Caribbean New York


Book Description

Since 1965, West Indians have been emigrating to the United States in record numbers, and to New York City in particular. Caribbean New York shows how the new immigration is reshaping American race relations and sheds much-needed light on factors that underlie some of the city's explosive racial confrontations. Philip Kasinitz examines how two forces--racial solidarity and ethnic distinctiveness--have helped to shape the identity of New York's West Indian community. He compares "new" (post-1965) immigrants with West Indians who arrived earlier in the century, and looks in detail at the economic, political, and cultural rules that Afro-Caribbean immigrants have played in the city during each period.




City of Islands


Book Description

Tammy L. Brown uses the life stories of Caribbean intellectuals as “windows” into the dynamic history of immigration to New York and the long battle for racial equality in modern America. The majority of the 150,000 black immigrants who arrived in the United States during the first-wave of Caribbean immigration to New York hailed from the English-speaking Caribbean—mainly Jamaica, Barbados, and Trinidad. Arriving at the height of the Industrial Revolution and a new era in black culture and progress, these black immigrants dreamed of a more prosperous future. However, northern-style Jim Crow hindered their upward social mobility. In response, Caribbean intellectuals delivered speeches and sermons, wrote poetry and novels, and created performance art pieces challenging the racism that impeded their success. Brown traces the influences of religion as revealed at Unitarian minister Ethelred Brown's Harlem Community Church and in Richard B. Moore's fiery speeches on Harlem street corners during the age of the “New Negro.” She investigates the role of performance art and Pearl Primus's declaration that “dance is a weapon for social change” during the long civil rights movement. Shirley Chisholm's advocacy for women and all working-class Americans in the House of Representatives and as a presidential candidate during the peak of the Feminist Movement moves the book into more overt politics. Novelist Paule Marshall's insistence that black immigrant women be seen and heard in the realm of American Arts and Letters at the advent of “multiculturalism” reveals the power of literature. The wide-ranging styles of Caribbean campaigns for social justice reflect the expansive imaginations and individual life stories of each intellectual Brown studies. In addition to deepening our understanding of the long battle for racial equality in America, these life stories reveal the powerful interplay between personal and public politics.




Racial Migrations


Book Description

The gripping history of Afro-Latino migrants who conspired to overthrow a colonial monarchy, end slavery, and secure full citizenship in their homelands In the late nineteenth century, a small group of Cubans and Puerto Ricans of African descent settled in the segregated tenements of New York City. At an immigrant educational society in Greenwich Village, these early Afro-Latino New Yorkers taught themselves to be poets, journalists, and revolutionaries. At the same time, these individuals—including Rafael Serra, a cigar maker, writer, and politician; Sotero Figueroa, a typesetter, editor, and publisher; and Gertrudis Heredia, one of the first women of African descent to study midwifery at the University of Havana—built a political network and articulated an ideal of revolutionary nationalism centered on the projects of racial and social justice. These efforts were critical to the poet and diplomat José Martí’s writings about race and his bid for leadership among Cuban exiles, and to the later struggle to create space for black political participation in the Cuban Republic. In Racial Migrations, Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof presents a vivid portrait of these largely forgotten migrant revolutionaries, weaving together their experiences of migrating while black, their relationships with African American civil rights leaders, and their evolving participation in nationalist political movements. By placing Afro-Latino New Yorkers at the center of the story, Hoffnung-Garskof offers a new interpretation of the revolutionary politics of the Spanish Caribbean, including the idea that Cuba could become a nation without racial divisions. A model of transnational and comparative research, Racial Migrations reveals the complexities of race-making within migrant communities and the power of small groups of immigrants to transform their home societies.




Islands in the City


Book Description

"These superb essays illuminate the fascinating process of absorbing West Indian immigrants into New York City's multicultural but racially divided social fabric... They explore how gender, transnational networks, class, economic restructuring, and above all racial stereotyping have affected these black immigrants as they struggle for a better life and how their struggles have in turn influenced the contours of the larger society. The result is a model of multi-disciplinary analysis."—John Mollenkopf, co-author of Place Matters: A Metropolitics for the 21st Century "Islands in the City is a comprehensive collection of the recent findings of the foremost scholars in this field. The premier researchers on West Indians in New York City discuss migration from historical, statistical, theoretical, and experiential points of view. This volume will be used as a model for understanding migration in other areas and it will have importance beyond its field."—Wallace Zane, author of Journeys to the Spiritual Lands: The Natural History of a West Indian Religion "Nancy Foner has pulled together excellent essays by the leading scholars of the emerging study of West Indians in the United States. Islands in the City is a welcome book because of its informative essays on gender, occupation, and culture, to name but a few."—David Reimers, co-author of All the Nations Under Heaven: An Ethnic and Racial History of New York City "West Indians sit right at the center of the crucial divides of race, class, nationality, nativity, gender, generation, and identity. The insights of this book teach us much of what we need to know about our changing nation."—Jennifer Hochschild, author of Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation




Red International and Black Caribbean


Book Description

*Selected as one of openDemocracy's Best Political Books of 2017*This is the history of the black radicals who organised as Communists between the two imperialist wars of the twentieth century. It explores the political roots of a dozen organisations and parties in New York City, Mexico and the Black Caribbean, including the Anti-Imperialist League, and the American Negro Labour Congress and the Haiti Patriotic League, and reveals a history of myriad connections and shared struggle across the continent.This book reclaims the centrality of class consciousness and political solidarity amongst these black radicals, who are too often represented as separate from the international Communist movement which emerged after the Russian Revolution in 1917. Instead, it describes the inner workings of the 'Red International' in relation to struggles against racial and colonial oppression. It introduces a cast of radical characters including Richard Moore, Otto Huiswoud, Navares Sager, Grace Campbell, Rose Pastor Stokes and Wilfred Domingo.Challenging the 'great men' narrative, Margaret Stevens emphasises the role of women in their capacity as laborers; the struggles of peasants of colour; and of black workers in and around Communist parties.




