Our Caribbean Kin

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.

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.

Major changes have happened in households and people's lives in most countries in the developed world. Marriage rates have fallen, divorce has risen, women are having fewer children and later in life, and one in four families with children is headed by a lone parent. These changes have significance that goes beyond the individual families - with implications for housing demand, social security benefits, labour force participation, health and social services.

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.

In June 1973, amid ideological rifts in the U.S. gay liberation movement, thousands of people gathered in New York City's Washington Square Park to commemorate the fourth anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion. Partway through the rally, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) co-founder Sylvia Rivera fought her way to the stage to address the predominantly white, middle class lesbian and gay crowd. Over the din of their boos and jeers, Rivera reprimanded the crowd for failing in their responsibilities to their "gay brothers and sisters" in jail, detailed the sacrifices she had made for the movement, and called them into the politics of STAR, "The people who are trying to do something for all of us and not men and women that belong to a white middle class white club! And that is what you all belong to!" Rivera's appeal thus worked through a push-pull of distance and belonging, shaming the movement for its assimilatory turn while invoking forms of kinship and calling her listeners into an expansive multi-issue liberation politics. How does a sense of intimacy call people into political community? If We Were Kin is about the we of politics--how that we is made, fought over, and remade--and how these struggles lie at the very core of questions about power and political change. Across a range of sites in racial justice and queer/trans liberation movements--from speeches by James Baldwin and Sylvia Rivera in the 1960s and 1970s to contemporary immigrant justice campaigns by the antiracist LGBTQ organization Southerners on New Ground (SONG)--Lisa Beard traces a distinct lineage of appeals that challenge atomized and hierarchical racial formations in the United States and advance powerful visions of political relationships rooted in mutuality and shared freedom. In plumbing the deeper registers of identificatory appeals, Beard transforms understandings of identity, solidarity, political confrontation, and apparent loss/failure as points of possibility. If We Were Kin offers an innovative account of racial politics and political theory rooted in Black, Latinx, queer, and trans activism in twentieth and twenty-first century America.

Fully meets the requirements of the latest CSEC syllabus - Complete coverage of the core options, plus the options in communications, tourism and consumer affairs, including co-operatives - Practical guidance on how to approach the School-Based Assessment and on the alternative to the School-Based Assessment - Activities develop Social Studies skills and exam practice questions help students prepare for their exam

Introduction: Archival dreams and Caribbean life writing -- 'Autobiography in a graveyard' : doors of no return and revolutionary failures -- Speculative autobiography : ghosts and feminist fugitivity -- Repicturing the picturesque : genealogical desire, archives, and descendant community autobiography -- Ashes to ashes, dust to dust : Indo-Caribbean archival impossibility -- "Put my mom in there" : Memorialization as Caribbean counter-archive -- Coda: Untelling history.

Writing the Caribbean in Magazine Time examines literary magazines generated during the 1940s that catapulted Caribbean literature into greater international circulation and contributed significantly to social, political, and aesthetic frameworks for decolonization, including Pan-Caribbean discourse. This book demonstrates the material, political, and aesthetic dimensions of Pan-Caribbean literary discourse in magazine texts by Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, Nicolás Guillén, José Lezama Lima, Alejo Carpentier, George Lamming, Derek Walcott and their contemporaries. Although local infrastructure for book production in the insular Caribbean was minimal throughout the twentieth century, books, largely produced abroad, have remained primary objects of inquiry for Caribbean intellectuals. The critical focus on books has obscured the canonical centrality of literary magazines to Caribbean literature, politics, and social theory. Up against the imperial Goliath of the global book industry, Caribbean literary magazines have waged a guerrilla pursuit for the terms of Caribbean representation.