A masterwork of travel literature and of history: voyaging from Cuba to Jamaica, Puerto Rico to Trinidad, Haiti to Barbados, and islands in between, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of each society, its
A masterwork of travel literature and of history: voyaging from Cuba to Jamaica, Puerto Rico to Trinidad, Haiti to Barbados, and islands in between, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of each society, its culture and politics, connecting this region's common heritage to its fierce grip on the world's imagination.
From the moment Columbus gazed out from the Santa Maria's deck in 1492 at what he mistook for an island off Asia, the Caribbean has been subjected to the misunderstandings and fantasies of outsiders. Running roughshod over the place, they have viewed these islands and their inhabitants as exotic allure to be consumed or conquered. The Caribbean stood at the center of the transatlantic slave trade for more than three hundred years, with societies shaped by mass migrations and forced labor. But its people, scattered across a vast archipelago and separated by the languages of their colonizers, have nonetheless together helped make the modern world its politics, religion, economics, music, and culture. Jelly-Schapiro gives a sweeping account of how these islands inhabitants have searched and fought for better lives. With wit and erudition, he chronicles this place where globalization began, and introduces us to its forty million people who continue to decisively shape our world.
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is the author of Island People: The Caribbean and the World and the co-editor, with Rebecca Solnit, of Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas. His work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, Harper's, The Believer, The Nation, Artforum, American Quarterly and Transition, among many other publications, and he is the recipient of fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Social Science Research Council. He earned his PhD in geography at UC-Berkeley, and is currently a visiting scholar at the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU.