bahareads's Reviews (1.09k)

Sounds of Vacation: Political Economies of Caribbean Tourism examines the commodification of music and sound at all-inclusive hotels throughout the Caribbean to look at the relationships between political economy, hospitality, and the legacies of slavery and colonialism.

There are five essays and they look at The Bahamas, an unnamed French colony (yet the clues point to Guadaloupe), Sint Maarten, Barbados, and Saint Lucia. My personal favourite was "Touristic Rhythms" by Jerome Camal. He is able to create a narrative for the reader while educating them on the politics of music and sound. My least favourite was "All-Inclusive Resorts in Sint Maarten and Our Common Decolonial State" by Francio Guadeloupe and Jordi Halfman. The metaphor of butterflies did not pass over well and the narrative was hard to follow.

Each essay follows a different method of observation in studying sound. Each study is interesting and illuminates the way people in the Caribbean have similar experiences and yet are so different. The essays examine and observe changes in music, how tourism affects music, how sound (or the lack of it) impacts the hotel experience, how hotels have similar plantation themes, locals versus seasonal staff, the erasure of black locals in hotels, and much more.

"...Vistors' sensory engagement with the Caribbean is not limited to sight and taste. It is complete. It involves all of our senses: sight, smell, taste, but also touch, kinesthesia, and of course, sound."

Each essay offers something for the reader to think about whether it relates to music or everyday sound in the Caribbean. The effects of colonialism shine through in every essay.

"The lesson of this volume is not confined merely to the postcolonial context of Caribbean nation-states. It is revelatory of transnational processes that affect everyone, everywhere."

Nelson Denis creates a readable narrative! I sped through this work when I picked it up. I think Denis background in journalism helps keep readers reading. there’s so much in this book though. I mean US paternalism and naive native narrative that gives the US license to take over tropical countries. The same thing happened in the Panama Canal area. The illustrations on page 22 with all the islands being shown in a grotesque figure way. The fact that all the figures are dark-skinned. The work shows that Puerto Rico has faced, and is still facing, so much under US occupation.

I wondered about the racial composition of the nationalists. Denis does not mention their skin colour or racial type for the most part. If most of them were darker-skinned, mulatto, or black that’d add an extra layer to the narrative that’s missing right now. I would have liked for Denis to expand on the gender aspect of the nationalist movement and US oppression. The book seemed to center more around men in the nationalist movement. I would have liked for his footnotes to be a bit more extensive, I thought in some chapters they were lacking. I would have liked to see him pull from more source bases. He roots most of his research in FBI files. I enjoyed the sectioning of the book but sometimes the overlap threw me off. I think the overlapping of memoir, biography, and historiographical narrative was a bit too much at times.

B.H. Malcolm takes on the enormous task of creating a whole new world, with character systems and complex regional dynamics. Biblical imagery and verbiage were prevalent throughout the entire book. I enjoyed the way it was woven in, it was very creative. One of the species spoke in Bahamian vernacular which is always a joy to read and see.

I wanted to love this book so bad but I did not. Any high fantasy book gives the author the hard task of trying to provide the reader with enough information to understand the world and follow along with the narrative. Malcolm was not able to do that. She gave too much too quickly. The number of character POVs and places readers are taken to should have been narrowed down for a more streamlined approach. Especially since Ibrida is the first book in the series there is no reason to rush the reader through the process of learning about the world and the characters. I think whoever was beta reading or screening the draft for Malcolm did a disservice to them.

I was unable to connect with any of the characters or care about them at all. People died, families died and I could not have cared less... I could not even remember who some of them were if I am being totally honest. I love a good romance and burn but the one that was slowly developing in this book had no reason to be here. The main plotline got lost in the POV skipping back and forth. I could not tell what the goal was beyond the Seram were bad and must be defeated. The chapters were split up into regions (and years) but they meant nothing to me. I think it was a lazy attempt at shifting POVs without having to do much work for the reader.

I see the vision with Ibrida but I think it should have been tweaked a bit before being published. There is so much potential here. I am curious to see what else B.H. Malcolm can come up with.

My first Toni Morrison book is also her first published novel. I plan on reading all of her bibliography in order.

