Synopses & Reviews
Combining fertile soils, vital trade routes, and a coveted strategic location, the islands and surrounding continental lowlands of the Caribbean were one of Europe’s earliest and most desirable colonial frontiers. The region was colonized over the course of five centuries by a revolving cast of Spanish, Dutch, French, and English forces, who imported first African slaves and later Asian indentured laborers to help realize the economic promise of sugar, coffee, and tobacco. The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples offers an authoritative one-volume survey of this complex and fascinating region.
This groundbreaking work traces the Caribbean from its pre-Columbian state through European contact and colonialism to the rise of U.S. hegemony and the economic turbulence of the twenty-first century. The volume begins with a discussion of the region’s diverse geography and challenging ecology and features an in-depth look at the transatlantic slave trade, including slave culture, resistance, and ultimately emancipation. Later sections treat Caribbean nationalist movements for independence and struggles with dictatorship and socialism, along with intractable problems of poverty, economic stagnation, and migrancy.
Written by a distinguished group of contributors, The Caribbean is an accessible yet thorough introduction to the region’s tumultuous heritage which offers enough nuance to interest scholars across disciplines. In its breadth of coverage and depth of detail, it will be the definitive guide to the region for years to come.
Review
“This collection provides an engaging introduction to the history of a region defined by centuries of colonial domination and popular struggle. In these essays readers will recognize the Caribbean as a garden of social catastrophe and a grim incubator of modern global capitalism, as well as of peoples continuous attempts to resist, endure, or adapt to it. Scholars and students will find it to be a very useful handbook for current thinking on a vital topic.”
Review
“A welcome collection of state-of-the-art contributions by prominent scholars of the Caribbean, discussing a broad range of topics from pre-Columbian cultures via plantation slavery and decolonization to the Caribbean diaspora. . . . An excellent and highly readable textbook, surely recommended for teaching Caribbean history.”
Review
“This is a remarkable and admirably ambitious collection. The span is overwhelming, for it reaches from physiography and indigenous settlement to todays economics and politics. . . . The Caribbean: A History of the Region and its Peoples will enable just about any reader—student, scholar, layperson—to learn more about this anciently Europeanized part of the world than he or she knew before.”
Review
“Illuminating.”
Los Angeles Times
Review
"The editors of this volume have successfully assembled a survey of historical and contemporary issues which serves as an excellent introductory text for newcomers to the region, as well as a resource for more experienced researchers searching for a concise reference to any historical period." Journal of Caribbean History
Review
“Studies that treat the Caribbean as a unified region, although relatively few in number, have been of extraordinary importance in understanding the basic characteristics of the regions singularly unusual history and inordinately complex culture. . . . The authors, primarily drawn from the fields of history, anthropology, sociology, political science, archaeology, geography and geology, are uniformly outstanding and are highly respected scholars in their fields.” Franklin W. Knight
Review
and#8220;The essays in Native Diasporas address a tremendously important and complicated subjectand#8212;Indigenous identity.and#8221;and#8212;Barbara Krauthamer, author of Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South
Review
and#8220;In a powerful and timely way, Native Diasporas moves away from the and#8216;frontierand#8217; as finite and from the and#8216;middle groundand#8217; as an endpoint. Its essays pay attention to womenand#8217;s agency, gender issues, economic and political dynamics, the history of changing policies, and to Indigenous responses and engagements with settler colonialism.and#8221;and#8212;Ann McGrath, director of the Australian Centre for Indigenous History at Australian National University and coauthor of How to Write History that People Want to Read
Review
“What does it mean to ‘study something’—like Afro-Cuban religion, for instance? In this wise, witty, and uncommonly erudite book, Stephan Palmié unseats key premises regarding the stability of social science knowledge. Afro-Cuban religion, he shows, is at best an ‘organic hybrid,’ a ‘multiuser domain,’ born of the chance meeting of scholars and practitioners, each in pursuit of their own, self-conscious mysteries. Yet his acute analysis shows us something more: not merely must we live with such uncertainty; we can make it the basis of compelling forms of insight.”
