This chapter examines the case of María Geronima, an Iberian-born, free-Black woman who lived in Cartagena, Veracruz, and Mexico City before she was exiled to Cuba in 1636. In emphasizing Geronima’s remarkable mobility, the chapter asks how inchoate notions of caste, race, and community varied and transformed across space in the early modern world. In Geronima’s exile from New Spain, the chapter ultimately asks whether and how scholars can apply Mexico’s archival richness—as seen in cases such as Geronima’s—to understand the evolution and function of status elsewhere in the Atlantic world.

Traditionally, scholars have focused on how narratives of the lives of the enslaved, commonly understood as “slave narratives,” engaged with explicit claims to authenticity and authority as distinct from those of the novel genre that developed coterminously. Indeed, scholars of the slave narrative have frequently focused almost exclusively on the discursive foundations and frameworks of abolitionism. To solely focus on whether or not a narrative is “true or authentic” is to accept that narratives of the lives of the enslaved can only ever be political ethnography, as opposed to aesthetics. However, like others, enslaved and free Black narrators drew heavily upon engagements with notions of subjectivity and social action that appeared in other genres such as poetry and the novel. And so, consequently, rather than understanding the slave narrative as a genre that is focused solely on the institution of enslavement, we have instead a complex genre that is in dynamic conversation with other institutions, concepts, discourses, and genres. In addition to acknowledging how subaltern groups appropriated other forms of discourse, this chapter will examine how these inherently hybrid and complex texts participated directly and dynamically within discussions of identity, nation, and empire, as well as slavery.

While many Black Caribbean British writers persisted in operating within the literary framework of the empire, they blended an African Caribbean style and a Black diaspora perspective to enhance their literary activism. Developing a distinct style, later-generation writers asserted their presence in British society. Their thematic concerns went beyond the struggle for belonging or the need to establish a new Caribbean identity in a foreign environment. Further, as exemplified by poets such as Linton Kwesi Johnson, their works reflected a thread of resistance against British cultural imperialism and institutionalized racism. Although identity and self-determination continued to resonate deeply within the literature of Black Caribbean British writers, a shift occurred in the newer generation. Departing from biographical narratives, they explored diverse political and social themes while using a range of genre fiction to convey emerging complexities. The first part of the chapter critically analyses the legacies and continuities of the African Caribbean writing style. The second section examines the Black diaspora sensibility, showing how post-1990s Black Caribbean British writers engaged in critical analysis of the intricate intersections of race, gender issues, and sexuality through contemporary literary styles.

The introduction explains how the Eastern Amazon was shaped in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; this means appreciating the diverse spaces and peoples of the Amazon and how they define one another. The introduction shows how this approach re-centres the Amazon as part of a continental space and elucidates its role in continental history by analysing the historical agency of the people who inhabited the region. Sections make the theoretical and methodological justification for analytically joining up the spaces and territories that are historically considered separate. It discusses the use of a spatial history approach, and how this perspective contributes to a new understanding of the Amazon, and presents a revisionist and historically anthropological framing of the argument along definitions of keywords used in the book.

Chapter 4.1, "What’s In it For Us? A Case of Interest Convergence" highlights the CRT tenet of interest convergence, the self-interest of dominant, powerful groups. This has implications for the way programs and policies that benefit minoritized groups are implemented. This tenet asks critical questions about all areas of practice, including humanitarian work in international settings. Unless international assistance programs understand and incorporate the community’s culture, needs, and input into its efforts, it could have a negative effect on the community and work being done. Acknowledging this through a CRT lens of interest convergence can ensure that the needs of minoritized groups are given priority, otherwise efforts put in place to advance them may not be effective.

This chapter opens by establishing the tangible personal connections between writers and intellectuals in Africa and the Caribbean. By way of these networks, African print made its way into Caribbean publications. It then identifies some of the styles and genres of African writing produced in the Caribbean. Next, we use the example of Jamaica to consider the differing networks print media followed into and through the diaspora during the mid-twentieth century. Pan-Africanist textual networks were less neat and more diverse than scholars have generally recognised, and prominently involved the lower socio-economic classes. In a country with a largely illiterate population, Jamaicans both accessed and consumed mainstream newspapers, smaller newsletters and journals in a distinct way. Jamaica had a culture of literature but not a literate culture where the written word intersected with and percolated through oral debates. The travels of African writing, we argue, suggest that conceptually African literatures (versus African literature) encompassed the African diaspora in concrete ways.

Britons and British subjects with family members deeply involved in the transatlantic economy were an important feature of University life. These students, who grew in number due the increasing profits of the slave economy and the underdeveloped state of tertiary education in the colonies, were accepted and nurtured by fellows and masters who, in many cases, owned plantations, held investments in the slave trade, or had family members serving as governors in the North American colonies. In following the experiences of these students, the chapter details the lives and struggles of undergraduates, particularly those who traveled abroad to Cambridge, and the emotional and personal bonds that fellows and their young charges developed. The chapter is a reminder that, when considering institutional connections to enslavement, political economy was but one side of the story – the emotional, social, and cultural bonds between the sons of enslavers and their fellow Britons were also integral.

