Afro-Caribbean personalities coupled with trade unions and organizations provided the ideology and leadership to empower the working class and also hastened the end of colonialism in the Anglophone Caribbean.

Recipient of the Gordon K. Lewis Memorial Award for Caribbean Scholarship Marcus Garvey, Amy Jacques Garvey, Claude McKay, Claudia Jones, C.L.R. James, Stokely Carmichael—the roster of immigrants from the Caribbean who have had a profound impact on the development of radical politics in the United States is a long one. In this magisterial work, Winston James focuses on the twentieth century’s first wave of inspirational writers and activists from the Caribbean and their contribution to political dissidence in America. Examining the way in which the characteristics of the societies they left shaped their perceptions of the land to which they traveled, Winston James draws sharp differences between Hispanic, Anglophone, and other non-Hispanic arrivals. He explores the interconnections between the Cuban independence struggle, Puerto Rican nationalism, Afro-American feminism, and black communism in the first turbulent decades of the twentieth century. He also provides fascinating insights into the peculiarities of Puerto Rican radicalism’s impact in New York City and recounts the remarkable story of Afro-Cuban radicalism in Florida. Virgin Islander Hubert Harrison, whom A. Philip Randolph dubbed “the father of Harlem radicalism,” is rescued from the historical shadows by James’s analysis of his pioneering contribution to Afro-America’s radical tradition. In addition to a subtle re-examination of Garvey’s Universal Negro Movement Association—including the exertions and contributions of its female members—James provides the most detailed exploration so far undertaken of Cyril Briggs and his little-known but important African Blood Brotherhood. This diligently researched, wide ranging and sophisticated book will be welcomed by all those interested in the Caribbean and its émigrés, the Afro-American current within America’s radical tradition, and the history, politics, and culture of the African diaspora.

This book illustrates the parallel struggles among Blacks in the US and the Caribbean for equality and greater political participation and equal treatment during the 1960s and 1970s. In recounting the historical evolution of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movement, this book focuses on lesser-known individuals and groups such as the Students for Racial Equality. Jerome Teelucksingh argues that these personalities and smaller organizations made valid contributions to the betterment their respective societies, connecting their work to both the cultural and social justice history of Civil Rights and to the contemporary struggles of cultural and political experience of Blacks in American and Caribbean society. The book also distinctively illustrates the contributions of Whites, ethnic minorities and non-Christians in a diverse campaign for greater political participation, better governance, poverty reduction, equality and tolerance.

In 1934 the republic of Haiti celebrated its 130th anniversary as an independent nation. In that year, too, another sort of Haitian independence occurred, as the United States ended nearly two decades of occupation. In the first comprehensive political history of postoccupation Haiti, Matthew Smith argues that the period from 1934 until the rise of dictator Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier to the presidency in 1957 constituted modern Haiti's greatest moment of political promise. Smith emphasizes the key role that radical groups, particularly Marxists and black nationalists, played in shaping contemporary Haitian history. These movements transformed Haiti's political culture, widened political discourse, and presented several ideological alternatives for the nation's future. They were doomed, however, by a combination of intense internal rivalries, pressures from both state authorities and the traditional elite class, and the harsh climate of U.S. anticommunism. Ultimately, the political activism of the era failed to set Haiti firmly on the path to a strong independent future.

“A truly excellent contribution that unearths new and largely unknown evidence about relationships between Puerto Ricans and African-Americans and white Americans in the continental United States and Puerto Rico. Alamo-Pastrana revises how race is to be studied and understood across national, cultural, colonial, and hierarchical cultural relations.”—Zaire Zenit Dinzey-Flores, author of Locked In, Locked Out: Gated Communities in a Puerto Rican City Puerto Rico’s colonial relationship with the United States and its history of intermixture of native, African, and Spanish inhabitants has prompted inconsistent narratives about race and power in the colonial territory. Departing from these accounts, early twentieth-century writers, journalists, and activists scrutinized both Puerto Rico’s and the United States’s institutionalized racism and colonialism in an attempt to spur reform, leaving an archive of oft-overlooked political writings. In Seams of Empire, Carlos Alamo-Pastrana uses racial imbrication as a framework for reading this archive of little-known Puerto Rican, African American, and white American radicals and progressives, both on the island and the continental United States. By addressing the concealed power relations responsible for national, gendered, and class differences, this method of textual analysis reveals key symbolic and material connections between marginalized groups in both national spaces and traces the complexity of race, racism, and conflict on the edges of empire.

