New Books in Caribbean Studies

Jan 23 2025 414 ep. 58 mins 621
New Books in Caribbean Studies Podcast artwork

Interviews with scholars of the Caribbean about their new books.

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  Society & Culture  History
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Greg Childs on Seditious Conspiracy (EF, JP)

Jan 23 2025 34 mins  
What a difference four years makes. Back in February 2021, still struggling to understand what had just happened at the Capitol, John and Elizabeth spoke with Brandeis historian Greg Childs. He is an expert in Latin American political movements and public space; his Seditious Spaces: Race, Freedom, and the 1798 Conspiracy in Bahia, Brazil is imminently forthcoming from Cambridge UP

The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe

Jan 23 2025 69 mins  
Henry Christophe was born to an enslaved mother on the Caribbean island of Grenada, and fought to overthrow the British in North America before helping his fellow enslaved Africans in Saint-Domingue—as Haiti was then called—to end slavery. He rose to power and became their king. In his time, he was popular and famous the world over. So how did he become an enigma? In The First

Andrew Gomez, "Constructing Cuban America: Race and Identity in Florida's Caribbean South, 1868–1945" (U Texas Press, 2024)

Jan 13 2025 46 mins  
How Black and white Cubans navigated issues of race, politics, and identity during the post-Civil War and early Jim Crow eras in South Florida. On July 4, 1876, during the centennial celebration of US independence, the city of Key West was different from other cities. In some of post–Civil War Florida, Black residents were hindered from participating in 4th of July festivities, b

Jorge Duany, "Puerto Rico: What Everyone Needs to Know" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Jan 12 2025 85 mins  
In the second edition of Puerto Rico: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford UP, 2024), Jorge Duany unravels the fascinating and turbulent past and present of an island that is politically and economically tied to the United States, yet culturally distinct. Acquired by the United States from Spain in 1898, Puerto Rico has a peculiar status among Latin American and Caribbean countries.

Simon Hall, "Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s" (Faber and Faber, 2020)

Jan 07 2025 44 mins  
In his new book Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s (Faber, 2020), Simon Hall, a Professor of Modern History at the University of Leeds, colorfully details an extraordinary visit by Fidel Castro to New York in the Autumn of 1960 for the opening of the UN General Assembly. Holding court from the iconic Hotel Theresa in Harlem, Castro's riotous stay in New Yo

Sujatha Fernandes, "Cuban Hustle: Culture, Politics, Everyday Life" (Duke, UP 2020)

Jan 04 2025 45 mins  
Cuban resourcefulness is on full display in Cuban Hustle: Culture, Politics, Everyday Life (Duke 2020), as sociologist Sujatha Fernandes presents an array of strategies not just for survival but for the invention of expressive practices and community-building spaces. Enduring years of Special Period economics and a transition away from Fidel Castro’s leadership as well as shiftin

Randy M. Browne, "The Driver’s Story: Labor and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

Dec 31 2024 67 mins  
The story of the driver is the story of Atlantic slavery. Starting in the seventeenth-century Caribbean, enslavers developed the driving system to solve their fundamental problem: how to extract labor from captive workers who had every reason to resist. In this system, enslaved Black drivers were tasked with supervising and punishing other enslaved laborers. In The Driver’s Story

Richard Blakemore, "Enemies of All: The Rise and Fall of the Golden Age of Piracy" (Pegasus Books, 2024)

Dec 30 2024 98 mins  
A masterful narrative history of the dangerous lives of pirates during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, revealing their unique impact on colonialism and empire. The pirates that exist in our imagination are not just any pirates. Violent sea-raiding has occurred in most parts of the world throughout history, but our popular stereotype of pirates has been defined by one hist

Matthew Chin, "Fractal Repair: Queer Histories of Modern Jamaica" (Duke UP, 2024)

Dec 22 2024 60 mins  
In Fractal Repair: Queer Histories of Modern Jamaica (Duke UP, 2024), Matthew Chin investigates queerness in Jamaica from early colonial occupation to the present, critically responding to the island’s global reputation for extreme homophobia and anti-queer violence. Chin advances a theory and method of queer fractals to bring together genealogies of queer and Caribbean formation

Chelsea Berry, "Poisoned Relations: Healing, Power, and Contested Knowledge in the Atlantic World" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

Dec 20 2024 43 mins  
By the time of the opening of the Atlantic world in the fifteenth century, Europeans and Atlantic Africans had developed significantly different cultural idioms for and understandings of poison. Europeans considered poison a gendered “weapon of the weak” while Africans viewed it as an abuse by the powerful. Though distinct, both idioms centered on fraught power relationships. W