The Caribbean Race Reader: From Colonialism to Anticolonial Thought

This book is the first critical anthology in English on the history and legacy of race in the Caribbean. It brings together the major debates, lines of inquiry, and theories around race and racism that have emerged out of the Caribbean from the beginning of European colonization at the end of the fifteenth century to the period of decolonization in the aftermath of World War II. This critical anthology stakes out the unique contribution made by the region to the global history of race.

The Caribbean Race Reader provides students and scholars of the region with vital access to some of the most important contributions on race and Caribbean society, many of which are difficult to access, and assembles them together as part of a series of key debates. At a time when the searing realities of race and antiblack racism stand out as global, existential crises, this volume both documents the Caribbean’s important contribution to global histories of race and provides an excellent overview of the quest by the region’s radical intelligentsia to undo racism’s contemporary legacies.

Victoria Collis-Buthelezi is Director of the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender and Class and Associate Professor of English at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. She is a senior research fellow at the Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Studies (JIAS) and a research associate at the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbia University. Some of her work on black intellectual and literary histories has appeared in Callaloo, boundary2 and the UK Journal of Arts and the Humanities.

Aaron Kamugisha is Ruth J. Simmons Professor of Africana Studies at Smith College and a scholar of the social, political and cultural thought of the African diaspora. He is the editor of five edited collections on Caribbean and Africana thought and his latest book, Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Freedom, was published in 2019 by Indiana University Press, with a simultaneous edition by University of Witwatersrand Press.