New Books in Caribbean Studies

Marshall Poe
  • 4.8 (23)
  • Society & Culture
  • Updated Semimonthly

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/caribbean-studies

  1. 2d ago

    Cécile Bishop, "Forms of Blackness: Race and Visibility in the French-Speaking World" (Duke UP, 2026)

    What does Blackness look like? In Forms of Blackness: Race and Visibility in the French-Speaking World (Duke University Press, 2026), Cécile Bishop argues that this seemingly simple question has no straightforward answer. Instead of treating race as something immediately visible, she explores how Blackness emerges through the interplay of perception, language, and history. A central theme of the book is that visibility is never neutral. Through examples ranging from photographs of the Liberation of Paris to works of art such as Portrait of a Black Woman, Bishop shows that Blackness cannot be reduced to what is seen. Instead, she introduces the idea of Blackness as form, emphasizing the importance of representation, opacity, and aesthetic experience. Engaging with thinkers such as Édouard Glissant and Frantz Fanon, Bishop invites readers to rethink the assumption that seeing is the same as knowing. Forms of Blackness offers a thoughtful and original account of how race is shaped not simply by appearance, but by the ways we learn to see. Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work explores the intersections of religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, especially within African diasporic communities in the Netherlands. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/caribbean-studies

    55 min

  2. Jun 25

    Michelle Chase and Isabella Cosse eds., "The Cuban Revolution and the New Left: Transnational Histories of Gender, Sexuality, and Family" (U Florida Press, 2026)

    Understanding overlooked dimensions of the Cuban Revolution and its impact on the global left in the 1960s and beyond. This volume, The Cuban Revolution and the New Left: Transnational Histories of Gender, Sexuality, and Family (University of Florida Press, 2026) reconsiders revolutionary Cuba's global influence by shifting the focus from high-level political leaders to perspectives traditionally sidelined, offering new insights into how everyday lives, family dynamics, and notions of gender and sexuality impacted revolutionary transformation. Its expansive scope uncovers ties between Cuba and Latin America, the United States, Africa, and Asia, examining the interplay of global forces including new models of mass consumption, feminist and LGBTQ+ movements, and national liberation struggles. Chapters include analyses of Chinese reinterpretations of a Cuban play, Angela Davis's influential visits to the island, Cuba's complex relations with Black militants in Angola, and a Mexican transgender and disability activist who reimagined Che Guevara's legacy. They also present research on Cuba's solidarity campaigns with Vietnam, foreign journalists who covered the revolution, the role of consumption and fashion, and the lasting impact of the revolution's refugee policies on exiled children and families from the Southern Cone. Through its interdisciplinary sociocultural approach, this volume challenges conventional top-down narratives by foregrounding the interplay between grassroots actors and transnational affairs. It is an essential resource for scholars, students, and anyone interested in the multilayered stages of the Cuban Revolution and its continued relationship with global politics and culture. A volume in the series Caribbean Crossroads: Race, Identity, and Freedom Struggles, edited by Lillian Guerra, Devyn Spence Benson, April Mayes, and Solsiree del Moral Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Contributors: Tanya Harmer | Emily Snyder | Felipe CesarCamilo Caro Romero | Ailynn Torres Santana | Robert Franco | MichelleChase | Isabella Cosse | Siwei Wang | Ximena Espeche | Sarah J. Seidman | Rafael Cesar | Alexis Baldacci Michelle Chase is an associate professor of history at Pace University. Isabella Cosse is a professor of history at Universidad Nacional de San Martín and researcher at Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET) Katie L. Coldiron is a librarian and doctoral candidate in history at Florida International University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/caribbean-studies

    42 min

  3. Jun 11

    Don Thomas Deere, "The Invention of Order: On the Coloniality of Space" (Duke UP, 2026)

