New Books in Caribbean Studies

Interviews with scholars of the Caribbean about their new books. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/caribbean-studies

Episodes

I Have Avenged America: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haiti’s Fight for Freedom

September 18, 2025 • 56 mins

“My name has become a horror to all those who want slavery,” declared Jean‑Jacques Dessalines as he announced the independence of Haiti, the most radical nation‑state during the Age of Revolution and the first country ever to permanently outlaw slavery. Enslaved for the first thirty years of his life, Dessalines (c. 1758–1806) joined the revolution that abolished slavery within the French colony. Then he became a general in the col...

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Susan M. Rigdon, "Oscar Lewis in Cuba: La Partida Final" (Berghahn Books, 2024)

September 12, 2025 • 67 mins

American anthropologist Oscar Lewis secured permission from Fidel Castro to undertake three years of field research on cultural and economic change in Cuba in the decade after the victory of Castro's M-26 Movement. Oscar Lewis in Cuba: La Partida Final (Berghahn Books, 2024) delves into Lewis' research goals, methods, the training and composition of his field team, and the difficulties of executing the plan in the political climate...

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Aliyah Khan, "Far From Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean" (Rutgers UP, 2020)

August 31, 2025 • 45 mins

Muslims have lived in the Caribbean for centuries. Far From Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean (Rutgers University Press, 2020) examines the archive of autobiography, literature, music and public celebrations in Guyana and Trinidad, offering an analysis of the ways Islam became integral to the Caribbean, and the ways the Caribbean shaped Islamic practices. Aliyah Khan recovers stories that have been there all along, though the...

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Kathleen Wilson, "Strolling Players of Empire: Theater and Performances of Power in the British Imperial Provinces, 1656–1833" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

August 21, 2025 • 55 mins

Why did Britons get up a play wherever they went? In Strolling Players of Empire: Theater and Performances of Power in the British Imperial Provinces, 1656–1833 (Cambridge UP, 2022), Dr. Kathleen Wilson reveals how the performance of English theater and a theatricalized way of viewing the world shaped the geopolitics and culture of empire in the long eighteenth century. Ranging across the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans to enco...

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Disco's "Latin Tinge"

August 19, 2025 • 61 mins

In the 1930s, musical Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton identified the influence of Latin American rhythms like the habanera in jazz, as a sonic “tinge” that fundamentally shaped his style as a stride pianist. In the Seventies, disco presented its own Latin tinge. The Latin American and Latino influence on 1970s New York disco extended far beyond the familiar narratives of the Paradise Garage and Studio 54, creating vibrant spaces that...

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Manuel Barcia, "The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the 19th-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade" (Yale UP, 2020)

August 9, 2025 • 48 mins

As we now know, epidemics and pandemics are not new phenomena. In her new book The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the 19th-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade (Yale University Press, 2020), Manuel Barcia offers a striking rendition of the diseases that swept through the illegal slave trade Atlantic World. In fact, Barcia argues that the history of disease and the story of continuing traffic in enslaved people despite the ...

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César Brioso, "Last Seasons in Havana: The Castro Revolution and the End of Professional Baseball In Cuba" (U Nebraska Press, 2019)

August 4, 2025 • 42 mins

Today we are joined by César Brioso, author of the book Last Seasons in Havana: The Castro Revolution and the End of Professional Baseball In Cuba (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). Blending the love for baseball fans in Cuba had during the 1950s with the political upheaval that led to Fidel Castro’s rise to power in 1959, Brioso weaves a fascinating tale. Brioso focuses on the last two seasons of the Havana Sugar Kings of the I...

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Dan-el Padilla Peralta, "Classicism and Other Phobias" (Princeton UP, 2025)

July 30, 2025 • 50 mins

Classicism and Other Phobias (Princeton University Press, 2025) shows how the concept of “classicism” lacks the capacity to affirm the aesthetic value of Black life and asks whether a different kind of classicism—one of insurgence, fugitivity, and emancipation—is possible. Engaging with the work of Sylvia Wynter and other trailblazers in Black studies while drawing on his own experiences as a Black classicist, Dan-el Padilla Peralt...

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Phil Tiemeyer, "Women and the Jet Age: A Global History of Aviation and Flight Attendants" (Cornell UP, 2025)

July 11, 2025 • 51 mins

Women and the Jet Age: A Global History of Aviation and Flight Attendants (Cornell University Press, 2025) is a global history of postwar aviation that examines how states nurtured airlines for competing political and economic goals during the Cold War. While previous histories almost exclusively stress US and Western European aviation progress, Dr. Phil Tiemeyer examines how smaller, poorer states in socialist Eastern Europe and i...