Although the Caribbean Left has made significant contributions to political development in its region, until now little attempt has been made to chronicle and analyze its activities. Ideology and Change provides the first comprehensive record and analysis of the experience of these political movements, organizations, and trends in the English-speaking Caribbean. Perry Mars views the Left as a dynamic force that has made indelible contributions toward advancing democracy since the 1940s, and he here examines the contributions of its organizations at both theoretical and practical levels. He identifies their role in Caribbean political culture and processes, the problems they face, and the strategies they employ toward political change within a hazardous political and social environment. Mars argues, however, that the entire Leftist movement in the Caribbean has been seriously circumscribed by both the nature of its political environment and the class character of its leadership, and that much of the failure of the Left can be attributed to inertia imposed by capitalism and the limitations of the middle classes that invariably lead leftist movements. He shows how the Caribbean Left began gradually shifting to the right even before the breakdown of communism in Europe and the self-destruction of Grenada's New Jewel Movement in 1983, and has now become almost unrecognizably transformed. His analysis of Leftist trends is cast within a global political-economic framework utilizing Gramscian concepts of hegemony and counter-hegemonic struggle. Because their impact has been out of proportion to their membership and constituencies, these movements are an especially important subject ofstudy. By examining how political radicalization takes place in an aggressively conservative milieu and addressing the implications of these findings for change on the part of weaker groups, Ideology and Change can help both scholars and activists better understand past successes and failures and prospects for future contributions to the region's development

"Representing Radical Politics in Anglophone Caribbean Literature After Independence" examines the depiction of black radicalism across multiple works by V. S. Naipaul, Sam Selvon, Merle Collins, and Earl Lovelace--the first writers of fiction to address the emergence of Black Power in the Caribbean. These authors repurpose, expand, and revise their portraits of Caribbean resistance movements in the wake of decolonization and in so doing betray the limitations inherent in the literary forms that their representations take. I argue that reading these authors alongside each other illuminates a myriad of formal difficulties that prevent Afro-Caribbean revolutionary struggle from being portrayed as something other than mere mimicry of Anglo-American forms. When read in turn, each author illustrates the evolving search for a form amenable to the fictive depiction of a radical politics indigenous to black West Indian culture. Collectively, their works either manifest or challenge the inability to recognize the uniquely Caribbean relationship of blackness to radicalism due to the region's politics being seen until the 1980s as imitating or secondary to British or African American modes. The dissertation finds that, respectively, the authors' testing of literary forms moves from mimicry to parody to allegory before culminating in Lovelace's most recent novel, Is Just a Movie (2011), a work of historiographic metafiction that spotlights the representation of Caribbean Black Power as parodic only to dismantle that interpretation as myopic. The focus of my dissertation on the literature of black radicalism in Trinidad, Grenada, and the U.K. makes an important contribution to the field of Caribbean Studies in its demonstration of how literary forms bring into representation a global Black Power Movement that is thought to have failed as a viable political enterprise in the West Indies. It shows how Collins's and Lovelace's complex interpretations of Caribbean Black Power counter and broaden Naipaul's and Selvon's oversimplifications of the movement.

On August 7, 1989, Congressman Mickey Leland departed on a flight from Addis Ababa, with his thirteen-member delegation of Ethiopian and American relief workers and policy analysts, bound for Ethiopia's border with Sudan. This was Leland's seventh official humanitarian mission in his nearly decade-long drive to transform U.S. policies toward Africa to conform to his black internationalist vision of global cooperation, antiracism, and freedom from hunger. Leland's flight never arrived at its destination. The plane crashed, with no survivors. When Leland embarked on that delegation, he was a forty-four-year-old, deeply charismatic, fiercely compassionate, black, radical American. He was also an elected Democratic representative of Houston's largely African American and Latino Eighteenth Congressional District. Above all, he was a self-proclaimed "citizen of humanity." Throughout the 1980s, Leland and a small group of former radical-activist African American colleagues inside and outside Congress exerted outsized influence to elevate Africa's significance in American foreign affairs and to move the United States from its Cold War orientation toward a foreign policy devoted to humanitarianism, antiracism, and moral leadership. Their internationalism defined a new era of black political engagement with Africa. In This Land of Plenty presents Leland as the embodiment of larger currents in African American politics at the end of the twentieth century. But a sober look at his aspirations shows the successes and shortcomings of domestic radicalism and aspirations of politically neutral humanitarianism during the 1980s, and the extent to which the decade was a major turning point in U.S. relations with the African continent. Exploring the links between political activism, electoral politics, and international affairs, Benjamin Talton not only details Leland's political career but also examines African Americans' successes and failures in influencing U.S. foreign policy toward African and other Global South countries.

Caribbean Studies Association Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Award - Honorable Mention The initial push for a federation among British Caribbean colonies might have originated among colonial officials and white elites, but the banner for federation was quickly picked up by Afro-Caribbean activists who saw in the possibility of a united West Indian nation a means of securing political power and more. In Building a Nation, Eric Duke moves beyond the narrow view of federation as only relevant to Caribbean and British imperial histories. By examining support for federation among many Afro-Caribbean and other black activists in and out of the West Indies, Duke convincingly expands and connects the movement's history squarely into the wider history of political and social activism in the early to mid-twentieth century black diaspora. Exploring the relationships between the pursuit of Caribbean federation and black diaspora politics, Duke convincingly posits that federation was more than a regional endeavor; it was a diasporic, black nation-building undertaking--with broad support in diaspora centers such as Harlem and London--deeply immersed in ideas of racial unity, racial uplift, and black self-determination. A volume in this series New World Diasporas, edited by Kevin A. Yelvington