In this original and compelling book, Mary Chamberlain explores the nature and meaning of migration for Barbadians who migrated to Britain and elsewhere. It is a unique oral and social history, based on life-story interviews across three or more generations of Barbadian families. Locating migration within the contemporary debate on modernity, Narratives of Exile and Return highlights the continuing role of migration in shaping the culture and history of Barbados. But it does more by providing post-modern theorizing with concrete national and ethnic settings.

This anthology represents important and original directions in the study of Caribbean migration. It takes a comparative perspective on the Caribbean people's migratory experiences to North America, Europe, and within the Caribbean. Using a multi-disciplinary approach, the book discusses: * the causes of migration * the experiences of migrants * the historical, cultural and political processes * issues of gender and imperialism * the methodology of migration studies, including oral history.

A historical and ethnographic study of the conflict between global transportation and rural development as the two intersect at the Panama Canal. In this innovative book, Ashley Carse traces the water that flows into and out from the Panama Canal to explain how global shipping is entangled with Panama's cultural and physical landscapes. By following container ships as they travel downstream along maritime routes and tracing rivers upstream across the populated watershed that feeds the canal, he explores the politics of environmental management around a waterway that links faraway ports and markets to nearby farms, forests, cities, and rural communities. Carse draws on a wide range of ethnographic and archival material to show the social and ecological implications of transportation across Panama. The Canal moves ships over an aquatic staircase of locks that demand an enormous amount of fresh water from the surrounding region. Each passing ship drains 52 million gallons out to sea—a volume comparable to the daily water use of half a million Panamanians. Infrastructures like the Panama Canal, Carse argues, do not simply conquer nature; they rework ecologies in ways that serve specific political and economic priorities. Interweaving histories that range from the depopulation of the U.S. Canal Zone a century ago to road construction conflicts and water hyacinth invasions in canal waters, the book illuminates the human and nonhuman actors that have come together at the margins of the famous trade route. 2014 marks the 100th anniversary of the Panama Canal. Beyond the Big Ditch calls us to consider how infrastructures are materially embedded in place, producing environments with winners and losers.

Over fifty years after Jamaican and Trinidadian independence, Imagining Caribbean womanhood examines the links between beauty and politics in the Anglophone Caribbean, providing a first cultural history of Caribbean beauty competitions, spanning from Kingston to London. It traces the origins and transformation of female beauty contests in the British Caribbean from 1929 to 1970, through the development of cultural nationalism, race-conscious politics and decolonisation. The beauty contest, a seemingly marginal phenomenon, is used to illuminate the persistence of racial supremacy, the advance of consumer culture and the negotiation of race and nation through the idealised performance of cultured, modern beauty. Modern Caribbean femininity was intended to be politically functional but also commercially viable and subtly eroticised. The lively discussion surrounding beauty competitions, examined in this book, reveals that femininity was used to shape ideas about Caribbean modernity, citizenship, and political and economic freedom. This cultural history of Caribbean beauty competitions will be of value to scholarship on beauty, Caribbean studies, postcolonial studies, gender studies, ‘race’ and racism studies and studies of the body.

A major history of the impact of Caribbean migration to the United States. Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay, Claudia Jones, C.L.R. James, Stokely Carmichael, Louis Farakhan—the roster of immigrants from the Caribbean who have made a profound impact on the development of radical politics in the United States is extensive. In this magisterial and lavishly illustrated work, Winston James focuses on the twentieth century’s first waves of immigrants from the Caribbean and their contribution to political dissidence in America. Examining the way in which the characteristics of the societies they left shaped their perceptions of the land to which they traveled, Winston James draws sharp differences between Hispanic and English-speaking arrivals. He explores the interconnections between the Cuban independence struggle, Puerto Rican nationalism, Afro-American feminism, and black communism in the first turbulent decades of the twentieth century. He also provides fascinating insights into the impact of Puerto Rican radicalism in New York City and recounts the remarkable story of Afro-Cuban radicalism in Florida.

Professors Haines and Steckel bring together leading scholars to present an expansive population history of North America from pre-Columbian times to the present. Covering the populations of Canada, the United States, Mexico, and the Caribbean, including two essays on the Amerindian population, this volume takes advantage of considerable recent progress in demographic history to offer timely, knowlegeable information in a non-technical format. A statistical appendix summarizes basic demographic measures over time for the United States, Canada, and Mexico.