MACMILLAN Caribbean Military Encounters (New Caribbean Studies)

Product Description This book provides a much-needed study of the lived experience of militarization in the Caribbean from 1914 to the present. It offers an alternative to policy and security studies by drawing on the perspectives of literary and cultural studies, history, anthropology, ethnography, music, and visual art. Rather than opposing or defending militarization per se, this book focuses attention on how Caribbean people negotiate militarization in their everyday lives. The volume explores topics such as the US occupation of Haiti; British West Indians in World War I; the British naval invasion of Anguilla; military bases including Chaguaramas, Vieques and Guantánamo; the militarization of the police; sex work and the military; drug wars and surveillance; calypso commentaries; private security armies; and border patrol operations.  Review “Encounters with armed force―whether from the traditional imperial states, the regional hegemonic power after 1898, the USA, or local postcolonial police and military―have been a constant in the history of the Greater Caribbean. This original and interesting collection of essays explores some of these encounters in novel ways and from the perspective of the region’s people themselves.” (Bridget Brereton, Emerita Professor of History, University of the West Indies St Augustine, Trinidad & Tobago) “Moving beyond the focus on security that demonstrates the necessity or outrage of military interventions, this multidisciplinary and genuinely regional volume suggests that all of the various kinds of military encounter can be found across the region's imperial boundaries, showing us patterns of violence and power that are usually occluded by a focus on a single language area. The longstanding engagement of the region's people with the militarization that has been continuous with the story of the Caribbean's modernity is explored with rich attentiveness to intimacy, silence, and the quotidian, as occupiers and insurgents' intentions converge on the same sites.” (Faith Smith, Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies and English, Brandeis University, USA) From the Back Cover This book provides a much-needed study of the lived experience of militarization in the Caribbean from 1914 to the present. It offers an alternative to policy and security studies by drawing on the perspectives of literary and cultural studies, history, anthropology, ethnography, music, and visual art.  Rather than opposing or defending militarization per se, this book focuses attention on how Caribbean people negotiate militarization in their everyday lives. The volume explores topics such as the US occupation of Haiti; British West Indians in World War I; the British naval invasion of Anguilla; military bases including Chaguaramas, Vieques and Guantánamo; the militarization of the police; sex work and the military; drug wars and surveillance; calypso commentaries; private security armies; and border patrol operations.  About the Author Shalini Puri is Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, USA. She is the author of T he Grenada Revolution in the Caribbean Present: Operation Urgent Memory and the award-winning The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity.  She has edited the volumes The Legacies of Caribbean Radical Politics, Marginal Migrations: The Circulation of Cultures within the Caribbean, and with Debra Castillo, Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities: Methods, Reflections, and Approaches to the Global South. Lara Putnam is Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh, USA.  She is the author of Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age, The Company They Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870-1960, and more than twenty journal articles and book chapters exploring labor migration, state racism, and the ways family and