Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2020 -

This interesting and well-researched book adds considerably to our understanding of Caribbean geopolitical history in the 20th century. Watson (Bucknell Univ.) examines the leadership of Errol Walton Barrow, the first prime minister of Barbados, during the transformative period leading up to Barbadian independence in 1966. He outlines the complex formation of the Barbados Labor Party and its political counterpart, the Democratic Labor Party, within the context of a volatile and rapidly changing British colonial world. The book addresses Barbadian political change from an international perspective, illustrating how Barrow's leadership faced external pressures from global geopolitical forces, such as the fall of British colonialism, the Great Depression, WW II, the Cold War, and progressive Black Power movements, including the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Watson embraces a pan-Caribbean perspective to explain obstacles to the West Indies Federation and Barbadian independence while simultaneously highlighting the local political maneuvering of Barrow and other Barbadian political figures. He employs a sophisticated theoretical model grounded in Marxist political-economic thought to understand political and ideological change in late colonial Barbados.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels.

Freedom Roots narrates the history of the Caribbean islands from the late 15th century until the present from a "counter-plantation perspective." The main thread running throughout the narrative is land--specifically the tension between elite desires to extract wealth from it and popular efforts to derive autonomy from it. Dubois (Duke Univ.) and Turits (College of William and Mary) juxtapose the structures (colonialism and the plantation) that have historically dominated the region with the struggles of ordinary Caribbean denizens as they carved out independence against these prevailing conditions. The book is organized into two parts: the first focuses on the four centuries of colonial rule, and the second, beginning in 1898, examines what were then the region's largest independent nations (Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic) as well as the Anglophone Caribbean (especially Jamaica and Grenada) over the long 20th century. The epilogue carries forward the book's epistemological critique of systemic oppression by considering how the resistance and struggles for autonomy might help readers envision alternative, more just futures for the Caribbean and its peoples. This volume's accessible narrative quality and critical perspectives make it a great textbook for any Caribbean history course.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels.

Harms (Brandon Univ., Canada) offers a unique history of non-indigenous, or Ladina, feminism in Guatemala, providing a much-needed glimpse into the diverse histories of Latin American feminisms. This study helps readers understand how a racially divided country with a historically strong feminist movement among its ethnic elites became infamous for mass rapes and genocidal violence and, in the postwar period, high rates of femicide and decades of refugee flows due to gender-based violence. Harms argues that the maternal feminisms of Guatemalan elites existed since the 1880s, having found social support by adhering to accepted gender norms. However, the history of maternal feminisms later waned in the country's collective memory as new social feminisms that transgressed gender norms took hold in the revolutionary period, beginning in 1944. This volume brings this lost history to light by documenting the rise of maternal feminism in urban Guatemala through suffrage movements, Ladina women's engagement in military uprisings, international feminist organizations, and faith-based movements of the Catholic Church. The study challenges readers to question assumptions about linear histories of activism and the inherently progressive nature of feminisms.Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty.

Many have written about the Haitian Revolution, but the historical antecedent was Trinidad-born historian C. L. R. James. His classic 1938 history of the revolution, The Black Jacobins, began as the 1936 play Toussaint Louverture. Following its publication, James kept reworking the text, editing and revising the history for its 1963 edition (the most well known), which included an epilogue linking the Haitian Revolution and the then freshly minted Cuban Revolution. Even after this, James kept rewriting, reconsidering the impact of Marxism on his history, shaping Marxist historiography from a Caribbean perspective, and shifting the focus of the revolution away from such key actors as Louverture and toward more grassroots actors. This retelling found expression in James's 1967 play The Black Jacobins. In this addition to "The C. L. R. James Archives" series from Duke, Douglas (Univ. of Glasgow, UK) masterfully recounts this "book history" by delving into previously unexplored versions of James's manuscripts and interviews about his writing. This study is a must read for scholars interested in Caribbean and world history, particularly those interested in James's "bottom-up history" and how his constant reworking of political thought found expression in his histories of the Haitian Revolution.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

An interdisciplinary survey of the ways in which space is conceptualized, created, negotiated, and challenged throughout Latin America, this volume treats the subject broadly, focusing on cultural studies, film studies, environmental studies, gender, geography, politics, history, sociology, and current events. Authors employ several different theoretical frameworks, concentrating on different time periods throughout the 19th and 20th centuries and focusing on different locations within Latin America. Each essay is thoroughly grounded in current literature on the topic and within its respective discipline. Taken as a whole, this collection comprehensively dissects the concept of space from the perspectives of the political body, the marketplace, the urban, and the rural. Provoking thought and inviting discussion, this energetic bricolage of essays is essential reading for students and scholars who engage with the topic of space broadly, and especially for those with a narrower focus on Latin America.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Brown (Harvard Univ.) situates Tacky's Revolt as a single episode within a larger uprising of Coromantee (enslaved people in the Caribbean), a struggle that shook the very foundations of 18th-century Jamaica's slave society. The book aims to contextualize the African and Jamaican basis of the Coromantee war, identify slave leaders' backgrounds and aims, and describe the brutal suppression of the war while explicating how it shaped Atlantic and global history. The now-forgotten war perversely generated anti-slavery arguments, steered the British to centralize their Atlantic possessions (leading the American colonies to revolt), and set a model for revolutionaries in St. Domingue. Brown's arguments problematize conventional assumptions about slave resistance and merit deeper reflection, foremost that shared African ethnicity did not create a homogenous people or slave solidarity. Rather, a collective consciousness had to be forged through military coordination and masculine experiences, nurtured through spiritual oaths, and sustained through tortuous circumstances. Further, slaveholders' effective suppression of slave revolts was not inevitable. It involved armed troops; the punishing, policing force of the British Navy; and slaveholders' ability to draw from trustworthy black militants. Last, black military intellectual history is essential to the study of slave resistance.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.