Reimagining The Caribbean

This volume brings together scholars working in different languages—Creole, French, English, Spanish—and modes of cultural production—literature, art, film, music—to suggest how best to model courses that impart the rich, vibrant, and multivalent aspects of the Caribbean in the classroom. Essays focus on discussing how best to cross languages, histories, and modes of discourse. Instead of relying on available paradigms that depend on Western ways of thinking, the essays recommend methods to develop a pan-Caribbean perspective in relation to notions of the self, uses of language, gender hierarchies, and ideas of nationhood. Contributors represent various disciplines, work in one of the several languages of the Caribbean, and offer essays that reflect different cadres of expertise.

Brand Jamaica is an empirical look at the postindependence national image and branding project of Jamaica within the context of nation-branding practices at large. Although a tiny Caribbean island inhabited by only 2.8 million people, Jamaica commands a remarkably large presence on the world stage. Formerly a colony of Britain and shaped by centuries of slavery, violence, and plunder, today Jamaica owes its popular global standing to a massively successful troika of brands: music, sports, and destination tourism. At the same time, extensive media attention focused on its internal political civil war, mushrooming violent crime, inflation, unemployment, poverty, and abuse of human rights have led to perceptions of the country as unsafe. Brand Jamaica explores the current practices of branding Jamaica, particularly within the context of postcoloniality, reconciles the lived realities of Jamaicans with the contemporary image of Jamaica projected to the world, and deconstructs the current tourism model of sun, sand, and sea. Hume Johnson and Kamille Gentles-Peart bring together multidisciplinary perspectives that interrogate various aspects of Jamaican national identity and the dominant paradigm by which it has been shaped.

In her thought-provoking study of Britain's relationship with Latin America and the Caribbean during the Romantic and Victorian periods, Joselyn M. Almeida makes a compelling case for extending the critical boundaries of current transatlantic and circumatlantic scholarship. She proposes the pan-Atlantic as a critical model that encompasses Britain's relationship to the non-Anglophone Americas given their shared history of conquest and the slave trade, and underscores the importance of writings by Afro-British and Afro-Hispanophone authors in formulating Atlantic culture. In adopting the term pan-Atlantic, Almeida argues for the interrelationship of the discourses of discovery, conquest, enslavement, and liberation expressed in literary motifs such as the New World, Columbus, and Las Casas; the representation of Native Americans; the enslavement and liberation of Africans; and the emancipation of Spanish America. Her study draws on the works of William Robertson, Ottobah Cugoano, Francisco Clavijero, Francisco Miranda, José Blanco White, Richard Robert Madden, Juan Manzano, Charles Darwin, and W. H. Hudson, uncovering the shared cultural grammar of travel narratives, abolitionist poems, novels, and historiographies that crosses national and linguistic boundaries.

The last four years have seen significant damage in US-China relations that will take years to rebuild. Early signs within the Biden Administration indicate that an expeditious return to strong Sino-US ties is premature at best. To fully address these challenges and regain credibility both at home and abroad, the Biden team will need to recalibrate a new set of values, objectives, and thinking in redefining the most important bilateral relationship in the world. This edited book volume seeks to reimagine US-China relations, provide innovative policy analysis, and utilizes a truly multidisciplinary approach coupled with both first and second-hand quantitative data, infographics, geopolitical analysis, and perspectives from leading experts. More importantly, this book project provides a nuanced perspective highlighting the central issues that will define America and China both now and well into the future. Whether you are a policy-maker, business professional, academic, established practitioner, or a casual observer, this impressive volume provides exceptional insight on issues like technology, trade, cross-Strait relations, security & alliances in East Asia, geopolitics, climate change, and much more.

Includes appendix (pages 103-106): survey questionnaire.

Black women living in the French empire played a key role in the decolonial movements of the mid-twentieth century. Thinkers and activists, these women lived lives of commitment and risk that landed them in war zones and concentration camps and saw them declared enemies of the state. Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel mines published writings and untapped archives to reveal the anticolonialist endeavors of seven women. Though often overlooked today, Suzanne Césaire, Paulette Nardal, Eugénie Éboué-Tell, Jane Vialle, Andrée Blouin, Aoua Kéita, and Eslanda Robeson took part in a forceful transnational movement. Their activism and thought challenged France's imperial system by shaping forms of citizenship that encouraged multiple cultural and racial identities. Expanding the possibilities of belonging beyond national and even Francophone borders, these women imagined new pan-African and pan-Caribbean identities informed by black feminist intellectual frameworks and practices. The visions they articulated also shifted the idea of citizenship itself, replacing a single form of collective identity and political participation with an expansive plurality of forms of belonging.

A dividing line, the border is usually perceived in terms of separation and rupture. It is a site of tension par excellence, at the origin of contestations, negotiations, and other conflicting patterns of inclusion/exclusion. This book takes us through an exploration of the border in the Caribbean region, both geographically fragmented and strongly tied through its history, culture and people. This collection of scholarly articles interrogates the border within the specificities of the Caribbean context, its socio-political dynamics and its literary and artistic representations. The transgression of borders and the consequent reconfiguring phenomena are thus applied to the Caribbean and its diasporas, through a transdisciplinary approach. The book combines a multiplicity of research fields, including Social Sciences, Cultural Geography, Geopolitics, Cultural and Literary Studies, hence it offers a global perspective on the topic and transcends disciplinary categories. The contents of the book also stretch beyond geographic and linguistic borders as the contributors come from diverse scholarly backgrounds, affiliations, linguistic areas, and research expertise.