Member Books

Member Books

Reconstructing Racial Identity and the African Past in the Dominican Republic Kimberly Eison Simmons; University Press of Florida (2009)
Kimberly Simmons explores the fascinating socio-cultural shifts in Dominicans' racial categories, concluding that Dominicans are slowly embracing blackness and ideas of African ancestry. Simmons also examines the movement of individuals between the Dominican Republic and the United States, where traditional notions of indio are challenged, debated, and called into question. How and why Dominicans define their racial identities reveal shifting coalitions between Caribbean peoples and African Americans, and proves intrinsic to understanding identities in the African diaspora. (View on Amazon.)

Constructing Vernacular Culture in the Trans-Caribbean; (Eds) Holger Henke and Karl-Heinz Magister; Lexington Books (2007)
In this volume authors strive to understand the evolving Trans-Caribbean as a discontinuous, displacing and displaced, transnational space. It considers the imagined community in the islands as its psycho-social homeland, while simultaneously pursuing different cultural strategies of redefining and resisting colonial "homeland" conventions (which Kamau Brathwaite appropriately termed the "inner plantation"). (View on Amazon.)

Globalization and Race; (Eds) Kamari Maxine Clarke and Deborah A. Thomas; Duke University Press (2006)
Globalization and Race asserts that a firm grasp of globalization requires an understanding of how race has constituted, and been constituted by, global transformations. Focusing attention on race as an analytic category, the volume explores the changing meanings of blackness in the context of globalization. It illuminates the connections between contemporary global processes of racialization and transnational circulations set in motion by imperialism and slavery; between popular culture and global conceptions of blackness; and between the work of anthropologists, policymakers, religious revivalists, and activists and the solidification and globalization of racial categories. (View on Amazon.)