Freedom Roots: Histories from the Caribbean, by Laurent Dubois & Richard Lee Turits
2021; Brill; Volume: 95; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1163/22134360-09501006
ISSN2213-4360
Autores Tópico(s)Caribbean history, culture, and politics
ResumoThis powerfully argued and engagingly written book offers a thematic history of the Caribbean, with a focus on events that put the region at the center of global developments and on struggles for freedom by its peoples.It's based on a truly impressive range of mainly-published sources in three languages, as the nearly 60 pages of annotations reveal.(Annoyingly, there's no bibliography and only one, very inadequate, general map of the region.)Laurent Dubois and Richard Lee Turits say their theme is the "island Caribbean," not the "Greater Caribbean," but in fact the Guianas are implicitly included in their definition (for example in the account of the 1823 Demerara rebellion, pp.116-18).Though Freedom Roots is not a straightforward narrative history, it is structured on a chronological basis.Part One discusses the region's history from pre-Columbian times to the late 1800s.The account of the pre-1492 societies of the Greater Antilles, and of the familiar story of conquest, colonization, and genocide (Chapter 1), is fairly standard, based on up-to-date scholarship; as the authors write, while "older orthodoxies" about the indigenous Caribbean have been overthrown, we still lack "a new consensus about what terms and categories most usefully describe the indigenous world" of 1492 (p.34).Chapter 2 examines the plantation complex, from Hispaniola in the 1500s to Jamaica and Saint-Domingue in the 1700s, and the worlds created by plantation and enslavement.Part One ends with Chapter 3, on the slow and painful movement to freedom for the enslaved, with a strong focus on self-liberation through rebellion and everyday resistance.The significance of "family land" for the newly freed is emphasized in this chapter, following the work of Jean Besson on Jamaica in particular.In Part Two, the major theme is the twentieth-century involvement of the United States in the independent Caribbean.Chapter 4 takes up the development of "informal" empire in Cuba from 1898, and the formal occupation of
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