The promotional flier introducing this edited collection as a ‘novel and interdisciplinary volume on the dynamics of migration with comparative case studies of the Caribbean experience’ gets it half-right. The three editors, Margarita Cervantes-Rodríguez, Ramón Grosfoguel and Eric Mielants, have complementary yet different disciplinary backgrounds, and the 11 contributing authors also span the social sciences in disciplinary variety. So, ‘interdisciplinary’ this collection certainly is, but ‘novel’ it isn't. The flier's characterisation is perhaps an overstatement of this collection's themes and contribution to the considerable breadth and depth of scholarship that has addressed ‘the dynamics of Caribbean migration’, and to which some of the contributors and one of the editors in particular have added valuable and insightful treatise. The volume succeeds in making an interdisciplinary contribution, however, and the regional breadth of case studies helps its representativeness. It correctly depicts the Caribbean as an ‘anything-but’ homogeneous entity in terms of its migration dynamics, its colonial and post-colonial contexts, and its diversity of migration experiences in the metropolitan destinations of Western Europe and North America, and in its Caribbean source societies, in contemporary post-9/11 times – the ‘difficult to navigate’ neoliberal era of globalisation, as the editors stress in their introduction. On the other hand, the disciplinary diversity is accompanied by unfortunate differences in the quality of offerings, so that while some are insightful and complementary, others are a poor fit and are scarcely of note in comparison to other Caribbeanists' contributions on similar topics and contexts. Selectively, however, the collection contains enough informed scholarship to underwrite its overall value.

The three editors' introductory chapter, ‘Caribbean Migrations to Western Europe and the United States’, introduces the anthology by way of conceptual arguments that stress the geopolitical and historical contextualization of colonial legacies, post-colonial continuities and uneven core–periphery power relations in which the book's socio-historical contexts are framed. First, the region's diverse colonial legacies and the coloniality of power argument are detailed; this is followed by a second section that builds the connections between the coloniality of power, transnationalism and migrants' incorporation in the metropolitan destinations of Western Europe and the United States. A third and final conceptual section draws out conceptual links between critical thinking, critical border thinking and migration studies, and like the two earlier sections stresses the cultural, geopolitical and contextual differences between migrants' transnational experiences, both in metropolitan locales and in their source societies (to which some return for visits, or even permanently).

Rounding out the collection's introductory section is chap. 1, a stand-alone theoretical contribution by Nina Glick Schiller which presents her own arguments on ‘Theorizing about and beyond Transnational Processes’ as they have developed and taken shape since her original sallies into the transnational migration arena in the early 1990s. One notable clarification in this brief review chapter is the distinction made between the ‘transnational social spaces’ that migrants live in and the social and cultural flows and exchanges of information, knowledge and cultural messages of which they are a part, thereby stressing that it is migrants' lives and livelihoods that are central rather than the more abstract and subjective transfers of goods, services, ideas, knowledge and such that occur within transnational networks and across national borders. The rather stark contrast between these first two introductory chapters is magnified further by their lack of attachment to what follows, although there are occasional overlaps and complementary coincidences of the themes they espouse in the remaining sets of contributions.

Despite this introductory shortcoming, the remainder of the book is appropriately organised into three sections distinguished either by their metropolitan locations and national institutional barriers and entryways – as is part 1, ‘State Policies and Migrants' Strategies’ – their socio-cultural, ethnic, transnational spaces in the destination metropoles – as is part 2, ‘Identities, Countercultures and Ethnic Resilience’ – or their micro-scale, household and individual livelihood strategies – as is part 3, ‘Incorporation, Entrepreneurship and Household Strategies’.

Part 1 consists of three chapters, beginning with chap. 2, ‘Colonial Racism, Ethnicity and Citizenship: The Lessons of the Migration Experiences of French-Speaking Caribbean Populations’, authored by Michel Giraud; continuing in chap. 3, ‘From the Periphery to the Core: a Case Study on the migration and Incorporation of Recent Caribbean Immigrants in the Netherlands’, authored by Eric Mielants; and finishing with chap. 4, ‘Puerto Ricans in the United States and French West Indian Immigrants in France’, authored by Monique Milia-Marie-Luce. Shared colonial legacies link these contributions, yet they deal with different transatlantic metropolitan immigrant experiences (in France, the Netherlands and the United States). They commonly find that these Caribbean migrants face racism and experience ethnic discrimination and exclusion rather than incorporation and eventual segmented assimilation.