A Million Aunties


Book Description

American-born artist Chris is forced to reconsider his conception of family during a visit to his mother’s Caribbean homeland. “Thoroughly satisfying . . . This bighearted narrative of love, loss, and family is handled with grace and beauty.” —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review “Alecia McKenzie’s tender new novel [is] an emotionally resonant ode to adopted families and community resilience.” —New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice After a personal tragedy upends his world, American-born artist Chris travels to his mother’s homeland in the Caribbean hoping to find some peace and tranquility. He plans to spend his time painting in solitude and coming to terms with his recent loss and his fractured relationship with his father. Instead, he discovers a new extended and complicated “family.” The people he meets help him to heal, even as he supports them in unexpected ways. Told from different points of view, this is a compelling novel about unlikely love, friendship, and community, with surprises along the way.




New York and the International Sound of Latin Music, 1940-1990


Book Description

New York City has long been a generative nexus for the transnational Latin music scene. Currently, there is no other place in the Americas where such large numbers of people from throughout the Caribbean come together to make music. In this book, Benjamin Lapidus seeks to recognize all of those musicians under one mighty musical sound, especially those who have historically gone unnoticed. Based on archival research, oral histories, interviews, and musicological analysis, Lapidus examines how interethnic collaboration among musicians, composers, dancers, instrument builders, and music teachers in New York City set a standard for the study, creation, performance, and innovation of Latin music. Musicians specializing in Spanish Caribbean music in New York cultivated a sound that was grounded in tradition, including classical, jazz, and Spanish Caribbean folkloric music. For the first time, Lapidus studies this sound in detail and in its context. He offers a fresh understanding of how musicians made and formally transmitted Spanish Caribbean popular music in New York City from 1940 to 1990. Without diminishing the historical facts of segregation and racism the musicians experienced, Lapidus treats music as a unifying force. By giving recognition to those musicians who helped bridge the gap between cultural and musical backgrounds, he recognizes the impact of entire ethnic groups who helped change music in New York. The study of these individual musicians through interviews and musical transcriptions helps to characterize the specific and identifiable New York City Latin music aesthetic that has come to be emulated internationally.




The Traveller's Tree


Book Description

In this, his first book, Patrick Leigh Fermor recounts his tales of a personal odyssey to the lands of the Traveller's Tree - a tall, straight-trunked tree whose sheath-like leaves collect copious amounts of water. He made his way through the long island chain of the West Indies by steamer, aeroplane and sailing ship, noting in his records of the voyage the minute details of daily life, of the natural surroundings and of the idiosyncratic and distinct civilisations he encountered amongst the Caribbean Islands. From the ghostly Ciboneys and the dying Caribs to the religious eccentricities like the Kingston Pocomaniacs and the Poor Whites in the Islands of the Saints, Patrick Leigh Fermor recreates a vivid world, rich and vigorous with life.




Saint X


Book Description

A New York Times Notable Book of 2020 "'Saint X' is hypnotic. Schaitkin's characters...are so intelligent and distinctive it feels not just easy, but necessary, to follow them. I devoured [it] in a day." –Oyinkan Braithwaite, New York Times Book Review When you lose the person who is most essential to you, who do you become? Recommended by Entertainment Weekly, included in Good Morning America's 20 Books We're Excited for in 2020 & named as one of Vogue's Best Books to Read This Winter, Bustle's Most Anticipated Books of February 2020, and O Magazine's 14 of the Best Books to Read This February! Hailed as a “marvel of a book” and “brilliant and unflinching,” Alexis Schaitkin’s stunning debut, Saint X, is a haunting portrait of grief, obsession, and the bond between two sisters never truly given the chance to know one another. Claire is only seven years old when her college-age sister, Alison, disappears on the last night of their family vacation at a resort on the Caribbean island of Saint X. Several days later, Alison’s body is found in a remote spot on a nearby cay, and two local men–employees at the resort–are arrested. But the evidence is slim, the timeline against it, and the men are soon released. The story turns into national tabloid news, a lurid mystery that will go unsolved. For Claire and her parents, there is only the return home to broken lives. Years later, Claire is living and working in New York City when a brief but fateful encounter brings her together with Clive Richardson, one of the men originally suspected of murdering her sister. It is a moment that sets Claire on an obsessive pursuit of the truth–not only to find out what happened the night of Alison’s death but also to answer the elusive question: Who exactly was her sister? At seven, Claire had been barely old enough to know her: a beautiful, changeable, provocative girl of eighteen at a turbulent moment of identity formation. As Claire doggedly shadows Clive, hoping to gain his trust, waiting for the slip that will reveal the truth, an unlikely attachment develops between them, two people whose lives were forever marked by the same tragedy. For readers of Emma Cline’s The Girls and Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies, Saint X is a flawlessly drawn and deeply moving story that culminates in an emotionally powerful ending.




Caribbean Diaspora in USA


Book Description

Caribbean Diaspora in the USA presents a new cultural theory based on an exploration of Caribbean religious communities in New York City. The Caribbean culture of New York demonstrates a cultural dynamism which embraces Spanish speaking, English speaking and French speaking migrants. All cultures are full of breaks and contradictions as Latin American and Caribbean theorists have demonstrated in their ongoing debate. This book combines unique research by the author in Caribbean New York with the theoretical discourse of Latin American and Caribbean scholars.