Caribbean Connections: A Look from Within – 19th Century to Present

Ada Ferrer is Professor of History and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University, where she has taught since 1995.  She is the author of Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898, which has appeared in French and Spanish translations and which won the 2000 Berkshire Book Prize for the best first book written by a woman in any field of history. Her new book, Freedom's Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2014), won honorable mention for the PROSE Award in European and World History, and is a finalist for the 2015 Frederick Douglass Prize.

Alaí Reyes-Santos is an assistant professor of ethnic studies at the University of Oregon. She is the former co-director of the journal Revista Estudios Sociales, published by Centro Bonó in the Dominican Republic. Our Caribbean Kin: Race and Nation in the Neoliberal Antilles (Rutgers University Press) explores the extent to which Dominicans, Haitians, and Puerto Ricans have imagined one another as part of the same big family, rallying against the forces of European colonialism. Our Caribbean Kin considers three key moments in the region’s history: the nineteenth century, when the antillanismo movement sought to throw off the yoke of colonial occupation; the 1930s, at the height of the region’s struggles with US imperialism; and the past thirty years, as neoliberal economic and social policies have encroached upon the islands. At each moment, the book demonstrates, specific tropes of brotherhood, marriage, and lineage have been mobilized to construct political kinship among Antilleans, while racist and xenophobic discourses have made it difficult for them to imagine themselves as part of one big family.

Chantalle F. Verna, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of History and International Relations at Florida International University. She is the author of research articles about Haiti and the relationship between the Caribbean nation’s domestic and international affairs. Her forthcoming works include a single-authored book currently entitled Haiti and the Uses of America: Post-U.S. Occupation Cooperation, 1934-1953 and a co-edited volume, The Haiti Reader, with Laurent Dubois, Kaiama Glover, Nadèvé Menard and Millery Polyné.

Matthew J. Smith, professor of history at the University of the West Indies at Mona, is author of Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934-1957.  In Liberty, Fraternity, Exile: Haiti and Jamaica after Emancipation (University of North Carolina Press), a moving micro history of nineteenth-century Haiti and Jamaica, Smith details the intimate connections that illuminate the conjoined histories of both places after slavery. The frequent movement of people between Haiti and Jamaica in the decades following emancipation in the British Caribbean brought the countries into closer contact and influenced discourse about the post emancipation future of the region. In the stories and genealogies of exiles and politicians, abolitionists and diplomats, laborers and merchants--and mothers, fathers, and children--Smith recognizes the significance of nineteenth-century Haiti to regional development.