Coloniality of Diasporas

Focusing on piracy in the seventeenth century, filibustering in the nineteenth century, intracolonial migrations in the 1930s, metropolitan racializations in the 1950s and 1960s, and feminist redefinitions of creolization and sexile from the 1940s to the 1990s, this book redefines the Caribbean beyond the postcolonial debate.

"This is a bold and imaginative rupturing of current colonial metanarratives of nation, race, and sexual identities. By reading history, fiction, and colonial mentalities against the grain, with a skillful navigation of disciplinary, geographical, and linguistic boundaries, Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel conjures up a far more variegated understanding of Caribbean ontology." - Patricia Mohammed, Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of the West Indies, Trinidad and author of Imaging the Caribbean: Culture and Visual Translation

"Yolanda Martinez-San Miguel's Coloniality of Diasporas is a groundbreaking study of the legacies of colonialism and of the ways in which migration produces Caribbean diasporas that challenge traditional representations of ethnic and cultural identities. Her focus on collective identities in the Caribbean archipelago includes the linguistic background of the créolité and creolization debates, and redefines Caribbean identity beyond national or postcolonial boundaries. Her exploration of the links between racism and colonialism exposes both the depths of processes of racialization and their redefinition by the diasporic experience, creatively complicating current postcolonial thinking in Latino and Caribbean Studies." - H. Adlai Murdoch, Professor of Francophone Studies, Tufts University, USA

"A productive critical intervention that offers a theoretically informed, comparative, interdisciplinary, and historically grounded reading of 18 foundational texts in the insular Caribbean, primarily in the Hispanic and French Antilles, as well as the Philippines. She deftly analyzes the multiple intersections among race, class, gender, and sexuality in the cultural representations of contemporary population movements from the Caribbean islands to the United States and France." - Jorge Duany, Director, Cuban Research Institute, Florida International University, USA, and author of Blurred Borders: Transnational Migration between the Hispanic Caribbean and the United States

Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel is Professor in the Department of Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies and Program of Comparative Literature at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, USA.