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Susan L. Carruthers, "Making Do: Britons and the Refashioning of the Postwar World" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

July 8, 2025 • 69 mins

Imagine a world in which clothing wasn't superabundant – cheap, disposable, indestructible – but perishable, threadbare and chronically scarce. Eighty years ago, when World War II ended, a textile famine loomed. What would everyone wear as uniforms were discarded and soldiers returned home, Nazi camps were liberated, and millions of uprooted people struggled to subsist? In Making Do: Britons and the Refashioning of the Postwar Worl...

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Paul R. Beckett, "An Anatomy of Tax Havens: Europe, the Caribbean and the United States of America" (de Gruyter, 2023)

June 30, 2025 • 60 mins

Tax havens in offshore lands like Switzerland, the Cayman Islands and the Bahamas were once considered a rarity, the preserve of the super-rich. Today, they are big business available to the masses. Their goal? To avoid any form of accountability. Own nothing. Possess everything. Be answerable to no one. Where are these tax havens? What forms can they take? What future lies in store for them, and why should we care? An Anatomy of...

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Maya J. Berry, "Defending Rumba in Havana: The Sacred and the Black Corporeal Undercommons" (Duke UP, 2025)

June 25, 2025 • 85 mins

In Defending Rumba in Havana: The Sacred and the Black Corporeal Undercommons (Duke University Press, 2025), anthropologist and dancer Maya J. Berry examines rumba as a way of knowing the embodied and spiritual dimensions of Black political imagination in post-Fidel Cuba. Historically a Black working-class popular dance, rumba, Berry contends, is a method of Black Cuban struggle that provides the community, accountability, sustenan...

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Ana Hebra Flaster, "Property of the Revolution: From a Cuban Barrio to a New Hampshire Mill Town" (She Writes Press, 2025)

June 16, 2025 • 59 mins

Ana Hebra Flaster was six years old when her working-class family was kicked out of their Havana barrio for opposing communism. Once devoted revolutionaries themselves but disillusioned by the Castro government’s repressive tactics, they fled to the US. The permanent losses they suffered—of home, country, and loved ones, all within forty-eight hours—haunted her multigenerational family as they reclaimed their lives and freedom in 1...

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M. Myrta Leslie Santana, Transformismo: Performing Trans/Queer Cuba" (U Michigan Press, 2025)

May 20, 2025 • 56 mins

In Transformismo, M. Myrta Leslie Santana draws on years of embedded research within Cuban trans/queer communities to analyze how transformistas, or drag performers, understand their roles in the social transformation of the island. Once banned and censored in Cuba, transformismo, or drag performance, is now state-sponsored events. Transformismo suggests that these performances are making critical interventions in Cuban trans/queer...

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Emily Colbert Cairns and Nieves Romero-Diaz, "Early Modern Maternities in the Iberian Atlantic" (Amsterdam UP, 2024)

May 17, 2025 • 46 mins

Emily Colbert Cairns of Salve Regina University and Nieves Romero-Díaz of Mount Holyoke join Jana Byars to talk about Early Modern Maternities in the Iberian Atlantic (Amsterdam University Press, 2024). It is the first volume to emphasize women's personal experiences and their life trajectories as mothers within the Peninsula and across the Atlantic. Although an official discourse that defined the conditions of motherhood emerged i...

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William Jennings, "Dibia's World: Life on an Early Sugar Plantation" (Liverpool UP, 2023)

May 10, 2025 • 47 mins

In the latest episode of Unlocking Academia, Tarin Ahmed, the host, is joined by guest, William Jennings, a senior lecturer in French at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, and author of Dibia's World.: Life on an Early Sugar Plantation (Liverpool UP, 2023). William discusses the importance of names, voice and the community life of a hundred slaves on an early sugar plantation. Dibia's World follows the story of Dibia, an ed...

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Las G. Newman, "To Die in Africa’s Dust: West Indian Missionaries in Western Africa in the Nineteenth Century" (Langham, 2024)

April 24, 2025 • 88 mins

Christian mission in the modern era has generally been conceptualized as a Western endeavor: “from the West to the rest.” The rise and explosive growth of world Christianity has challenged this narrative, emphasizing Christian mission as “from everywhere to everywhere.” Dr. Las Newman contributes to this revitalized perspective, interrogating our understanding of modern missions history by drawing attention to the role of African W...