    In The Invention of Order: On the Coloniality of Space (Duke University Press, 2026), Don Thomas Deere retraces the colonial origins of spatial organization in the Americas and the Caribbean and its lasting impact on modern structures of knowledge, power, race, gender as well as understandings of global modernity. The coloniality of space dispossessed Indigenous, African, and mixed populations as it constructed new systems of control and movement. Deere demonstrates how these developments manifested, among other forms, in urban grid patterns imposed during the development of Spanish colonial cities as well as totalizing trade routes crisscrossing the Atlantic. Drawing on a range of thinkers including Enrique Dussel, Édouard Glissant, and Sylvia Wynter, Deere reveals how movement—who travels, who settles, and who is excluded—becomes an essential component of control under colonial rule. Against the violence of spatial reordering, Deere outlines how novel forms of resistance and insurgency geographies still take hold, particularly in the Caribbean, where landscapes remain excessive, eruptive, and uncaptured by the order of modernity. Don Thomas Deere is Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at Texas A&M University. He previously taught at Wesleyan University and received his PhD with distinction from DePaul University and BA from Cornell University. He is a Mellon Mays fellow and the recipient of a Mellon Career Enhancement Faculty Fellowship. His research focuses on the intersections of Latin American, Caribbean, and Contemporary Continental Philosophy. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/caribbean-studies

    46 min

  4. Jun 10

    Justin F Jackson, "The Work of Empire: War, Occupation, and the Making of American Colonialism in Cuba and the Philippines" (UNC Press, 2025)

    In 1898, on the eve of the Spanish-American War, the US Army seemed minuscule and ill-equipped for global conflict. Yet over the next fifteen years, its soldiers defeated Spain and pacified nationalist insurgencies in both Cuba and the Philippines. Despite their lack of experience in colonial administration, American troops also ruled and transformed the daily lives of the 8 million people who inhabited these tropical islands.How was this relatively small and inexperienced army able to wage wars in Cuba and the Philippines and occupy them? American soldiers depended on tens of thousands of Cubans and Filipinos, both for military operations and civil government. Whether compelled to labor for free or voluntarily working for wages, Cubans and Filipinos, suspended between civilian and soldier status, enabled the making of a new US overseas empire by interpreting, guiding, building, selling sex, and many other kinds of work for American troops. In The Work of Empire: War, Occupation, and the Making of American Colonialism in Cuba and the Philippines (UNC Press, 2025), Justin Jackson reveals how their labor forged the politics, economics, and culture of American colonialism in Cuba and the Philippines and left an enduring imprint on these islands and the US Army itself. Jackson offers new ways to understand the rise of American military might and how it influenced a globalizing imperial world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/caribbean-studies

    1h 17m

  5. Jun 9

    Tania Sengupta and Stuart King eds., "Reclaiming Colonial Architecture" (Routledge, 2024)

    Reclaiming Colonial Architecture (Routledge, 2024) explores the built inheritance of colonialism and considers how architects, heritage practitioners, students, communities, and activists might narrate, care for, transform, or challenge them today. Awarded the SAHGB’s Colvin Medal in 2025, the book draws on a variety of authors to combine historical context with thematically organised case studies across urban and architectural scales. This interview was conducted by Matthew Wells, Senior Lecturer in Architectural History at the University of Manchester. His research explores nineteenth-century European architecture, focusing on artistic techniques, technology, and political economy. Wells is the author of Modelling the Metropolis: The Architectural Model in Victorian London (2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/caribbean-studies

    56 min

  6. May 26

    Petal Kimberly Samuel, "The Quiet Zone: Caribbean Expressive Cultures and the Feminist Aesthetics of Disturbance" (Rutgers UP, 2026)

    A serene beach. The classroom of an elite private school. The still nights in an upscale residential neighborhood. An acclaimed poet with a quiet, dignified mode of address. The sonic etiquette and experience of quiet is integral to each of these scenes. The Quiet Zone: Caribbean Expressive Cultures and the Feminist Aesthetics of Disturbance (Rutgers UP, 2026) examines what the emergence of quiet as an elite aesthetic, privilege, and entitlement means for minoritized people who are often narrated as loud, disruptive, and disturbing, sonically, visually, and otherwise. Taking the Caribbean and its diasporas as its key sites of study, the book explores what we can learn from efforts to transform the region into the quintessential site of quiet leisure, in part, through the enactment of regimes of sonic discipline and surveillance directed against its majority Black population. Analyzing the work of Afro-Caribbean artists that catalog and critique sonic surveillance, the book questions the ways that quiet gets produced both as a regulatory ideal of racial, gender, sexual, national, and civilizational belonging and as a universal object of desire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/caribbean-studies