Review
“The book is a chef d’ouevre. Stephan Palmié examines the recipes by which ethnographic animals like religions or history are ‘cooked’: hunted, sliced, prepared, and consumed. The dishes are heated on what Palmié names the ‘ethnographic interface,’ where anthropological recipes and the confections that anthropologists study boil together to constitute the regular fare of social life. It would be enough to have penned the first anthropological history of this interspace, exploring, as Palmié does, the lives and practices of those who regularly consume a menu of ‘Afro,’ ‘Cuban,’ and ‘religion.’ This book does much more, serving up a radical critique of anthropological knowing and its time-honored techniques of cookery and, dare we say it, crockery. Brilliantly iconoclastic, Palmié tosses even the unsavory ethnographer into the pot.”
Review
“Stephan Palmié has brought forth once more a work of stunning originality that is certain to have a lasting impact on the study of Afro-Cuban religion and, more generally, the whole field of Afro-American cultural formation. Part auto-ethnography of self-making, part historical ethnography of Afro-Cuban worldmaking, and part homage to the progenitors and bearers of the tradition—with a pinch of chaos and fractal theory thrown in for good measure—The Cooking of History turns ‘cooking’ into a ‘turning,’ a turning upside down of the stale, conventional story based on the idea of cultural holism, and replaces the idea of cultural endowment and transmission with the idea of an analytic space or ‘ethnographic interface’ as the locus of the creation of the episteme called ‘Afro-Cuban religion.’ Palmié has thrown down a most formidable challenge. Now let the fireworks begin!”
Review
andquot;This work will become a seminal text for people studying in the field.andquot;andmdash;Paul Moon, Te Kaharoa
Review
“An excellent dissection and analysis of what the author calls ‘Afro-’ ‘Cuban’ ‘Religion.’ . . . Looking back to the earliest records of the groups that eventually developed the traditions known today as Santería, Lukumi, Orisha Religion, and Yoruba Tradition Religion, Palmié traces the ways scholars and their informants/conversation partners worked together to develop what has become a group of worldwide religious traditions.”
Synopsis
The arrival of European settlers in the Americas disrupted indigenous lifeways, and the effects of colonialism shattered Native communities. Forced migration and human trafficking created a diaspora of cultures, languages, and people. Gregory D. Smithers and Brooke N. Newman have gathered the work of leading scholars, including Bill Anthes, Duane Champagne, Daniel Cobb, Donald Fixico, and Joy Porter, among others, in examining an expansive range of Native peoples and the extent of their influences through reaggregation. These diverse and wide-ranging essays uncover indigenous understandings of self-identification, community, and culture through the speeches, cultural products, intimate relations, and political and legal practices of Native peoples.
and#160;Native Diasporas explores how indigenous peoples forged a sense of identity and community amid the changes wrought by European colonialism in the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, and the mainland Americas from the seventeenth through the twentieth century. Broad in scope and groundbreaking in the topics it explores, this volume presents fresh insights from scholars devoted to understanding Native American identity in meaningful and methodologically innovative ways.
and#160;
Synopsis
Over a lifetime of studying Cuban Santería and other religions related to Orisha worship—a practice also found among the Yoruba in West Africa—Stephan Palmié has grown progressively uneasy with the assumptions inherent in the very term Afro-Cuban religion. In The Cooking of History he provides a comprehensive analysis of these assumptions, in the process offering an incisive critique both of the anthropology of religion and of scholarship on the cultural history of the Afro-Atlantic World. Understood largely through its rituals and ceremonies, Santería and related religions have been a challenge for anthropologists to link to a hypothetical African past. But, Palmié argues, precisely by relying on the notion of an aboriginal African past, and by claiming to authenticate these religions via their findings, anthropologists—some of whom have converted to these religions—have exerted considerable influence upon contemporary practices. Critiquing widespread and damaging simplifications that posit religious practices as stable and self-contained, Palmié calls for a drastic new approach that properly situates cultural origins within the complex social environments and scholarly fields in which they are investigated.
About the Author
Stephan Palmié is professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago, specializing in Afro-Caribbean cultures. He is the author of
Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition. Francisco A. Scarano is professor at history at the University of WisconsinMadison, specializing in the Caribbean and Latin America. He is the author of
Puerto Rico: Cinco siglos de historia.
