Our Caribbean Kin: Race and Nation in the Neoliberal Antilles by Alaí Reyes-Santos (review)

Much work has been done on the Caribbean and its relationship to the broader Diaspora. Our Caribbean Kin by Alaí Reyes-Santos expands notions of kinship, belonging, and Diaspora through her examination of solidarity and political alliance throughout the Hispanophone Caribbean. Divided into four chapters based on tropes of marriage, brotherhood, and family, Reyes-Santos sets out to understand and document moments where Haitians, Dominicans, and Puerto Ricans have come to imagine each other as kin, specifically throughout colonial, imperial, and neoliberal episodes of violence (2). Drawing from various archives, novels, and media, Reyes-Santos examines how these tropes get taken up in different social and political situations to promote and foster Antillean solidarity while also interrogating class and racial difference. It is through this lens that we can understand how the Spanish (and French) Caribbean also plays a role in shaking up bodies of scholarship predicated on notions of sameness and community.

Our Caribbean Kin sets out to uncover politics of belonging through inclusion and exclusion by examining how tropes of affect and relations have been used historically (and contemporarily) to mobilize across the Antilles. Reyes-Santos accomplishes this by exploring how nineteenth century antillanistas envisioned community, kinship, and solidarity in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. In looking at the Antilles as a site of trans-anti-colonial and neo-liberal projects, Reyes-Santos concludes how such creations of intra-racial alliances are tied to larger struggles of freedom in the Caribbean, and most importantly within the Spanish Caribbean. Looking at kinship and belonging as a productive site with which to inquire about constructions of identity-making and community also reveal limitations of "national families" and national allegiances (4).

Chapter 1 provides a brief, yet vital history of antillianismo in the nineteenth century to examine how antillanistas envisioned brotherhood and solidarity in the Caribbean region based on notions of shared kinship. This chapter could have benefited from a more comprehensive geographic history of the Antilles and distinction between that of the greater and lesser Antilles, especially in terms of local politicization and identity. Nevertheless, exploring how antillanista thinkers of the nineteenth century imagined regional community provides the framework for thinking about contemporary calls for solidarity and nation-building projects. Reyes-Santos utilizes the term "transcolonial" in place of transnational to represent how community formations created out of colonial racialized violence and "creole nation building" were contested in the nineteenth-century Caribbean (7). In using transcolonial as a purposeful alternative, Reyes-Santos establishes how the effects and pervasiveness of Western imperialism can be conceptualized beyond the economic. Opening the chapter is a description of the Puerto Rican band Calle 13's 2012 performance of "Latino-américa" at the Latin Grammy Awards. Not only does this aid in the solidarity and visualization of a unified Latin America but also inserts the group "into a history of Antillean thinkers and cultural workers invested in transcolonial kinship" (29). Tying in contemporary groups like Calle 13 to Antillanistas and Antillean projects of the nineteenth century also works to demonstrate the longevity of kinship narratives in the Caribbean imagination. The works of Ramón Emeterio Betances and Gregorio Luperón are the focus of the chapter and through their work we are able to get a sense of the tension and conflicts with inclusivity and identity, but also how they negotiate conceptions of belonging through both colonial and nationalistic methods. The title of the chapter, "The Emancipated Sons," also directly ties into how community formations and nation-making were highly gendered. Through her reading of these two men, Reyes-Santos illustrates how the absence of women from this chapter (with the exception of Gómez de Avellaneda) is not only an implication of gender roles during this time but also the way in which nationhood and sovereignty are directly tied to brotherhood and masculinity.

Chapter 2 elaborates on transcolonial kinship and conceptions of national family through the tropes of marriage...