EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

Book Our Caribbean Kin

    Book Details:
  • Author : Alaí Reyes-Santos
  • Publisher : Rutgers University Press
  • Release : 2015-06-15
  • ISBN : 0813572010
  • Pages : 328 pages

Download or read book Our Caribbean Kin written by Alaí Reyes-Santos and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-15 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beset by the forces of European colonialism, US imperialism, and neoliberalism, the people of the Antilles have had good reasons to band together politically and economically, yet not all Dominicans, Haitians, and Puerto Ricans have heeded the calls for collective action. So what has determined whether Antillean solidarity movements fail or succeed? In this comprehensive new study, Alaí Reyes-Santos argues that the crucial factor has been the extent to which Dominicans, Haitians, and Puerto Ricans imagine each other as kin. Our Caribbean Kin considers three key moments in the region’s history: the nineteenth century, when the antillanismo movement sought to throw off the yoke of colonial occupation; the 1930s, at the height of the region’s struggles with US imperialism; and the past thirty years, as neoliberal economic and social policies have encroached upon the islands. At each moment, the book demonstrates, specific tropes of brotherhood, marriage, and lineage have been mobilized to construct political kinship among Antilleans, while racist and xenophobic discourses have made it difficult for them to imagine themselves as part of one big family. Recognizing the wide array of contexts in which Antilleans learn to affirm or deny kinship, Reyes-Santos draws from a vast archive of media, including everything from canonical novels to political tracts, historical newspapers to online forums, sociological texts to local jokes. Along the way, she uncovers the conflicts, secrets, and internal hierarchies that characterize kin relations among Antilleans, but she also discovers how they have used notions of kinship to create cohesion across differences.

Book Our Caribbean Kin

    Book Details:
  • Author : Alaí Reyes-Santos
  • Publisher : Rutgers University Press
  • Release : 2015-06-15
  • ISBN : 0813572029
  • Pages : 244 pages

Download or read book Our Caribbean Kin written by Alaí Reyes-Santos and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-15 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beset by the forces of European colonialism, US imperialism, and neoliberalism, the people of the Antilles have had good reasons to band together politically and economically, yet not all Dominicans, Haitians, and Puerto Ricans have heeded the calls for collective action. So what has determined whether Antillean solidarity movements fail or succeed? In this comprehensive new study, Alaí Reyes-Santos argues that the crucial factor has been the extent to which Dominicans, Haitians, and Puerto Ricans imagine each other as kin. Our Caribbean Kin considers three key moments in the region’s history: the nineteenth century, when the antillanismo movement sought to throw off the yoke of colonial occupation; the 1930s, at the height of the region’s struggles with US imperialism; and the past thirty years, as neoliberal economic and social policies have encroached upon the islands. At each moment, the book demonstrates, specific tropes of brotherhood, marriage, and lineage have been mobilized to construct political kinship among Antilleans, while racist and xenophobic discourses have made it difficult for them to imagine themselves as part of one big family. Recognizing the wide array of contexts in which Antilleans learn to affirm or deny kinship, Reyes-Santos draws from a vast archive of media, including everything from canonical novels to political tracts, historical newspapers to online forums, sociological texts to local jokes. Along the way, she uncovers the conflicts, secrets, and internal hierarchies that characterize kin relations among Antilleans, but she also discovers how they have used notions of kinship to create cohesion across differences.

Book Close Kin and Distant Relatives

Download or read book Close Kin and Distant Relatives written by Susana M. Morris and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2014-02-04 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "black family" in the United States and the Caribbean often holds contradictory and competing meanings in public discourse: on the one hand, it is a site of love, strength, and support; on the other hand, it is a site of pathology, brokenness, and dysfunction that has frequently called forth an emphasis on conventional respectability if stability and social approval are to be achieved. Looking at the ways in which contemporary African American and black Caribbean women writers conceptualize the black family, Susana Morris finds a discernible tradition that challenges the politics of respectability by arguing that it obfuscates the problematic nature of conventional understandings of family and has damaging effects as a survival strategy for blacks. The author draws on African American studies, black feminist theory, cultural studies, and women’s studies to examine the work of Paule Marshall, Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat, and Sapphire, showing how their novels engage the connection between respectability and ambivalence. These writers advocate instead for a transgressive understanding of affinity and propose an ethic of community support and accountability that calls for mutual affection, affirmation, loyalty, and respect. At the core of these transgressive family systems, Morris reveals, is a connection to African diasporic cultural rites such as dance, storytelling, and music that help the fictional characters to establish familial connections.

