ABSTRACT

The Caribbean has played a crucial geopolitical role in the Western pursuit of economic dominance, yet Eurocentric research usually treats the Caribbean as a peripheral region, consequently labelling the inhabitants as beings without agency.

Examining asymmetrical relations of power in the Greater Caribbean in historical and contemporary perspectives, this volume explores the region’s history of resistance and subversion of oppressive structures against the backdrop of the Caribbean’s central role for the accumulation of wealth of European and North American actors and the respective dialectics of modernity/coloniality, through a variety of experiences inducing migration, transnational exchange and transculturation. Contributors approach the Caribbean as an empowered space of opposition and agency and focus on perspectives of the region as a place of entanglements with a long history of political and cultural practices of resistance to colonization, inequality, heteronomy, purity, invisibilization, and exploitation.

An important contribution to the literature on agency and resistance in the Caribbean, this volume offers a new perspective on the region as a geopolitically, economically and culturally crucial space, and it will interest researchers in the fields of Caribbean politics, literature and heritage, colonialism, entangled histories, global studies perspectives, ethnicity, gender, and migration.

chapter |23 pages

Introduction

Narratives, politics, and aesthetics of resistance across the Caribbean and its diasporas

part I|111 pages

Narratives of/as resistance

chapter 1|15 pages

Using folklore to challenge contemporary social norms

Papa Bois, Mama D’Lo, and environmentalism in Caribbean literature

chapter 2|16 pages

Shadows pass the surface

Decolonial (re)configurations of indigenous presence in Merle Collins’s The Colour of Forgetting

chapter 4|28 pages

From anti-colonial to anti-modernist resistance

Historiopoetic transformations of the maroon in selected works of Édouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant

chapter 5|18 pages

Cultures of resistance

Dialectical images of the Haitian Revolution in Haitian culture and literature

chapter 6|13 pages

Postcolonial poetics

El reino de este mundo and the resistance of lo real maravilloso

part II|145 pages

Resistance in/as activism

chapter 7|14 pages

Caribbean activism for slavery reparations

An overview

chapter 8|18 pages

Debated existences, claimed histories

Black Indigenous women’s diasporic lives in Costa Rica

chapter 9|25 pages

Una Universidad Tomada

Resistance performances in the (re)construction of spaces of resistance and contention during the first wave of the 2010–2011 University of Puerto Rico student movement 1

chapter 10|21 pages

Troubling our intersections

A Caribbean feminist methodology as resistance approach

chapter 12|21 pages

Racism vs. socialism in Cuba

A misplaced conflict (notes on/against internal colonialism) 1

chapter 13|16 pages

“Let us be Moors”

Conversion to Islam in Cuba

chapter 14|16 pages

Thinking resistance

Critique and resistance in the philosophical concept of Foucault and in the postcolonial and decolonial theories of Bhabha and Mignolo