The growing professionalisation of the law and the natural sciences owed much to the spread of the empire – and Cambridge intellectuals would benefit more than most from these processes. Natural philosophers travelled across the empire amassing botantical, geological, and antiquarian collections and expanding scientific knowledge, with much of the credit for their findings owed to local enslavers or enslaved Africans. Britons with financial investments in slave-trading organisations also donated to found professorships. In the case of the law, experts in international law and treaty-making, particularly Sir Nathaniel Lloyd, applied their expert knowledge to cases concerning piracy, plantation holdings, and imperial companies. As with missionary organisations, the problem of enslavement continued to be a source of debate in the eighteenth century, as philosophers of natural law and rights considered the ethical justifications for racial enslavement.

Following the colonisation of Ireland, North America, and the Caribbean, British society, politics, and the economy were forever transformed by the growing transatlantic empire. The University of Cambridge was intimately connected to that Atlantic world. The introduction provides context on Cambridge’s history and the long-term development of racial slavery, examining how enslavement and the plantation economy were of incredible significance to British life from the beginning of the seventeenth century through to the end of the American Civil War and beyond. More than a history of plantation owners purchasing stately homes or consumers eagerly consuming sugar, a case study of Cambridge’s town and gown communities highlights the vast spectrum of connections, ties, and interests that many Britons held to a slave empire.

Chapter 4 explores how the literary collection adapted to audio recording to form a species of sonic cartography. I argue that Zora Neale Hurston’s fieldwork in Jamaica and Haiti presented US borders in stereo, both offset from Caribbean islands and overlapping with them. Hurston’s notion of a sonic boundary is distinct from that heard by Jean Toomer, for whom folksong is a spiritual rejoinder to the violence of agricultural labor. Toomer’s swansong to Georgia’s small-town sugarcane harvest is echoed and distorted by Cuban soundscapes. Poems about cane harvest by Agustin Acosta and Nicolás Guillén document of Cuba’s rather different agricultural identity and pose toward US imperium. In these cartographies, I argue, the line demarcating continental nation from island colony is not just aquatic, but also sonic: heard in stereo, and often out of phase.

Through an analysis of Jacob Ross’s 1999 story ‘Rum an Coke’, this chapter examines the role of rum in contemporary literature, both as an emblem of the Caribbean and a commodity historically connected to slavery and the plantation economy. As both noun and adjective, word and thing, rum is peculiarly open for language play characteristic of ‘the literary’ and productive for examining the silences and echoes of colonialism in everyday life. By tracking substitutions across commodities in the story—sugar, rum, Coca-Cola, and cocaine—the role of the United States and Europe becomes central to material conditions in contemporary Grenada. Stereotypes about alcohol and drug use deflect historicization of these conditions as legacies of colonization and enslavement in the Caribbean. Through this method, I suggest that reading commodities in historical perspective can frustrate colonialist interpretive circuits to reckon ethically with the past and speculate on postcolonial futures.

Water is rarely a subject of Euro-American literary attention, even if it is one of the most essential commodities today. But this is not the case for literary studies in places such as Oceania and the Caribbean, and in our world’s moment of environmental crises the status of water as (and as not) a commodity is more important than ever. This chapter first sketches out broader trends of water’s commodification in several canonical literary texts. The chapter then examines imaginaries of transnational waters, hydro-power, and water contamination in works by Ruth Ozeki and Nnedi Okorafor. Finally, I focus on contemporary authors from Oceania who prioritise water’s critical importance as they challenge notions of it as a commodity and complicate the ‘Blue Humanities’. This chapter considers shows how fictions and poetry can creatively engage with forms of water’s commodification but also theorise alternative water futures.

This chapter examines language ideologies in the context of creole linguistics and in the Caribbean. Creole linguistics offers critical insights into how languages are socially constructed. Traditional debates in creole linguistics have often framed creoles as ‘simpler’ or structurally distinct from other languages, reflecting Western biases. Other approaches challenge these views and underline the fluidity and variability of creole languages. In the second part, the chapter examines language attitudes and ideologies in creole-speaking societies, focusing on the Caribbean in general and Belize. Creole languages function as symbols of solidarity and belonging. In Belize, the rise of Kriol’s prestige reflects national identity and cultural independence, and intersects with English, Spanish, and indigenous languages. This requires frameworks that account for the polycentric, complex sociolinguistic realities of creole-speaking societies. The chapter establishes Belize as a compelling site to explore how languages are discursively constructed, and shows how academic and lay perspectives influence this construction.