I was not disappointed. I enjoyed this sad sad book. The theme of internal racism is prevalent throughout the book, even in the title. I marked so many pages that really spoke to me. It is interesting to see that internalized anti-blackness has not changed at all. The only gripe I had with the novel was the chapter layout. Since I couldn't give the novel my full attention and had to leave it for days at a time, I found the narration switch from third to first person was somewhat difficult to follow at times.

brief thoughts and quotes:

Their [Breedlove] ugliness was unique. No one could have convinced them that they were not relentlessly and aggressively ugly...The rest of the family... wore their ugliness.

The character of Mrs. Breedlove and her religious fervour was humorous while also showing the hypocrisy of many Christians. As stated in the novel, she's not interested in Christ the Redeemer but Christ the Judge. She does not want any salvation for her wretched, ugly husband, rather she wants to see him struck down. She holds no mercy or sympathy for her children, all of it is wrapped up in her employer's kid.

Pecola hurt my heart, every situation involving her made me frustrated and sad.

Every character in the story is flawed, badly. I loved this book because of that reason. It's real sh*t.

"I felt a need for someone to want the black baby to live-- just to counteract the universal love of white baby dolls, Shirley Temples, and Maureen Peals."

side note: I might be hallucinating but I'm pretty sure that's a scrapbook or scrapbooks were mentioned in this novel (unfortunately I can't find the page/quote). I recently learned that scrapbooks were a way for African Americans to document their own history and create a counter archive and historical narrative to the popular one. If you want to know more about this phenomenon I would suggest checking out Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance

Tuning Out Blackness shows the way that blackness has been represented and discussed in Puerto Rican commercial media entertainment programming are examined. The focus of the text is the depiction of blackness, whether through blackface or black voice. Through these depictions in the media, Rivero is able to analyses the racial discourses, cultural, political, and social Puerto Rican practices that have permeated the island. Rivero asserts the local media is not to blame for the mediated blackness, instead by looking at the larger systems of meaning that are located in the specific social formations readers will be able to consider and see the formation of the la gran familia Puertorriquena discourse.

By looking at the unexplored and unexamined location of Puerto Rico’s commercial television, and the primary focus of the discursive realms of televisual events, dialogs, and artifacts that convey the racial ideologies of blackness and family Rivero contributes to the historiography. Seeing how the flow of people into and from Puerto Rico had permeated the local people and culture, and how the foreign media has influenced and created spaces for marginalized communities in Puerto Rico has also been a significant contribution.

These contributions stand in direct contrast to Roberta Astrft’s position that Puerto Rico cannot be used in the discussion of broadcasting because “of the use and quality of Spanish on the island, of solutions to social and economic problems, and of national culture [that] are excluded by both the economic system of broadcasting…and by the decision-makers in the industry who have no interest in creating a public forum for questions they would rather see disappear.” This discourse does not understand and has not done a close analysis of the diverse creatives in the Puerto Rican media.

Blackface and black voice has a large part in Rivero’s argument. In chapter one, Rivero considers the economic and political conditions of Puerto Rican society that influenced and was influenced by the media. The most significant contribution examined in the chapter is Ramon Rivero and his use of blackface and black voice. Through examining the beginning of his career, Yeidy Rivero shows how his performances were directly influenced by a Cuban connection. His use of a Havana accent, appropriation of Cuban Bufo and its racialized stereotypes such as el negrito, la mulata, and el gallego are some good examples of Cuban connection. The influence of blackface Cuban actor Leopoldo Fernandez on Rivero's early performances shows that the portrayals Rivero would later create would be a fusion of Cuba and Puerto Rican influences into what Yeidy Rivero coins CubaRican.

By examining characters such as Diplomacia, Calderon and Lirio Blanco, readers can see the social discussions in Puerto Rican society. The complex character of Calderon and his portrayal in El tremendo hotel show the complex themes such as commentary on US imperialism, the erasure of the racially sexualized mestizaje, the la gran familia Puertorriquena discourse, and the degradation of blackness in Puerto Rico. The complex use of Diplo be a “media vehicle” for criticizing Puerto Rico’s colonialism and oppressive conditions show blackface had more than just a comedic element to its use. By the emergence of Liro Blanco blackface characters had lost the political and social commentary significance that Diplo had produced. Lirio Blanco being portrayed by a black actress normalized and reaffirmed the whiteness Puerto Ricans and the Cuban community within Puerto Rico wanted. The character also showed the marginalization of blacks in Puerto Rico and the CubaRican borderless cultural space by positioning blackness as an Other comedic element in the televisual space.