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Daniel A. Rodriguez, "The Right to Live in Health: Medical Politics in Postindependence Havana" (U North Carolina Press, 2020)

April 21, 2025 • 51 mins

Daniel A. Rodriguez's history of a newly independent Cuba shaking off the U.S. occupation, The Right to Live in Health: Medical Politics in Postindependence Havana (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), focuses on the intersection of public health and politics in Havana. While medical policies were often used to further American colonial power, in Cuba, Rodriguez argues, they evolved into important expressions of anticolonial...

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Benjamin P. Davis, "Choose Your Bearing: Édouard Glissant, Human Rights, and Decolonial Ethics" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)

April 3, 2025 • 55 mins

Benjamin P. Davis’s Choose Your Bearing: Édouard Glissant, Human Rights and Decolonial Ethics (Edinburgh University Press 2025) provides one of the first readings, in English or French, of Édouard Glissant as an ethical theorist. What do we in the West owe those who grow our food, sew our clothes and produce our electronics? And what have we always owed one another, but forgotten, avoided, or simply disregarded? Looking back on nea...

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Philip Harling, "Managing Mobility: The British Imperial State and Global Migration, 1840-1860" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

March 31, 2025 • 68 mins

Between 1840 and 1860 the British Empire expanded rapidly in scale, with rampant annexation of territory and ruthless suppression of rebellion. These decades also witnessed an unprecedented movement of people across the Empire and around the world, with over 2.6 million emigrants leaving Britain in the 1850s alone. Managing Mobility: The British Imperial State and Global Migration, 1840–1860 (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by D...

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New Books in Caribbean Studies

Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}I Have Avenged America: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haiti’s Fight for Freedom

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}Susan M. Rigdon, "Oscar Lewis in Cuba: La Partida Final" (Berghahn Books, 2024)

Aliyah Khan, "Far From Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean" (Rutgers UP, 2020)

Kathleen Wilson, "Strolling Players of Empire: Theater and Performances of Power in the British Imperial Provinces, 1656–1833" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Disco's "Latin Tinge"

Manuel Barcia, "The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the 19th-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade" (Yale UP, 2020)

César Brioso, "Last Seasons in Havana: The Castro Revolution and the End of Professional Baseball In Cuba" (U Nebraska Press, 2019)

Dan-el Padilla Peralta, "Classicism and Other Phobias" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Phil Tiemeyer, "Women and the Jet Age: A Global History of Aviation and Flight Attendants" (Cornell UP, 2025)

Susan L. Carruthers, "Making Do: Britons and the Refashioning of the Postwar World" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Paul R. Beckett, "An Anatomy of Tax Havens: Europe, the Caribbean and the United States of America" (de Gruyter, 2023)

Maya J. Berry, "Defending Rumba in Havana: The Sacred and the Black Corporeal Undercommons" (Duke UP, 2025)

Ana Hebra Flaster, "Property of the Revolution: From a Cuban Barrio to a New Hampshire Mill Town" (She Writes Press, 2025)

M. Myrta Leslie Santana, Transformismo: Performing Trans/Queer Cuba" (U Michigan Press, 2025)

Emily Colbert Cairns and Nieves Romero-Diaz, "Early Modern Maternities in the Iberian Atlantic" (Amsterdam UP, 2024)

William Jennings, "Dibia's World: Life on an Early Sugar Plantation" (Liverpool UP, 2023)

Las G. Newman, "To Die in Africa’s Dust: West Indian Missionaries in Western Africa in the Nineteenth Century" (Langham, 2024)

Daniel A. Rodriguez, ﻿"The Right to Live in Health: Medical Politics in Postindependence Havana" (U North Carolina Press, 2020)

Benjamin P. Davis, "Choose Your Bearing: Édouard Glissant, Human Rights, and Decolonial Ethics" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)

Philip Harling, "Managing Mobility: The British Imperial State and Global Migration, 1840-1860" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Popular Podcasts

I Have Avenged America: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haiti’s Fight for Freedom

Susan M. Rigdon, "Oscar Lewis in Cuba: La Partida Final" (Berghahn Books, 2024)

Aliyah Khan, "Far From Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean" (Rutgers UP, 2020)

Daniel A. Rodriguez, "The Right to Live in Health: Medical Politics in Postindependence Havana" (U North Carolina Press, 2020)