This introduction situates the rebellions in British Guiana within the larger context of unrest in the Caribbean during the 1930s. I also discuss the concepts of solidarity, overlapping diasporas, and modern politics to explore how this story fits into the broader historiography, and why the stakes of this project have implications both within and beyond the region.

The conclusion explores the meaning and takeaways of the 1935 uprisings and explores ideas about solidarity that gain power from recognizing and understanding difference, and it notes this legacy of possibility.

From 1812 to 1815, the United States was at war with Britain. Officers and sailors, having developed deep animosities during the preceding decade over issues like impressment, fought each other with patriotic rancor. Yet, a few years after the end of the war American and British sailors and marines were sailing together to eliminate the piracy and maritime insecurity that dominated the region during the wars for Spanish-American independence. This rapid diplomatic reversal, from enemies to partners, offers an interesting history of diplomatic change following war. These post-conflict relationships were affected by the perception of power imbalances, the importance of aligning national interests, and the diplomatic role of non-State Department entities like the US Navy. This history speaks to the character of the Anglo-American relationship in the nineteenth century, oscillating between friends and foes, and illustrates the political and economic connections within the maritime and diplomatic past.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s encounters with the works of Caribbean intellectuals – C.L.R. James, George Lamming and Frantz Fanon – helped him crystallize global blackness around the nexus between race and geography vis à vis politics of domination and resistance. Emerging from Ngugi’s encounter with Caribbean life and thought were his pronouncements on the mismatch between aspiration and deprivation of the postcolonial, post-plantation/post-slavery Caribbean inhabitants. Their experiences, variously and collectively, signalled to Ngugi the importance of language as a cultural currency with which the formerly enslaved and/or colonised people could assert their being in and of the world, and negotiate their place in discursive praxes that had for long defaulted to European languages as the most appropriate vehicles of expression. These processes played out against the backdrop of painful histories, which had raptured the Caribbean islanders’ and some Africans’ attachment to cultures, economics and geographies, due to slavery and colonial violence. Ngugi’s encounter with Caribbean history and culture through the creative and critical works of James, Lamming and Fanon rendered the Caribbean a nucleus that Ngugi germinated and nurtured to expound on his earlier thoughts in subsequent collections of essays and memoirs that amplified his concerns with ‘decolonising the mind’ and ‘moving the centre’.

This chapter examines transatlantic news in the first newspaper of seventeenth-century France, the famous Gazette of Théophraste Renaudot, which appeared in Paris every week between 1631 and 1653. Renaudot has often been portrayed in French scholarship as a mere mouthpiece of Cardinal Richelieu, but his coverage of events in the Atlantic world shows that he was in fact a very accomplished news writer who gave a more balanced account of events than contemporaries and historians have given him credit for. Those who wanted to follow events in the South Atlantic were often better off reading Renaudot’s Gazette than the French-language editions of the Amsterdam newspapers, or the embryonic periodicals from Lisbon. As news of the climax in the war in Brazil reached Paris in the late 1640s, the Gazette reported events from as many as four different perspectives – giving equal weight to narratives of the Portuguese and Dutch generals, as well as those of the native American and (formerly enslaved) African commanders who had participated in the final battle.

We present historical background, contemporary status, and potential future development of the psychology of religion (PoR) in the Caribbean Region, beginning with its origins: the formative people, places, and various intellectual schools of thought. Writing about the current state of the topic, we reflect on influential factors that are either facilitating or inhibiting the study of PoR, including publication options, topical emphases, practitioners, orientations, methodologies, and professional organizations.

We offer opinions concerning future development topics that are emerging as important in the immediate future and/or are perennially important in order to stimulate creative and useful research including Western theoretical relevance, the extent to which Western PoR theories may or may not contain reasonable expectations and concepts for this region, contextual nuances, Indigenous theoretical concerns, collaborative research opportunities, and common faux pas – reflections on what people unfamiliar with this region commonly and incorrectly assume about conducting PoR work in this context.

