Contemporary Caribbean Cultures and Societies in a Global Context (review)

Due to its absence of autochthonous cultures and its preternatural modernity, the Caribbean was long overlooked by anthropologists. After the indigenous populations of Tainos, Caribs and Arawaks were ravaged by famine and disease, settlers imported African slaves who, over time, resulted in mixed populations. Forged in the shadow of plantation agriculture, these societies were early on subjected to the dictates of international capital, giving rise to novel cultures that were neglected by social scientists until the 1960s. Not western enough for sociologists, the Caribbean was too modern and hybrid for anthropologists. For decades, only scholars from Haiti, Cuba and Puerto Rico deemed these cultures worthy of study.

Yet for these very reasons, the region is an ideal laboratory for the study of globalization. This volume covers key themes related to Caribbean transnationalism including neoliberalism, popular religion, social movements and music. The essays primarily treat the islands of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Haiti and Jamaica and concern twentieth-century transnational contact, yet most contributions touch on the colonial period. Crisply written and argued, these case studies offer intriguing arguments about cultural flows and globalization processes without getting bogged down in either excessive theory or ethnographic context, making this an ideal text for teaching purposes. Showcasing prominent Caribbean scholars, the volume also offers an excellent sample of major research in the field.

The book commences on a less than sanguine note with a section on economics. The first essay, by Helen McBain, charts the transformation of regional economies that commenced with the efforts to achieve economic growth through export agriculture and industries and trade liberalization, an agenda that culminated with the removal of the last remaining trade barriers by the 1990s. Next, Alex Dupuy's article considers the case of Haiti, which paid a high price for its efforts at political reform. When Jean-Bertrand Aristide was reelected in 2000, Haiti was heavily penalized by the IMF, which suspended the disbursement of loans to the democratically elected governments in 1995, 1997 and 2000, thus deeply undermining the regime, a penalty never imposed upon the heavily repressive Duvalier regime. Trade liberalization also dealt a devastating blow to agriculture, since farmers could not compete with subsidized U.S. rice; Haitian food imports rose from 10 percent in the 1970s to 42 percent in 1993.

Links between Caribbean societies and their diasporas is a major theme in the volume. Antonio Benítez-Rojo's essay treats creolization in Havana public culture, from the colonial comparsas forged by slaves through the vibrant tourism economy of the 1950s. Frances Negrón-Montaner examines how Puerto Rico has used international sports contests as an avenue for fashioning an "ethnonational" identity, focusing on the case of boxing.Juan Flores considers the circular flows of Salsa between New York and San Juan as a form of "cultural remittance," one that enacts "diasporic Nuyorican authencity" (p. 121). He provides a fine-grained analysis of the music of Willy Colón, who brought a bad boy sensibility and the trombone to Salsa in the 1970s and helped popularize it on the island. Raquel Romberg looks at the appropriation of foreign religious forms such as espiritismo and Protestantism in local religious practices. In a surprising twist, Romberg details how U.S. values such as consumerism and individualism were adopted into the repertoire of vernacular religious practice; brujos have become "spiritual entrepreneurs," delivering potions and recipes via cell phone or federal express. These essays demonstrate persuasively that globalization need not imply homogenization.

The next cluster of essays focuses on the intervention of global forces on local politics. Valentina Peguero's essay considers grass-roots movements of resistance and development in the Dominican Republic from the U.S. Occupation (1916-24) through the present. Her essay covers canonical heroines such as the Mirabal sisters who valiantly conspired against the Trujillo regime...