Rowman & Littlefield Publishers / Rowman & Littlefield International
Pages: 204
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9
978-1-78348-835-3 • Hardback • October 2017 • $162.00 • (£125.00)
978-1-78348-837-7 • eBook • October 2017 • $50.00 • (£38.00)
Carlo A. Cubero is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department Social & Cultural Anthropology at Tallinn University in Estonia.
1. Transinsularism from a Caribbean Perspective / 2. Militarisation & Culebra's Transinsular Precedents / 3. Conflicted Visions of Land / 4. Working the Ubiquitous Seas / 5. Musical Movements / Conclusion: Keeping an Eye on the Tension / Bibliography/ Index
Carlo Cubero’s wonderfully sensitive and rich exploration of Caribbean transinsularity breaks new ground by grasping the relationship of immanence that exists between the circulations and stabilities of human social life. We learn ethnographically how people forge lives that are at once insular and transnational, and which unsettle academic and political perspectives that privilege one dimension over the other.
— Peter Wade, Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester
Cubero imaginatively tackles models long prevalent in Caribbean Studies that identify the region as insular, victimized, and imperial replicas while also as mobile, victorious, and unique. The island of Culebra is the rich site of this welcome critique, which explores what Caribbean postcolonial, national, and transnational identities can otherwise mean if approached through multiple forms of local agency and practice.
— Aisha Khan, Associate Professor of Anthropology at NYU College of Arts and Science
This ethnographically rich experience-near study of music and life in the tiny island of Culebra is a fine example of how research in the Caribbean can benefit from an intellectual approach that is simultaneously archipelagean, transinsular and cosmopolitan. Carlo Cubero brings ‘mangrove’ methodology to his anthropological understanding of Culebra and hence of contemporary world society.
— Huon Wardle, Director of the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies, University of St Andrews
In particular, scholars interested in island geographies will find Cubero's analysis provocative. Those interested in migration (particularly to places like Lampedusa, Malta or Lesbos) will find transinsularity a useful term to understand the politics of exclusion and inclusion during periods of heightened migratory flows. Finally, the book questions the fundamental categories that have been traditionally mobilized to describe the Caribbean. For this reason alone, I encourage all Caribbeanists and island scholars to grapple with Cubero's provocative ethnography.
— Emotion, Space and Society
Michel Foucault famously described the core constitution of power relations by stating that ‘When there is power, there is resistance’ (Foucault 2007: 116). In Cubero’s Caribbean island movements (2017), we find a eulogy to Culebra’s “resistance” through transinsularity – an original term that emerges from this book’s research – as a means to defy colonisation and continental mentality. This book, contextualised in the book series ‘Rethinking the Island’, indeed rethinks and unsettles nationality/insularity through the illustrative case of Culebra.
Caribbean island movements makes a significant contribution beyond the confines of social anthropology. Cubero contributes to Culebrense history, Puerto Rican studies, popular music, Caribbean studies, critical cultural studies and more. Yet, more importantly (in my view), Cubero has assembled a Culebrense‐centred cultural history that transcends the insularities of colonial continental mentality and produces a sense of subjectivity that is beyond the confines of nationalities and of discrete identities that is truly more in tune with the Caribbean experience.
— Social Anthropology