Race has been a dominant theme in studies of US black art and politics in the 1910s and 1920s. This chapter shifts focus to imperial concerns during a period marked by US occupations in Haiti, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic, as well as the acquisition of the Danish Virgin Islands. It explores how the era’s print culture both revealed and obscured the expansion of a US Empire or Greater United States in the Caribbean. US governance in places like Haiti did not go unchallenged in leftist and race-conscious periodicals such as The Nation, The Crisis, and The Crusader. While non-fiction provoked anti-imperial analyses, fiction did not prompt the same responses. Assessing reviews and commentary of fiction, including Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven, Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem and Eric Walrond’s Tropic Death, this chapter examines why anti-imperial reading proved so elusive in this context.

Approaches to La consagración de la primavera tend to consider that its central aspects are the historical and the autobiographical, judging the text for its ideological dimension and its stance on the Cuban Revolution. However, the omnipresent discourse on the arts and the figure of the artist, the way in which this is dealt with within the narration, as well as the intermedial devices used in it, confer on Carpentier’s penultimate novel the timelessness and universality of the Great Works. By textual analysis and a comprehension of the functioning of Carpentier’s aesthetic system, this chapter offers a humanist reading of a novel rooted in the dream of being a total work that metaphorically encompasses all arts and the writer’s own previous oeuvre.

The Caribbean is a vast geopolitical region that stretches for a span of 2,754,000 square kilometers and includes approximately 7,000 island land masses. Linguistically speaking, the Caribbean hosts an extraordinarily wide variety of languages and dialects. The sheer magnitude of inhabited islands and the accompanying geographical and social variation within each island locale sets the Anglophone Caribbean apart for other insular areas of the English-speaking world such as Ireland or the South Atlantic. English is the third most widely spoken language in the Caribbean, following Spanish and French. It is the official language of twelve Caribbean as well as of the seven British Overseas Territories in the region. This chapter provides an overview of the sociolinguistic histories and features of the English varieties of the Caribbean region and demonstrates that there are significant traits that serve to define the region. Additionally, it demonstrates that there are differences between the speech of the European-identifying and African-identifying populations of the Caribbean.

Four: I turn from the cormorant itself to the bird’s natural product, guano, a resource that in the nineteenth century brought the Pacific into the global economy, profoundly affected the environment worldwide and enriched Europeans through the de facto slavery of thousands of Chinese indentured labourers on the Peruvian guano islands. Beginning with the filthy riches made from the guano trade by the UK-based Gibbs family, I outline the chemistry of guano, the European capitalisation of guano, and the conditions of labour of the guano workers. I then turn to the James Bond novel Dr No, locating Ian Fleming’s interest in guano and his transposition of the guano trade from Peru to the Caribbean in his banking family’s close connection with the Gibbses. I conclude with a discussion of the origins in the history of guano of the idea of dirt as ‘matter out of place’.

This chapter, the first to our knowledge, examines whether central banks in Caribbean small island states have the necessary legal and institutional frameworks to achieve the global central banking community’s pledge to contribute to net-zero and safeguard financial stability from climate change. We find that the legal mandates of the central banks studied do not extend to climate change or sustainability. However, climate-related risks, if qualified as financial risks, fall within their financial stability mandate. Further, the path to net-zero is limited by the existing internal capacity of central banks, which is not geared towards climate science. This is not surprising since climate change has fairly recently moved beyond the acceptable risk tolerance of central banks, and only now is a response being fashioned. We argue that the region faces a high boundary risk with respect to net-zero. We note that even if Caribbean central banks are equipped with a mandate and policy tools to address climate change, net-zero may still not be achievable where climate change public policies are absent or not fully articulated. Further, Caribbean economies carry a heavy weighting to climate-sensitive or carbon-relevant sectors. Hence, net-zero may only be achieved with the involvement of committed governments.