, not only in their national dimensions, but in terms of their regional linkages and mutual influences.

The chapters are drawn from various disciplines and a range of democratic leftist projects. They consider not only state and party politics, but also civil society, cultural politics and artistic production, strikes, and grassroots activism.

This book was published as a special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.

This book provides a much-needed study of the lived experience of militarization in the Caribbean from 1914 to the present. It offers an alternative to policy and security studies by drawing on the perspectives of literary and cultural studies, history, anthropology, ethnography, music, and visual art. Rather than opposing or defending militarization per se, this book focuses attention on how Caribbean people negotiate militarization in their everyday lives. The volume explores topics such as the US occupation of Haiti; British West Indians in World War I; the British naval invasion of Anguilla; military bases including Chaguaramas, Vieques and Guantanamo; the militarization of the police; sex work and the military; drug wars and surveillance; calypso commentaries; private security armies; and border patrol operations.

This volume, the first of its kind, launches a conversation amongst humanities scholars doing fieldwork on the global south. It both offers indispensable tools and demonstrates the value of such work inside and outside of the academy. The contributors reflect upon their experiences of fieldwork, the methods they improvised, their dilemmas and insights, and the ways in which fieldwork shifted their frames of analysis. They explore how to make fieldwork legible to their disciplines and how fieldwork might extend the work of the humanities. The volume is for both those who are already deeply immersed in fieldwork in the humanities and those who are seeking ways to undertake it.

Drawing on the long and varied history of discourses of cultural hybridity across the caribbean, this book explores the rich and fraught cultural crossings that are often theorized homogeneously in postcolonial studies as 'hybridity'. What is the relationship of cultural hybridity to social equality? Why have some forms of hybridity been enshrined in the caribbean imagination and others disavowed? What is the appeal of cultural hybridity to nationalist and post-nationalist projects alike? What can we learn from the hybridization of Afro-caribbean and Indo-caribbean cultures set in motion by slavery and indentureship? In answering these questions, this book intervenes in several important debates in postcolonial studies about cultural resistance and popular agency, feminism and cultural nationalism, the relations between postmodernism and postcolonialism, and the status of nationalism in an age of globalization.

Exploring the relationship between discourses of cultural hybridity and projects for social equality, The Caribbean Postcolonial reveals a far greater diversity of political and aesthetic practices of cultural hybridity than has been generally recognized in postcolonial and cultural studies. It uncovers the logics according to which some forms of hybridity are enshrined and others disavowed in the Caribbean imagination and in the disciplinary imagination of postcolonial studies. Exploring cultural formations ranging from mestizaje and creolization to mulatto and dougla aesthetics, from literature to music, theater, Hosay, and carnival, it examines the sources of the appeal of cultural hybridity for both nationalist and postnationalist agendas. The first book-length study to offer an explicitly comparative account of cultural hybridity in the postcolonial arena, The Caribbean Postcolonial is a forceful argument for historicizing theory. It intervenes in key debates around popular agency and cultural resistance, feminism and cultural nationalism, the relations between postmodernism and postcolonialism, and the status of nationalism in an era of globalization.