The Caribbean archipelago and continental rimland territories were forged through the interaction of Amerindian/indigenous people, and migrants from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the United States. Currents of people, ideas, goods, and culture have defined the region’s global impact since the fifteenth century. It is the birthplace of globally impactful revolutions and an incubator for racializing and gendering capitalist technologies that define our collective present. Shaped by centuries of colonization, enslavement, rebellion, and imperialism, the region lends itself to sustained analysis of contemporary political and social conditions. This working group takes the matter of close reading Caribbean history, politics, and culture as its central point of concern. The “Caribbean Currents" theme gestures to the flow of people and thoughts in the Caribbean and the temporal fluidity of a region so profoundly shaped by the “infinitely relevant and repeating past.”
Despite media representations that suggest that the Caribbean is “too distant… too inconvenient, too dangerous, too corrupt, or even too touristic,” scholars of the region have insisted upon its centrality to our understanding of modernity and its discontents. This working group takes seriously their contention and lingers in the discomfort and the possibility produced by the “living memory” of colonialism’s wake. Harnessing expertise from scholars of art history; Black studies; literature; Caribbean studies; religion; anthropology; education; science, technology, and society; geography and more, we will host critical conversations, article workshops, book intensives, and archive visits to better understand the historical origins of the Caribbean’s present(s).
Shelby M. Sinclair is a historian of the nineteenth and twentieth century United States and Caribbean. She specializes in histories of U.S. empire, military occupation, gender, and visual culture in the Caribbean and its diasporas. Her current book project explores Haitian women’s lives and labors during the 19-year U.S. military occupation of Haiti (1915-1934). Sinclair’s research has been supported by the Gilder Lehrman Institute, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She teaches courses on critical archival methods, Black women’s history, and Haiti in the world. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Palimpsest, Global Black Thought, The Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, History of Photography, and Forgotten Lands.
Alexa Rodríguez is an assistant professor and faculty affiliate at the Carter G. Woodson Institute, as well as a faculty affiliate in the Latin American Studies Program at the University of Virginia. Her current book project, Crafting Dominicanidad (forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press), is an intellectual history that explores how Dominicans used public schools to articulate and circulate competing visions of national identity in the early twentieth century. She is also director of the digital humanities project, Dominican Voices Project/Proyecto Voces Dominicanas, a bilingual digital archive that consists of audio and videotaped interviews of Dominicans born and raised in the Dominican Republic between 1920 and 1960. Rodríguez was a 2024–26 postdoctoral fellow with the National Academy of Education and the Spencer Foundation. Her work has appeared in History of Education Quarterly, Latino Studies, City & State New York, Clio and the Contemporary, and on the blog of the History of Education Society in the UK.