    1h 13m

  7. May 14

    Martin Munro and Eliana Vagalau eds., "Jean-Claude Charles: A Reader's Guide" (Liverpool UP, 2022)

    Despite being a major figure of Haitian literature, Jean-Claude Charles (1949-2008) has received relatively little scholarly attention to date. Jean-Claude Charles: A Reader's Guide (Liverpool UP, 2022) seeks to serve as an introduction to the work and universe of this unique and capital writer to an English-language readership. The essays in the collection are organized along three major axes: contextual articles, placing Charles' work within the larger Haitian literary landscape, punctual articles, addressing specific themes in a selection of Charles' books, and author testimonials, attesting to Charles' work's importance both to his contemporaries and to a new generation of writers. With the ongoing republication of Charles' work by Mémoire d'encrier in Montreal, and the increasing interest in the author, the proposed volume is timely and necessary, and is in large part a critical accompaniment to the republishing programme. Described by Dany Laferrière as "most brilliant Haitian author of his generation," Charles has until recently remained largely unread and little understood. As the various chapters in the volume show, Charles is an author for now, and the collection will accompany readers seeking strikingly original insights on issues such as race, migration, and exile, and the role of the author and literature in times of crisis. Guest Eliana Văgălău is Associate Professor and director of the French program at Loyola University Chicago. Her research on francophone Caribbean literature and contemporary philosophy focuses on the relationship between aesthetics and politics, as well as on questions of transnationalism, diaspora, and sexuality. In addition to co-editing this volume, she has published articles on the work of authors such as Maryse Condé, James Noël, and Jean-Claude Charles. As a founding member of the Collectif Jean-Claude Charles, she dedicates much of her work to making visible the work of this fundamental Haitian author. She has published translations of literary and philosophical texts and is currently completing an essay on contemporary French Caribbean fiction. By teaching a course on Black Paris, her extensive collaborations with contemporary Black artists and writers living in France today, as well as serving as co-organizer of the Black Europe Symposium in 2023 at Loyola University Chicago, she has developed a secondary research interest in the city of Paris as achief site of Black transnational encounters. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progresson posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/caribbean-studies

    37 min

  8. Apr 15

    Rawlston Williams, "The Caribbean Cookbook" (Phaidon Press, 2026)

    An exploration of Caribbean cuisine and culinary history, featuring more than 380 authentic home cooking recipes from across the region Caribbean cuisine reveals a culture of boundless imagination and creativity. It is the result of resourcefulness and ingenuity, where the need to survive and thrive shaped dishes that stand as powerful representations of its various cultures. In The Caribbean Cookbook, chef Rawlston Williams celebrates the diverse foods, flavors, and culinary traditions of this vibrant region. Featuring more than 380 recipes from 28 countries and island nations, the book includes classic marinades, sauces, and preserves; broths and soups; rices, grains, and vegetables; and chapters dedicated to Sea & River, On Land, Flour, Sugar, Juice, and Rum. The iconic ingredients synonymous with the Caribbean - citrus, nutmeg, coconut, tamarind, pimento, pineapple, rum - are showcased throughout, with spices as the stars, elevating other ingredients to create layered and satisfying dishes. This intensively researched recipe collection includes both beloved classics and lesser-known specialties. Home cooks around the world will discover Jamaica's Jerk Chicken and Dominica's Callaloo Soup; Puerto Rico's plantain-based Mofongo; Green Fig Salad from Saint Lucia; Haiti's Seafood Creole; a sweet Cashew Cake from Aruba; and other authentic dishes. There's plenty for armchair travelers to enjoy, too: Rawlston's descriptions of the islands' histories, culture, and traditions bring each recipe to life, while stunning color photography of the food and landscapes offers a whirlwind journey across one of the world's most beautiful destinations. Beautifully designed in bold tropical shades, The Caribbean Cookbook is a powerful, joyful ode to the many flavors of this incredible region.  Dr. N'Kosi Oates is a curator. He earned his Ph.D. in the Department of Africana Studies from Brown University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/caribbean-studies

    33 min
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About

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/caribbean-studies

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