The assessments Rivero makes through these two characters into the larger media portrayal of blackface and black voice show that there is much more work to be done on the topic. The complexities of the portrayal cannot be understood without nuances of the social and political events during the period. It would be interesting to get the opinion of the black Puerto Ricans on the ground during this time. The more top-down approach Rivero uses is needed to set up a framework for the reader. However, there are few black voices, outside of the actors and actresses, examined in this work that shows how Black Puerto Ricans felt about blackface and black voice and their portrayal in the media.

The latter part of the book is not as strong as the first half. The arguments are not as definitive and the information is not as strong. Overall the book is good enough to read, at least the first half.

Eileen Suarez Findlay looks at the discourses of race and gender in forming Puerto Rican national identity. By using the city of Ponce as a case study, Findlay provides a window into the larger national discourses of race, gender and class within Puerto Rican society that was occurring during the 1870s to 1920s. By joining social history with discourse analysis, Findlay attempts to look at what was said in Puerto Rico and what was done in Puerto Rico during the period stated.

The social discourse of respectability shaped sexual practices, racial meetings, and sexual regulatory strategies. By paying particular attention to the popular elite intellectuals who helped create the racially and sexually saturated political discourse, readers can see how these norms and practices were vital to ordering Puerto Rican society. Through the focus on race, class, sex, and region, readers can see internal and local forms of identity formation during the end of Spanish colonial rule and the first two decades of US sovereignty in Puerto Rico.

Much of the research Findlay did for the study was done in the city of Ponce. There are limitations to the sources. In chapter six Findlay can only guess at the relationships prominent activists Herminia Tormes and Olivia Paoli were trying to create with incarcerated women. She states, “without the discovery of more detailed sources, though, we cannot ascertain whether this potential is ever reached.” However, with the sources available to her, Findlay can show that the political struggles and discourses cannot be understood without each other.

The case of Teresa Astacio in chapter one is a source that shows the multi-layered issues of race and gender in Puerto Rican society. White girls marrying or being associated sexually with men of colour shows that the idea of honour in society would be, as Findlay puts it, contradictory. Teresa being linked to a Black man would destabilize the concepts of race and class, yet honour demanded that she be married to the man who tarnished her sexually. The obsession with chastity among the elite class is not seen in the proletarian class in Ponce. Within the case, readers can see the divergent social expectations of women across Ponce’s class and race spectrum produced very different experiences of womanhood.

Honour in Puerto Rican society was a set of concrete practices everywhere in people’s lives. In chapter one, the honour codes Findlay considers are not transhistorical but consolidated in Puerto Rico during the sugar boom of 1800 to 1845. This brings up the issue of the lack of primary sources. Findlay says she uses honour codes produced after the plantation regime and its cultures were consolidated. Honour was a gendered concept in Puerto Rico. Women’s honour came from their sexual reputation, while men’s honour depended on several factors, the most important one being a provision of income.

The idea of honour and society comes into play with the repression of prostitution seen throughout the text. Women being a center and the family foundation meant that wayward women were seen as morally disintegrating society. During the era of World War I, colonial officials would use language when referring to prostitutes like “extermination,” “plague,” “cleanse” and that prostitutes were “the rotting part of the social organism.” The war on prostitution was also one of the state repression. Women as a whole were sexually repressed. However, there were many activists who actively spoke out against the campaign on prostitution and the larger issues of women’s labour that surround it. While there were those that spoke out against the oppression when the earthquake and influenza epidemic of 1918 occurred the state stop their campaign. This led to protests about state repression disappearing.

Middle-class feminists during this era of state repression of prostitutes chose not to openly denounce the state’s crackdown on working women. They also did not critique the sexual double standard during that campaign. This stands in contrast to the U.S. middle-class feminist activists who used critiques of prostitution to protest their suffering from male infidelity and sexual predation. This lack of critique also stands in contrast to the earlier writings of Puerto Rican feminists. It seems the feminist activists compromised their beliefs to appeal to the mainstream to the determent of their fellow persecuted women.

Mariana Candido shows how influential the slave trade was in Benguela and its interior, and how significant Benguela was to the slave trade. Moving away from a more traditional demographic analysis approach, she explores the political, economic, and social changes caused by the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Candido contributes to the historiography of the African world, and most importantly, West Central Africa, by reassessing the impact of the slave trade on African societies. In her study, she discusses the nature of cultural changes provoked by colonial encounters and looks specifically at Portuguese colonialism and the expansion of slave societies. Engaging in the debate on the expansion of slavery and slave exports, she shows that the cycles of violence had a profound impact on African and colonial communities. Political instability transformed the Benguela hinterland producing changes in commerce and local institutions.