Part 2 also consists of three chapters, but these are not as easily complementary or generalisable, in large part because the scale (and scope) of examination is at the micro level. Tangible links to Glick-Schiller's second chapter of the introduction and her discussion of ‘transnational social spaces’ are not very apparent, which is a pity, in retrospect. This section starts with chap. 5, ‘Puerto Rican Migration and Settlement in South Florida: Ethnic Identities and Transnational Spaces’, authored by Elizabeth Aranda. Chap. 6, ‘Racialized Culture and Translocal Counter-Publics: Rumba and Social Disorder in New York and Havana’, authored by Lisa Maya Knauer, follows, and the section is completed by chap. 7, ‘The Making of Suriland: The Binational Development of a Black community between the Tropics and the North Sea’, authored by Livio Sansone. These are three ‘cultural anthropological’ interpretations and examinations of Caribbean migrants' daily lives, cultural transfers and socio-cultural senses of place in another set of distant metropolitan ‘social spaces’: South Florida, New York and Amsterdam, with South Florida/Miami linked to Puerto Rico, New York linked to Havana and Amsterdam linked to Paramaribo in Surinam as migration destinations and homeland sources of lasting significance and persistence. Humanistic, cultural praxis binds these three contributions together, but each stands too far apart to enable the reader to draw comparative conclusions.

Part 3 again consists of three chapters, and here too the first chapter is distinctly different in approach and scale of analysis to the following two, which adhere to a common household- and family-level scale of interpretation and explanation. Chap. 8, ‘Cubans and Dominicans: Is there a Latino Experience in the United States?’, is co-authored by John Logan and Wenquan Zhang. It is followed by chap. 9, ‘Dominican Women, Heads of Households in Spain’, authored by Laura Oso Casas, and chap. 10, ‘Identity and Kinship: Caribbean Transnational Narratives’, authored by Mary Chamberlain. These last two chapters stand apart from most of the others in this collection because they are perceptive, empirically based interpretations of transnational migrants' social experiences and practices, in which the resilience and strength of family ties, senses of belonging and closeness come through as abiding characteristics, whether they are discussing Dominican mothers in Madrid (chap. 9) or Jamaican West Indians in Britain or North America (chap. 10). The first contribution in this section doesn't fit at all well, because the sociological question posed concerning whether there is a common Hispanic Latino identity among Caribbean immigrants in the United States (and those from Central America and South America as well) is hardly a ‘null hypothesis’ of note these days.

For several reasons alluded to in earlier comments about the integration of this collection, the absence of a concluding chapter is a further disappointment. Not only does this mean that the relevance of the geopolitical themes stressed in the introduction – which are rarely included in many of the contributions – is not revisited, nor amplified in the subsequent offerings, except on occasion or in passing; it also means that there is no attempt by the editors to bring the contributions together or ‘triangulate’ the findings of the contributors' case studies under a common rubric of general themes and collective findings. Subheadings for each part and its threesome of chapters in which keywords such as ‘identities’, ‘ethnic resilience’ and ‘incorporation’ occur are not enough in and of themselves to provide readers with consensual arguments which, in the editors' words, ‘challenge canonical discourses on assimilation, immigrant incorporation, and identity formation’. A thoughtful conclusion would have provided just such a triangulation of the varied cases, but instead the reader (and this reviewer) is forced to find the necessary ‘quality of insights and observations’ in those selective contributions that appeal most when compared to others in terms of their additions to the already substantial body of scholarship on this topic. Despite the richness of coverage, the editors have missed an opportunity to turn this collection of conference offerings into a more coherent and valuable contribution to an already ‘quality-laden’ Caribbean transnational migration literature, although several contributions do stand on their own in this regard.