The year 2009 marked the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution and the thirtieth anniversary of the Grenadian and Nicaraguan Revolutions, and as such offered an occasion to assess the complex legacies of revolutionary politics in the Caribbean. This volume considers what we might learn from such revolutionary projects and their afterlives, from their successes and their errors. It explores what struggles, currently underway in the Caribbean, share with these earlier and longer revolutionary traditions, and how they depart from them. It analyzes radical movements in Jamaica, Grenada, Cuba, Venezuela, Guadeloupe, Suriname, and Guyana, not only in their national dimensions, but in terms of their regional linkages and mutual influences.
The chapters are drawn from various disciplines and a range of democratic leftist projects. They consider not only state and party politics, but also civil society, cultural politics and artistic production, strikes, and grassroots activism.
This book was published as a special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.
1. Introduction: Legacies Left Shalini Puri, Associate Professor of English, University of Pittsburgh
RECOVERED HISTORIES
2. Resonances of Revolution: Grenada, Suriname, Guyana Rupert Roopnaraine, Working People’s Alliance, Guyana
3. Are you a Bolshevik Or a Menshevik?: Mimicry, Alienation and Confusion in the Grenada Revolution Merle Collins, Creative Writer and Professor of Comparative Literature and English, University of Maryland, College Park
ARTICLES
4. The Cuban Revolution and the Caribbean: civil society, culture, and international relations Rafael Hernández, Director, Journal Temas (Havana)
5. The Content of Socialism in Cuba Today Rafael Rojas, Professor and Researcher, Center for Economic Research and Teaching, Mexico City
6. Post-Grenada, Post-Cuba, Postcolonial: Rethinking Revolutionary Discourse in Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here Rafael Dalleo, Assistant Professor of English, Florida Atlantic University
Maps Annalee Davis, Independent Visual Artist, Barbados
7. History, Decolonization and the Making of Revolution: Reflections on Writing the Popular History of the Jamaican Events of 1938 Anthony Bogues, Harmon Family Professor of Africana Studies, Brown University
8. Revolutionary Praxis in a Post-Neoliberal Era Media Associations and the New Coalitional Politics in Venezuela Sujatha Fernandes, Assistant Professor, Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York
9. Technification, Sweetification, Treatyfication: Politics of the Caribbean-EU Economic Partnership Agreement Norman Girvan, Professorial Research Fellow, Institute of International Relations at the University of the West Indies, Trinidad
10. Shifting the Ground Beneath Us: Social Reproduction, Grassroots Women’s Organizing and the 2005 Floods in Guyana D. Alissa Trotz, Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, and Director of Caribbean Studies, University of Toronto
11. Guadeloupe is Ours: The Prefigurative Politics of the Mass Strike in the French Antilles Yarimar Bonilla, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Virginia
12. Legacies through the Lens Kathy Sloane, Independent photographer and filmmaker
Biography
Shalini Puri is an Associate Professor of English at the Univerisity of Pittsburgh. She is the author of The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity (Palgrave Macmillan 2004), which won the Gordon and Sybil Lewis Award for best book on the Caribbean, and has edited Marginal Migrations: The Circulation of Cultures within the Caribbean (2003). She is currently completing a book entitled Volcanic Memory: The Grenada Revolution and the Futures of Revolutionary Practice. She is also working on a collaborative project entitled 'Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities'.