Through the historiographical contributions above, Candido seeks to do away with a narrative dominated by a north-south approach. In this previous approach, Africans are seen as minor players, and women and enslaved people have no significant role in the narrative. The study, as Candido states, is a result of her reflections on the importance of an Afrocentric approach to history and against the way Africa is portrayed in North America.

Through the study, readers see Benguela was radically transformed by the Atlantic economy, like many other areas involved with the slave trade. The methodology Candido uses for her arguments is an analysis that goes inland to show not only were the coastland societies affected but also those in the interior. The shift away from a demographic analysis allows readers to see the trans-Atlantic slave trade’s impact on the region.

Candido’s work is one of the few full-length book analysis in English to emphasise the centrality of the south Atlantic during the end of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. By examining Brazilian traders’ importance as slavers and connections between the Portuguese colonies, readers can see how this led to radical transformations. These transformations affected settlement patterns, political systems, and identities in Benguela and its hinterland. This examination moves away from a historiography that presents the local identity as ahistorical and stable.

Candido’s emphasis on understanding the history of Benguela in conjunction with the Atlantic world is significant. It forces the reader to think about the interconnectedness of the Atlantic world and past historical narratives. Using Benguela and its hinterland as a space to explore the greater Atlantic shows how important it is to understand African history. The slave trade cannot be understood without knowing its African roots.

Candido’s emphasis on women allows readers to see women’s involvement with the trade and political realm in Benguela and the interior. However, while Candido claims to mention women more than in previous historical work, I still think the narrative of women was lacking. Throughout the text, women are rarely mentioned as autonomous human beings, outside of their relationships with men. The only chapters that stray from this formula are four and five. This could be due to the lack of quality sources and source material or the hardship of combating a European, male-dominated narrative. While trying to flesh women out in the narrative I think most of the focus of women is on their role as subordinates.

However, the look at women that Candido does take is fascinating. The issue of local African women becoming involved in local businesses in the slave trade after the death of their foreign husbands is an interesting phenomenon. The text states that these women became known as Donas, and many Donas were widows five times over. The rate of marriages shows that African women realised the benefit of miscegenation and creolisation.

Candido’s emphasis on creolisation being one of exchange and cultural adoption and not the domination of European values is something I have not thought about previously. The definition of creolisation that she presents leaves me wondering what other authors are emphasising when they use creolization. Candido’s work with An African Slaving Port in the Atlantic World changes how historians think about Africa and African history in conjunction with the Atlantic.

I picked this up on a whim. It's old and a bit outdated but informative. It is a textbook, and it does look at more of a political and economic history. My biggest gripe is the complete and utter lack of The Bahamas anywhere in the text. Countries smaller than The Bahamas are mentioned and talked about but not The Bahamas.

Foundations of Despotism show that Rafael Trujillo’s regime created a critical position for the peasantry in the Dominican Republic by implementing policies that generated ways to integrate peasants into commercial markets, the national state, and a shared national community as never before in Dominican history. It established the foundations for Trujillo’s hegemony. By doing research through oral interviews, it became apparent to Turits that it was peasant involvement with the state that helped maintain Trujillo’s credibility throughout the nation, and when the peasantry withdrew their support, it allowed the regime’s fall.

By looking at Trujillo’s despotism while exploring the paradoxical social base and the critical role of government figures other than the despot, Turits separates himself from other authors in the field. He argues that the transformation of the state was feasible and fruitful because of the regime's approach to peasants. By focusing on how the peasantry sustained the social foundations of Trujillo’s regime, Turits takes a different path than most of the literature, which has focused on coercion and fear as an explanation for Trujillo’s long rule.

Turits examines the history of the Dominican Republic as it evolves from a European colony to a modern nation under Trujillo to investigate the social foundations of Trujillo’s enduring regime and, more broadly, the power sustained in non-democratic systems. By beginning with the Dominican Republic as a colony, Turits can look at the societal foundations of the Dominican Republic and how it was ripe for the ideology of Trujillo and other Dominican elites.

Looking at the dialectic narratives, readers will be able to see the transformation in peasant-state relations. The first narrative in the text commences in the late 16th century with the demise of early sugar plantations. The second narrative takes place in the narrow timeframe of the Trujillo regime. With these two narratives in the text, Turits shows how the peasants were flexible and receptive to Trujillo’s rhetoric. Trujillo’s policies illuminate processes of state formation. The state brought the peasantry within its range of vision and effective control by distributing plots of land, providing aid, irrigation, and infrastructure upon which the sedentary agriculturalists came to depend.