Book Caribbean Journeys

    Book Details:
  • Author : Karen Fog Olwig
  • Publisher : Duke University Press
  • Release : 2007-06-12
  • ISBN : 0822389851
  • Pages : 331 pages

Download or read book Caribbean Journeys written by Karen Fog Olwig and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2007-06-12 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Caribbean Journeys is an ethnographic analysis of the cultural meaning of migration and home in three families of West Indian background that are now dispersed throughout the Caribbean, North America, and Great Britain. Moving migration studies beyond its current focus on sending and receiving societies, Karen Fog Olwig makes migratory family networks the locus of her analysis. For the people whose lives she traces, being “Caribbean” is not necessarily rooted in ongoing visits to their countries of origin, or in ethnic communities in the receiving countries, but rather in family narratives and the maintenance of family networks across vast geographical expanses. The migratory journeys of the families in this study began more than sixty years ago, when individuals in the three families left home in a British colonial town in Jamaica, a French Creole rural community in Dominica, and an African-Caribbean village of small farmers on Nevis. Olwig follows the three family networks forward in time, interviewing family members living under highly varied social and economic circumstances in locations ranging from California to Barbados, Nova Scotia to Florida, and New Jersey to England. Through her conversations with several generations of these far-flung families, she gives insight into each family’s educational, occupational, and socioeconomic trajectories. Olwig contends that terms such as “Caribbean diaspora” wrongly assume a culturally homogeneous homeland. As she demonstrates in Caribbean Journeys, anthropologists who want a nuanced understanding of how migrants and their descendants perceive their origins and identities must focus on interpersonal relations and intimate spheres as well as on collectivities and public expressions of belonging.

Book Pirates of the Caribbean

Download or read book Pirates of the Caribbean written by J. Surrell and published by Turtleback. This book was released on 2005-10-01 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A behind-the-scenes look at the forty-year history of the popular Disney theme park ride and film adaptation, "Pirates of the Caribbean," includes illustrations and photographs, recollections of cast and crew, and early story concepts.

Book Contradictory Indianness

Download or read book Contradictory Indianness written by Atreyee Phukan and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-15 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Contradictory Indianness shows, a postcolonial Caribbean aesthetics that has from its inception privileged inclusivity, interraciality, and resistance against Old World colonial orders requires taking into account Indo-Caribbean writers and their reimagining of Indianness in the region. Whereas, for instance, forms of Indo-Caribbean cultural expression in music, cuisine, or religion are more readily accepted as creolizing (thus, Caribbeanizing) processes, an Indo-Caribbean literary imaginary has rarely been studied as such. Discussing the work of Ismith Khan, Harold Sonny Ladoo, Totaram Sanadhya, LalBihari Sharma, and Shani Mootoo, Contradictory Indianness maintains that the writers' engagement with the regional and transnational poetics of the Caribbean underscores symbolic bridges between cultural worlds conventionally set apart—the Africanized and Indianized—and distinguishes between cultural worlds assumed to be the same—indenture and South Asian Indianness. This book privileges Indo-Caribbean fiction as a creolizing literary imaginary to broaden its study beyond a narrow canon that has, inadvertently or not, enabled monolithic and unidimensional perceptions of Indian cultural identity and evolution in the Caribbean, and continued to impose a fragmentary and disconnected study of (post)indenture aesthetics within indenture’s own transnational cartography.

Book Urban Dwellings  Haitian Citizenships

Download or read book Urban Dwellings Haitian Citizenships written by Vincent Joos and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-10 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships explores the failed international reconstruction of Port-au-Prince after the devastating 2010 earthquake. It describes the failures of international aid in Haiti while it analyzes examples of Haitian-based reconstruction and economic practices. By interrogating the relationship between indigenous uses of the cityscape and the urbanization of the countryside within a framework that centers on the violence of urban planning, the book shows that the forms of economic development promoted by international agencies institutionalize impermanence and instability. Conversely, it shows how everyday Haitians use and transform the city to create spaces of belonging and forms of citizenship anchored in a long history of resistance to extractive economies. Taking readers into the remnants of failed industrial projects in Haitian provinces and into the streets, rubble, and homes of Port-au-Prince, this book reflects on the possibilities and meanings of dwelling in post-disaster urban landscapes.

