Lara Putnam

Shalini Puri

This book provides a much-needed study of the lived experience of militarization in the Caribbean from 1914 to the present. It offers an alternative to policy and security studies by drawing on the perspectives of literary and cultural studies, history, anthropology, ethnography, music, and visual art. Rather than opposing or defending militarization per se, this book focuses attention on how Caribbean people negotiate militarization in their everyday lives. The volume explores topics such as the US occupation of Haiti; British West Indians in World War I; the British naval invasion of Anguilla; military bases including Chaguaramas, Vieques and Guantánamo; the militarization of the police; sex work and the military; drug wars and surveillance; calypso commentaries; private security armies; and border patrol operations.

Caribbean Military Encounters

Drawing on the long and varied history of discourses of cultural hybridity across the caribbean, this book explores the rich and fraught cultural crossings that are often theorized homogeneously in postcolonial studies as 'hybridity'. What is the relationship of cultural hybridity to social equality? Why have some forms of hybridity been enshrined in the caribbean imagination and others disavowed? What is the appeal of cultural hybridity to nationalist and post-nationalist projects alike? What can we learn from the hybridization of Afro-caribbean and Indo-caribbean cultures set in motion by slavery and indentureship? In answering these questions, this book intervenes in several important debates in postcolonial studies about cultural resistance and popular agency, feminism and cultural nationalism, the relations between postmodernism and postcolonialism, and the status of nationalism in an age of globalization.

Shalini Puri

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