Caribbean Military Encounters

This book provides a much-needed study of the lived experience of militarization in the Caribbean from 1914 to the present. It offers an alternative to policy and security studies by drawing on the perspectives of literary and cultural studies, history, anthropology, ethnography, music, and visual art. Rather than opposing or defending militarization per se, this book focuses attention on how Caribbean people negotiate militarization in their everyday lives. The volume explores topics such as the US occupation of Haiti; British West Indians in World War I; the British naval invasion of Anguilla; military bases including Chaguaramas, Vieques and Guantánamo; the militarization of the police; sex work and the military; drug wars and surveillance; calypso commentaries; private security armies; and border patrol operations. 

Shalini Puri is Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, USA. She is the author of The Grenada Revolution in the Caribbean Present: Operation Urgent Memory and the award-winning The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity.  She has edited the volumes The Legacies of Caribbean Radical Politics, Marginal Migrations: The Circulation of Cultures within the Caribbean, and with Debra Castillo, Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities: Methods, Reflections, and Approaches to the Global South.

Lara Putnam is Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh, USA.  She is the author of Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age, The Company They Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870-1960, and more than twenty journal articles and book chapters exploring labor migration, state racism, and the ways family and intimacy shape and are shaped by large-scale political and economic change.