Book Race and Nation in Puerto Rican Folklore

Download or read book Race and Nation in Puerto Rican Folklore written by Rafael Ocasio and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-14 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Race and Nation in Puerto Rican Folklore: Franz Boas and John Alden Mason in Porto Rico, 1915 explores the founding father of American anthropology's historic trip to Puerto Rico in 1915. As a component of the Scientific Survey of Porto Rico and the Virgin Islands, Boas intended to perform field research in the areas of anthropology and ethnography there while other scientists explored the island's natural resources. Native Puerto Rican cultural practices were also heavily explored through documentation of the island's oral folklore. A young anthropologist working under Boas, John Alden Mason, rescued hundreds of oral folklore samples, ranging from popular songs, poetry, conundrums, sayings, and, most particularly, folktales. Through extensive excursions, Mason came in touch with the rural practices of Puerto Rican peasants, the J baros, who served as both his cultural informants and writers of the folklore samples. These stories, many of which are still part of the island's literary traditions, reflect a strong Puerto Rican identity coalescing in the face of the U.S. political intervention on the island. A fascinating slice of Puerto Rican history and culture sure to delight any reader

Book Dominican Crossroads

    Book Details:
  • Author : Christina Cecelia Davidson
  • Publisher : Duke University Press
  • Release : 2024-09-13
  • ISBN : 1478059923
  • Pages : 214 pages

Download or read book Dominican Crossroads written by Christina Cecelia Davidson and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2024-09-13 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: H. C. C. Astwood: minister and missionary, diplomat and politician, enigma in the annals of US history. In Dominican Crossroads, Christina Cecelia Davidson explores Astwood’s extraordinary and complicated life and career. Born in 1844 in the British Caribbean, Astwood later moved to Reconstruction-era New Orleans, where he became a Republican activist and preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. In 1882 he became the first Black man named US consul to the Dominican Republic. Davidson tracks the challenges that Astwood faced as a Black politician in an era of rampant racism and ongoing cross-border debates over Black men’s capacity for citizenship. As a US representative and AME missionary, Astwood epitomized Black masculine respectability. But as Davidson shows, Astwood became a duplicitous, scheming figure who used deception and engaged in racist moral politics to command authority. His methods, Davidson demonstrates, show a bleaker side of Black international politics and illustrate the varied contours of transnational moral discourse as people of all colors vied for power during the ongoing debate over Black rights in Santo Domingo and beyond.

Book Energy Islands

    Book Details:
  • Author : Catalina M de Onís
  • Publisher : Univ of California Press
  • Release : 2021-06-22
  • ISBN : 0520380622
  • Pages : 300 pages

Download or read book Energy Islands written by Catalina M de Onís and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2021-06-22 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Weaving together historical and ethnographic research, Catalina M. de Onâis challenges the master narratives of Puerto Rico as a tourist destination and site of 'natural' disasters. She demonstrates how fossil-fuel economies are inextricably entwined with colonial practices and policies and how local community groups in Puerto Rico have struggled against energy coloniality and energy privilege to mobilize and transform power from the ground up. This work decenters continental contexts and deconstructs damaging hierarchies that devalue and exploit disenfranchised rural, coastal communities"--

Book Folk Stories from the Hills of Puerto Rico   Cuentos folkl  ricos de las monta  as de Puerto Rico

Download or read book Folk Stories from the Hills of Puerto Rico Cuentos folkl ricos de las monta as de Puerto Rico written by Rafael Ocasio and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-17 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This exciting new anthology gathers together Puerto Rican folktales that were passed down orally for generations before finally being transcribed beginning in 1914 by the team of famous anthropologist Franz Boas. These charming tales give readers a window into the imaginations and aspirations of Puerto Rico’s peasants, the Jíbaro. Some stories provide a distinctive Caribbean twist on classic tales including “Snow White” and “Cinderella.” Others fictionalize the lives of local historical figures, such as infamous pirate Roberto Cofresí, rendered here as a Robin Hood figure who subverts the colonial social order. The collection also introduces such beloved local characters as Cucarachita Martina, the kind cockroach who falls in love with Ratoncito Pérez, her devoted mouse husband who brings her delicious food. Including a fresh English translation of each folktale as well as the original Spanish version, the collection also contains an introduction from literary historian Rafael Ocasio that highlights the historical importance of these tales and the Jíbaro cultural values they impart. These vibrant, funny, and poignant stories will give readers unique insights into Puerto Rico’s rich cultural heritage. Esta nueva y emocionante antología reúne cuentos populares puertorriqueños que fueron transmitidos oralmente durante generaciones antes de ser finalmente transcritos comenzando en 1914 por el equipo del famoso antropólogo Franz Boas. Estos encantadores cuentos ofrecen a los lectores un vistazo a la imaginación y las aspiraciones de los jíbaros, los campesinos de Puerto Rico. Algunas historias brindan un distintivo toque caribeño a cuentos clásicos como "Blanca Nieves" y "Cenicienta". Otros ficcionalizan la vida de personajes históricos locales, como el famoso pirata Roberto Cofresí, representado como una figura al estilo de Robin Hood, quien subvierte el orden social colonial. La colección también presenta personajes locales tan queridos como Cucarachita Martina, la amable cucaracha que se enamora de Ratoncito Pérez, su devoto esposo ratón que le trae deliciosa comida. Incluyendo una nueva traducción al inglés de estos cuentos populares, así como las versiones originales en español, la colección también contiene una introducción del historiador literario Rafael Ocasio, quien destaca la importancia histórica de estos cuentos y los valores culturales del jíbaro que éstos imparten en los relatos. Estas historias vibrantes, divertidas y conmovedoras brindarán a los lectores una visión única de la rica herencia cultural de Puerto Rico. Introducción en español (https://d3tto5i5w9ogdd.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/03154419/Ocasio_Cuentos_Intro_Espan%CC%83ol.pdf)

