The beautiful Caribbean basin is fertile ground for a study of capitalism past and present. Transnational corporations move money and labor around the region, as national regulations are reworked to promote conditions benefiting private capital. Globalizing the Caribbean offers a probing account of the region’s experience of economic globalization while considering gendered and racialized social relations and the frequent exploitation of workers. Jeb Sprague focuses on the social and material nature of this new era in the history of world capitalism. He combines an historical overview of capitalism in the region with theoretical analysis backed by case studies. Sprague elaborates upon the role of class formation and the restructuring of local states. He considers both U.S. hegemony, and how various upsurges from below and crises occur. He examines the globalization of the cruise ship and mining businesses, looks at the growth of migrant labor and reverse flow of remittances, and describes the evolving role of export processing and supranational associations. In doing so, Sprague shows how transnationally oriented elites have come to rule the Caribbean, and how capitalist globalization in the region occurs alongside shifting political, institutional, and organizational dynamics.

How do recent trends toward globalization affect the Caribbean, a region whose suppliers, production, markets, and politics have been globalized for centuries? What is the status of neoliberal development policy in the Caribbean, where the rewards for belt tightening and economic opening have been slow in coming? How have Caribbean policymakers and citizens responded to and resisted the pressures to conform to the new rules of the global economy? By examining these questions through the lens of political economy, this volume explores the interaction among development, trade, foreign policy, the environment, tourism, gender relations, and migration. With its global implications, this book will be invaluable for students and scholars from all disciplines who are concerned with the impact of development and globalization.

Challenging the main ways we debate globalization, Global Displacements reveals how uneven geographies of capitalist development shape—and are shaped by—the aspirations and everyday struggles of people in the global South. Makes an original contribution to the study of globalization by bringing together critical development and feminist theoretical approaches Opens up new avenues for the analysis of global production as a long-term development strategy Contributes novel theoretical insights drawn from the everyday experiences of disinvestment and precarious work on people’s lives and their communities Represents the first analysis of increasing uneven development among countries in the Caribbean Calls for more rigorous studies of long accepted notions of the geographies of inequality and poverty in the global South

The Caribbean ranks among the earliest and most completely globalized regions in the world. From the first moment Europeans set foot on the islands to the present, products, people, and ideas have made their way back and forth between the region and other parts of the globe with unequal but inexorable force. An inventory of some of these unprecedented multidirectional exchanges, this volume provides a measure of, as well as a model for, new scholarship on globalization in the region. Ten essays by leading scholars in the field of Caribbean studies identify and illuminate important social and cultural aspects of the region as it seeks to maintain its own identity against the unrelenting pressures of globalization. These essays examine cultural phenomena in their creolized forms--from sports and religion to music and drink--as well as the Caribbean manifestations of more universal trends--from racial inequality and feminist activism to indebtedness and economic uncertainty. Throughout, the volume points to the contending forces of homogeneity and differentiation that define globalization and highlights the growing agency of the Caribbean peoples in the modern world. Contributors: Antonio Benitez-Rojo (1931-2004) Alex Dupuy, Wesleyan University Juan Flores, City University of New York Graduate Center Jorge L. Giovannetti, University of Puerto Rico Aline Helg, University of Geneva Franklin W. Knight, The Johns Hopkins University Anthony P. Maingot, Florida International University Teresita Martinez-Vergne, Macalester College Helen McBain, Economic Commission for Latin America & the Caribbean, Trinidad Frances Negron-Muntaner, Columbia University Valentina Peguero, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point Raquel Romberg, Temple University

Prologue: Globalization, globality, globe-stone / Patrick Chamoiseau -- Introduction / Eva Sansavior and Richard Scholar -- The archipelago goes global: late Glissant and the early modern isolario / Richard Scholar -- How globalization invented Indians in the Caribbean / Patricia Seed -- Precocious modernity: environmental change in the early Caribbean / Philip D. Morgan -- 'Slaves' in my family: French modes of servitude in the New World / Christopher L. Miller -- Paradoxical encounters: the essay as a space of globalization in Montaigne's 'Des cannibales' and Maryse Conde's "O brave new world' / Eva Sansavior -- Tobacco: the commodification of the Caribbean and the origins of globalization / Guillaume Pigeard de Gurbert -- The amaranth paradigm: Amerindian indigenous glocality in the Caribbean / Judith Misrahi-Barak -- Aluminium: globalizing Caribbean mobilities, Caribbeanizing global mobilities / Mimi Sheller -- Race and modernity in Hispaniola: tropical matters and development perspectives / David Howard -- Local, national, regional, global: Glissant and the postcolonial manifesto / Charles Forsdick -- Tropical apocalypse: globalization and the Caribbean end times / Martin Munro

Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean is the first academic work on Muslims in the English-speaking Caribbean. Khan focuses on the fiction, poetry and music of Islam in Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica, combining archival research, ethnography, and literary analysis to argue for a historical continuity of Afro- and Indo-Muslim presence and cultural production in the Caribbean: from Arabic-language autobiographical and religious texts written by enslaved Sufi West Africans in nineteenth century Jamaica, to early twentieth century fictions of post-indenture South Asian Muslim indigeneity and El Dorado, to the 1990 Jamaat al-Muslimeen attempted government coup in Trinidad and its calypso music, to judicial cases of contemporary interaction between Caribbean Muslims and global terrorism. Khan argues that the Caribbean Muslim subject, the "fullaman," a performative identity that relies on gendering and racializing Islam, troubles discourses of creolization that are fundamental to postcolonial nationalisms in the Caribbean.

The geo-political significance of the Caribbean, its growing importance as a major transshipment gateway for illegal drugs coming from Latin America to the United States, issues of national security, vulnerability to corruption, increases in the level of violence and social disorder, have all raised serious questions not only about the notions of sovereignty, democracy and development but also about the long-term viability of these nations. Recognized experts in the field make a strategic intervention into the discourse on these important topics, but the importance of their contribution resides in its challenge to conventional wisdom on these matters, and the multidisciplinary approach they employ.