African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
218 p., Based on ten years of research, Economies of Desire is the first ethnographic study to examine the erotic underpinnings of transnational tourism. It offers startling insights into the commingling of sex, intimacy, and market forces in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, two nations where tourism has had widespread effects. In her multi-layered analyses, Amalia Cabezas reconceptualizes our understandings of informal economies (particularly "affective economies"), "sex workers," and "sexual tourism," and she helps us appreciate how money, sex and love are intertwined within the structure of globalizing capitalism.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Though only a small percentage of the quarter million Indians who came to Guyana, the South Indian Madrasis, now much dispersed through emigration to North America, played an influential role in Guyanese life. The Kali-Mai churches they established, for instance, now draw devotees from all Guyanese ethnic groups. At the heart of the narrative are the stories of the entrepreneurial Naga, like pot-salt in everything, his wife Chunoo, resolute in her sense of community and justice, and Hendree, Naga's sidekick, an idler, brilliant drummer and would-be healer. In their lives are played out the polarities which gave Madrasi life its extraordinary dynamism: its spirituality and earthiness, its respect for goodness - and delight in scampishness, its faithfulness to Madrasi culture and openness to the culture of others, particularly the Afro-Guyanese.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
232p., Using a unique four-dimensional lens to frame questions of diaspora in the writings of women from Haiti, Martinique, and Guadeloupe, Mehta expands notions of Caribbean identity.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
208 p., Analyzes literary representation of the island in Caribbean women's literature as a key component of the gendered construction of diasporic identity. This book centers on the representations of the island - whether in Anglophone, Hispanophone, or Francophone Caribbean literature - and the inherent contradictions they raise.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
294 p., Drawing on his groundbreaking ethnographic research in the Dominican Republic, Mark Padilla discovers a complex world where the global political and economic impact of tourism has led to shifting sexual identities, growing economic pressures, and new challenges for HIV prevention. In fluid prose, Padilla analyzes men who have sex with male tourists, yet identify themselves as “normal” heterosexual men and struggle to maintain this status within their relationships with wives and girlfriends.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
313 p., Analyzes the phenomenon of mati work, an old practice among Afro-Surinamese working-class women in which marriage is rejected in favor of male and female sexual partners. Wekker describes the lives of these women, who prefer to create alternative families of kin, lovers, and children, and gives a fascinating account of women's sexuality that is not limited to either heterosexuality or same-sex sexuality. She offers new perspectives on the lives of Caribbean women, transnational gay and lesbian movements, and an Afro-Surinamese tradition that challenges conventional Western notions of marriage, gender, identity, and desire.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
357 p., Focuses on the ethics of military and humanitarian intervention in Haiti during and after Haiti's 1991 coup. Explores the traumas of Haitian victims whose experiences were denied by U.S. officials and recognized only selectively by other humanitarian providers. Using first-person accounts from women survivors, James raises important new questions about humanitarian aid, structural violence, and political insecurity. She discusses the politics of postconflict assistance to Haiti and the challenges of promoting democracy, human rights, and justice in societies that experience chronic insecurity.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
214 p., "Collins's novel is a tribute to the Afro-Caribbean oral tradition, a vanishing landscape as well as an exploration in "life sense." Characters such as Carib, Mamag, and Willive struggle against forgetting the historical ties that have implications for the present. In the end Collins would have us understand that the humanity of a people, the survival of a people, rests with its young, the young's willful desire to present to its community what the textbooks do not: the history of ordinary people." --Adele S. Newson, Florida International University.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
246 p., With the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and the emancipation of all slaves throughout the British Empire in 1833, Britain washed its hands of slavery. Not so, according to Marika Sherwood, who sets the record straight in this provocative new book. In fact, Sherwood demonstrates Britain continued to contribute to and profit from the slave trade well after 1807, even into the twentieth century. Chapter 4 is about Cuba and Brazil, pp. 83-111.
Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
298 p., Showing how revolutionary and prerevolutionary values coexist in a potent and sometimes contradictory mix, Hamilton addresses changing patterns in heterosexual relations, competing views of masculinity and femininity, same-sex relationships and homophobia, AIDS, sexual violence, interracial relationships, and sexual tourism. Hamilton's examination of sexual experiences across generations and social groups demonstrates that sexual politics have been integral to the construction of a new revolutionary Cuban society.