Table of Contents
General Maps
Introduction: Caribbean Counterpoints
PART 1 THE CARIBBEAN STAGE
1 Geographies of Opportunity, Geographies of Constraint
David Barker
2 Contemporary Caribbean Ecologies: The Weight of History
Duncan McGregor
3 The Earliest Settlers
L. Antonio Curet
4 Old World Precedents: Sugar and Slavery in the Mediterranean
William D. Phillips Jr.
PART 2 THE MAKING OF A COLONIAL SPHERE
5 The Columbian Moment: Politics, Ideology, and Biohistory
Reinaldo Funes Monzote
6 From Tainos to Africans in the Caribbean: Labor, Migration, and Resistance
Jalil Sued- Badillo
7 Negotiations of Conquest
Lynne A. Guitar
8 Toward Sugar and Slavery
Stephan Palmié
9 Masterless People: Maroons, Pirates, and Commoners
Isaac Curtis
PART 3 COLONIAL DESIGNS IN FLUX
10 The Caribbean between Empires: Colonists, Pirates, and Slaves
Josep M. Fradera
11 Imperial Decline, Colonial Adaptation: The Spanish Islands during the Long 17th Century
Francisco A. Scarano
12 The Atlantic Framework of 17th- Century Colonization
Alison Games
13 Servants and Slaves during the 17th- Century Sugar Revolution
Hilary McD. Beckles
14 The French and Dutch Caribbean, 1600- 1800
Philip Boucher
15 Slaves and Tropical Commodities: The Caribbean in the South Atlantic System
Selwyn H. H. Carrington and Ronald C. Noel
PART 4 CAPITALISM, SLAVERY, AND REVOLUTION
16 Slave Cultures: Systems of Domination and Forms of Resistance
Philip Morgan
17 Rivalry, War, and Imperial Reform in the 18th- Century Caribbean
Douglas Hamilton
18 The Haitian Revolution
Laurent Dubois
19 The Abolition of Slavery in the Non- Hispanic Caribbean
Diana Paton
20 Econocide? From Abolition to Emancipation in the British and French Caribbean
Dale Tomich
21 Missionaries, Planters, and Slaves in the Age of Abolition
Jean Besson
PART 5 A REORDERED WORLD
22 A Second Slavery? The 19th- Century Sugar Revolutions in Cuba and Puerto Rico
Christopher Schmidt- Nowara
23 Peasants, Immigrants, and Workers: The British and French Caribbean after Emancipation
Gad Heuman
24 War and Nation Building: Cuban and Dominican Experiences
Robert Whitney
25 The Rise of the American Mediterranean, 1846- 1905
Luis Martínez- Fernández
26 The Conundrum of Race: Retooling Inequality
Elizabeth Cooper
27 Africa, Europe, and Asia in the Making of the 20th- Century Caribbean
Aisha Khan
PART 6 THE NEW EMPIRE
28 Building US Hegemony in the Caribbean
Brenda Gayle Plummer
29 The American Sugar Kingdom, 1898- 1934
César J. Ayala
30 Culture, Labor, and Race in the Shadow of US Capital
Winston James
31 Labor Protests, Rebellions, and the Rise of Nationalism during Depression and War
O. Nigel Bolland
32 Toward Decolonization: Impulses, Processes, and Consequences since the 1930s
Anne S. Macpherson
33 The Caribbean and the Cold War: Between Reform and Revolution
David Sheinin
PART 7 THE CARIBBEAN IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION
34 The Long Cuban Revolution
Michael Zeuske
35 Independence and Its Aftermath: Suriname, Trinidad, and Jamaica
Anthony P. Maingot
36 The Colonial Persuasion: Puerto Rico and the Dutch and French Antilles
Humberto García Muñiz
37 An Island in the Mirror: The Dominican Republic and Haiti
Pedro L. San Miguel
38 Tourism, Drugs, Off shore Finance, and the Perils of Neoliberal Development
Robert Goddard
39 Caribbean Migrations and Diasporas
Christine M. Du Bois
Acknowledgments
Glossary
Bibliography
Contributors
Index