Turits says extreme depictions of Trujillo’s dictatorship “reproduces a long European tradition of projecting the most extreme forms of political despotism and otherness onto non-Western societies and imagining beyond the edges of the European universe oddly passive or irrational people who mysteriously accept intolerable regimes.” I find this quote fascinating enough to include in full within this paper because this is a theme seen time and time again in tropical regions. The narrative of otherness or naïve native is pushed on to those who live in the tropics. Somehow tropical people need European saviours. This will be seen in the text with the US’s intervention in the Dominican Republic. White intervention is seen as noble and paternalistic in nature.

Turits’ sources took him all over the Dominican Republic. Archival sources show local and daily operations of the state, public policies and their implementation, and testimony from pertinent social groups. However, the bulk of Foundations of Despotism comes from thousands of daily interstate documents, letters by peasants written to the state, and interviews with elderly peasants across the country. Oral interviews play an essential role in Turits’ thesis and methodology throughout the text. Using sources from peasants’ perspectives, Turits shows why there was widespread support for Trujillo in light of his regime's repressive character.

While Richard Turits’ book is dense in its style, the information was fascinating. Shifting to look at rural Dominicans, Turits shows how a regime like Trujillo’s could sustain itself until it could not. Ending the text with the assassination of Trujillo shows how the public’s shifting position and the US’s shifting support helped bring about the end of Trujillo’s regime. Foundations of Despotism was a great read.

Through Conceiving Freedom, Camillia Cowling tells the stories of enslaved and free(d) women in pursuit of freedom in the urban cities of Havana and Rio de Janerio. Cowling explores how enslaved and free women of colour were at the front line of daily battles for freedom, which inherently helped shape and speed the ending of slavery. The study of urban slavery would be vastly incomplete without looking at the role women played in the avenues of freedom in urban settings.

The stories in this text help show the connections across the Atlantic in popular discourses, tying different worlds with each other. Looking at these women of colour gives readers a look into the broader abolition processes to which their struggles were connected. Women of colour in urban settings are windows into inmate connections with domestic spheres in which they served, as they provided a “biological and social function” to bridge the gaps between cultures and worldviews.

By comparing women of colour’s actions in two different cities, Cowling shows the reader that slavery was a gendered concept: in its theory and everyday practice. Women of colour were at the centre of manumission and miscegenation, as their bodies were where “the violence of physical and cultural intermixture occurred.” Cowling follows recent scholarship by focusing on two Iberian societies.

Using the cases of Brazil and Cuba, differences in the level of language, legal tradition, and regional and political histories do appear throughout the text, though not in-depth. The book’s structure is layered as Cowling creates intimate intersections to show that claim-making was a collective social process. She wants to show the humanness in the cases presented in the text. She seeks to be a part of the wave of historians peeking behind the manumission statistics to look at enslaved people themselves and their role in their manumission.

By focusing solely on women claimants in her work, Cowling seeks to move away from the legal cases that tell readers primarily about the actions of enslaved men. Cowling’s belief is that women’s activities can reveal broader national development and the changing politics of gender, as expressed throughout the text. The emphasis on second slavery throughout the text is an important reminder of a phrase that I still have heard little about throughout my studies.

The focus of abolition in hand with women experiencing enslavement, whether they were struggling to maintain freedom or still enslaved, was of particular interest to me. Conceiving Freedom's framework helped me see the broader picture of what was going on during this period with abolition movements in the Atlantic world. In the process of abolition, gendered imageries were debated and recast to show that manhood and womanhood are forever evolving and changing. Anti-slavery commentators use the language of equality hoping to arouse feelings of sympathy and sentiment for enslaved people show emotion is a powerful tool. Motherhood is especially prominent in abolitionist rhetoric. Throughout the text, motherhood was a powerful tool for soliciting elite women’s sympathy on behalf of enslaved women. Women’s involvement in the abolitionist movement was seen to bolster it, as women brought moral authority to society. The rhetoric of morality, emotion, and sympathy was appropriated by women themselves, whether they were in the abolitionist movement or not.

Throughout Conceiving Freedom, it’s clear that women sought the freedom and autonomy they believed themselves and their children deserved. Camillia Cowling does an excellent job of making that point come across in the text.