ABSTRACT
This chapter is inspired by Harrison’s reframing of what I see as the oft-disconnection of Caribbean studies from North American studies. Her discussion not only demonstrates how the Caribbean is connected to the United States but also how studies of the Caribbean and elsewhere can be intertwined. I began my anthropology career as a Caribbeanist, studying gender, work, and global economic shifts among women market traders (for my master’s thesis project) and banana farmers (for my dissertation project). My first book, which I published in 2006, was on St. Lucian banana producers’ responses to shifts in global trade policy for their export crop’s future in European markets. I explored the nation-and place-specific movements and narratives that small-scale Afro Caribbean and Indo Caribbean banana growers engaged as they challenged and made sense of an industry that threatened to edge them out of a long-guaranteed market.