Book The Guise of Exceptionalism

Download or read book The Guise of Exceptionalism written by Robert Fatton and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-16 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American exceptionalism -- Exceptionalism and "unthinkability" -- Manifest Destiny and the American occupation of Haiti -- The American occupation and Haiti's exceptionalism -- Imperial exceptionalism at the turn of the 20th century -- Dictatorship, democratization, and exceptionalism -- The diaspora and the transmogrification of exceptionalism -- Identity politics and modern exceptionalism.

Book In Plenty and in Time of Need

    Book Details:
  • Author : Lia T. Bascomb
  • Publisher : Rutgers University Press
  • Release : 2019-12-13
  • ISBN : 197880394X
  • Pages : 307 pages

Download or read book In Plenty and in Time of Need written by Lia T. Bascomb and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-13 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Plenty and in Time of Need uses music and performance as sites of analysis for the competing ideals and realities of Barbadian national culture. The book demonstrates complex relations between national, gendered, and sexual identities in Barbados, and how these identities are represented and interpreted on a global stage.

Book Transnational Families

Download or read book Transnational Families written by Harry Goulbourne and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-01-21 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative book provides an overview of the emergence of new understandings of ethnicities, identities and family forms across a number of ethnic groups, family types, and national boundaries.

Book Feminist Spiritualities

Download or read book Feminist Spiritualities written by Joshua R. Deckman and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2023-07-01 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Feminist Spiritualities aims to complicate contemporary debates surrounding Black/Latinx experiences within a critical framework of decolonial thought, women of color feminisms, politicized emotional structures, and anti-imperial politics. Joshua R. Deckman considers literary and cultural productions from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, and their diasporas in the United States, exploring epistemic spaces that have historically been marked as irrational and inconsequential for the production of knowledge—including social media posts, song lyrics, public writings, speeches, and personal interviews. Analyzing works by Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, Mayra Santos-Febres, Rita Indiana Hernández, Ana-Maurine Lara, Elizabeth Acevedo, María Teresa Fernández, Nitty Scott, Lxs Krudxs Cubensi, and Ibeyi, Deckman shows how these authors develop afro-epistemologies grounded in Caribbean feminist spiritualities and manifest a commitment to finding joy and love in difference. Literary, anthropological, and more, Feminist Spiritualities weaves through a series of fields and methodologies in an undisciplined way to contribute new close readings of recent works and fresh assessments of well-known ones.

Book Thieving Three Fingered Jack

Download or read book Thieving Three Fingered Jack written by Frances R. Botkin and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-31 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fugitive slave known as “Three-Fingered Jack” terrorized colonial Jamaica from 1780 until vanquished by Maroons, self-emancipated Afro-Jamaicans bound by treaty to police the island for runaways and rebels. A thief and a killer, Jack was also a freedom fighter who sabotaged the colonial machine until his grisly death at its behest. Narratives about his exploits shed light on the problems of black rebellion and solutions administered by the colonial state, creating an occasion to consider counter-narratives about its methods of divide and conquer. For more than two centuries, writers, performers, and storytellers in England, Jamaica, and the United States have “thieved" Three Fingered Jack's riveting tale, defining black agency through and against representations of his resistance. Frances R. Botkin offers a literary and cultural history that explores the persistence of stories about this black rebel, his contributions to constructions of black masculinity in the Atlantic world, and his legacies in Jamaican and United States popular culture.

Book Becoming Creole

    Book Details:
  • Author : Melissa A. Johnson
  • Publisher : Rutgers University Press
  • Release : 2018-11-01
  • ISBN : 0813597005
  • Pages : 249 pages

Download or read book Becoming Creole written by Melissa A. Johnson and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-01 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Becoming Creole explores how people become who they are through their relationships with the natural world, and it shows how those relationships are also always embedded in processes of racialization that create blackness, brownness, and whiteness. Taking the reader into the lived experience of Afro-Caribbean people who call the watery lowlands of Belize home, Melissa A. Johnson traces Belizean Creole peoples’ relationships with the plants, animals, water, and soils around them, and analyzes how these relationships intersect with transnational racial assemblages. She provides a sustained analysis of how processes of racialization are always present in the entanglements between people and the non-human worlds in which they live.