ABOUT THIS BOOK

2021 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

The Caribbean has long been a key area for empires warring over influence spheres, and where migration waves from Africa, Europe, and Asia accompanied every political transformation. In this volume, an interdisciplinary group of scholars studies the Caribbean’s “unincorporated subjects,” and explores how against all odds, Caribbean artists, filmmakers, and writers have been resourceful at showcasing migration as the hallmark of our modern age.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Anke Birkenmaier is a professor of Latin American literature and culture at Indiana University, Bloomington, and the former director of its Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. She is the author of The Specter of Races: Latin American Anthropology and Literature Between the Wars, and co-editor of Havana Beyond the Ruins: Cultural Mappings after 1989.

REVIEWS

"Profoundly interdisciplinary and nearly Pan-Caribbean in scope, Caribbean Migrations transforms our understanding of how migration has shaped the Caribbean and how Caribbean migration has shaped the United States. The analysis of Caribbean people on the move, asserting political power across digital platforms and through art, explodes the long-held notion that Caribbean migration is the story of flight from poverty to a better life in the United States and breaks down the boundary between Caribbean and American Studies."

— Leah Rosenberg, co-editor of Beyond Windrush: Rethinking Postwar West Indian Literature

"The starting point of Caribbean Migrations is a series of reflections that help illuminate the fascinating legal fiction that is Puerto Rico's 'unincorporated' status, using the unique experiences of Puerto Rican subjects as a poignant counterpoint and a compelling framework to understand Caribbean migration more generally. Together, the essays in this collection offer a rich blueprint to understand pervasive as well as new forms of colonialism, virtual and real citizenship, affect, and structural violence in a post-disaster world."

— Guillermina De Ferrari, author of Community and Culture in Post-Soviet Cuba

"All in all the book represents a rich contribution to an international literature constantly transforming the way we view and try to understand the links between colonialism, migration and identity, and particularly in the case of the Caribbean and Caribbean diasporas."

— Ethnic and Racial Studies

"The essays emphasize the geo-strategic ambitions of the US in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, especially Puerto Rico. However, the theoretical breadth of the volume sheds new light on migration throughout the Caribbean region, as well as the formation of transnational identities in other parts of the world. This study is a must read for Caribbean studies specialists and postcolonial scholars. Highly recommended."

— Choice

"The starting point of Caribbean Migrations is a series of reflections that help illuminate the fascinating legal fiction that is Puerto Rico's 'unincorporated' status, using the unique experiences of Puerto Rican subjects as a poignant counterpoint and a compelling framework to understand Caribbean migration more generally. Together, the essays in this collection offer a rich blueprint to understand pervasive as well as new forms of colonialism, virtual and real citizenship, affect, and structural violence in a post-disaster world."

— Guillermina De Ferrari, author of Community and Culture in Post-Soviet Cuba

"The essays emphasize the geo-strategic ambitions of the US in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, especially Puerto Rico. However, the theoretical breadth of the volume sheds new light on migration throughout the Caribbean region, as well as the formation of transnational identities in other parts of the world. This study is a must read for Caribbean studies specialists and postcolonial scholars. Highly recommended."

— Choice

"Profoundly interdisciplinary and nearly Pan-Caribbean in scope, Caribbean Migrations transforms our understanding of how migration has shaped the Caribbean and how Caribbean migration has shaped the United States. The analysis of Caribbean people on the move, asserting political power across digital platforms and through art, explodes the long-held notion that Caribbean migration is the story of flight from poverty to a better life in the United States and breaks down the boundary between Caribbean and American Studies."

— Leah Rosenberg, co-editor of Beyond Windrush: Rethinking Postwar West Indian Literature

"All in all the book represents a rich contribution to an international literature constantly transforming the way we view and try to understand the links between colonialism, migration and identity, and particularly in the case of the Caribbean and Caribbean diasporas."

— Ethnic and Racial Studies

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Figures

Introduction: Another Archive on Migration by Anke Birkenmaier
Chapter 1: A Permanent Periphery: Caribbean Migration Flows and The World Economy by Alejandro Portes

Part 1: Unincorporated Subjects (Puerto Rico, Guam)
Chapter 2: The Role of State Actors in Puerto Rico’s Long Century of Migration (1899-2015) by Carlos Vargas-Ramos
Chapter 3: ’May God Take Me to Orlando’: The Puerto Rican Exodus to Florida before and after Hurricane Maria by Jorge Duany
Chapter 4: Caribbean Mediascapes: Ruins, Debt in Puerto Rico by Jossianna Arroyo
Chapter 5: Circumscribed Citizenship: Caribbean American Visibility by Vivian Halloran
Chapter 6: From Father to Humanitarian: Charting the Intimacies and Discontinuities of Ricky Martin’s Social Media Presence by Edward Chamberlain
Chapter 7: Terripelagoes: Archipelagic Thinking in Culebra (Puerto Rico) and Guam by Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel

Part 2: Technologies of Representation (Cuba, Jamaica)
Chapter 8: The Caribbean in the US Imagination: Travel Writing, Annexation, and Slavery by Daylet Domínguez
Chapter 9: Afro-Cubana Feminisms: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Havana by Devyn Spence Benson
Chapter 10: Going Back to Cuba: How Enclaves of Memory Stimulate Returns and Repatriations by Iraida H. López
Chapter 11: The Floating Generation. Cuban Art in the Post-Soviet Period (1991-2017) by Rafael Rojas
Chapter 12: ‘It would make a rat puke’: Diasporic Thinking in Contemporary Jamaican Art Practices by Jane Bryce

Part 3: Languages of the Diaspora (Hispaniola, United States)
Chapter 13: Kreyòl Sung, Kreyòl Understood: Haitian Songwriter BIC (Roosevelt Saillant) Reflects on Language and Poeticsby Rebecca Dirksen and Kendy Vérilus
Chapter 14: Migration and Its Discontents: The Dominican Films of Laura Amelia Guzmán and Israel Cárdenas by Anke Birkenmaier
Chapter 15: Transnational Hispaniola: The First Decade in Support of a New Paradigm for Haitian and Dominican Studies by Kiran C. Jayaram and April J. Mayes
Chapter 16: New Points of the Rhizome: Rethinking Caribbean Relation in U.S. Latino Poetry by Emily A. Maguire

Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index