Association of Caribbean Historians

Forthcoming (April 2026): Interrogating the Future of Puerto Rican Studies - Edited by Aurora Santiago Ortiz and Jorell A. Meléndez-Badillo | Duke University Press | More information can be found here: www.dukeupress.edu/interrogatin...

Singer Bad Bunny dressed in a cream colored outfit and carrying a football in his gloved hand is walking through a mock field of sugar cane with workers wearing straw hats and holding machetes

Bad Bunny opening halftime performance by moving through sugarcane highlights colonial history that binds US, Puerto Rico & the larger Caribbean. Sugar everywhere in the performance - drinks, wedding 🎂, etc. Labor, desire & pleasure tied to the land.

The book "Puerto Rico: A National History" on a red background. The Project MUSE logo appears in the upper left corner.

Curious to learn more about Puerto Rico after Bad Bunny's explosive Super Bowl performance? Access "Puerto Rico: A National History," an engaging and surprising history of colonialism, revolt, and the creation of a national identity, on MUSE.

https://bit.ly/4bLOp3i

There are some great threads going about how awful sugar plantations were.

I just want to add something as a historical romance author: every time you see someone adding a sugar cube to tea in a historical romance, think of those threads and the blood-soaked cost of the sugar.

Bad Bunny’s performance began in the plantation, featured broken electric poles, and ended by centering a hemispheric understanding of “América”—among many other things—and some Anglo journalists are like “his performance wasn’t political.”

This is why we need to be telling our stories.

Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History The Place of Sugar in Modern History

For those interested in why Black & Caribbean people are going off about the sugar cane from last night's halftime show: sugar is a plantation commodity that fueled slavery & colonialism

bookshop.org/p/books/swee...

@dlocaribbean has a great series of events coming up!

Slavery, Indentureship, and Women’s Labor Slavery, Indentureship, and Women’s Labor: Early British Guiana’s Jails uncovers the overlooked histories of incarcerated women in colonial British Guiana, revealing how prisons evolved from sites of ...

Congrats to Estherine Adams on her forthcoming book, Slavery, Indentureship, and Women’s Labor: Early British Guiana’s Jails. www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/S/Slav...

Many were not exported--see D. Andrew Johnson, Enslaved Native Americans and the Making of Colonial South Carolina (JHU Press, 2024). He maps out locales in SC where enslaved Native people made up majorities of the enslaved population well into the eighteenth century.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot would like to have a word.

I cannot sufficiently underline how despicable it is that the IOC has required Haitian Olympic athletes to remove an image representing the leader of the Haitian Revolution (against SLAVERY) from their uniforms.

Feety? Feetly? This is first book stuff bubbling up...

i'm...aghast. just...aghast.

Wait, what???

#OnThisDay, Feb 3, 1964, 464,000 NYC students—including Black & Puerto Rican—boycotted school to protest segregation. Led by Bayard Rustin, they demanded quality, integrated education. It was one of the largest Civil Rights demonstrations.

Learn more: https://crdl.usg.edu/events/ny_school_boycott

Cover of The Borders of America: Migration, Control, and Resistance Across Latin America and the Caribbean edited by Soledad Álvarez Velasco, Nicholas De Genova, Gustavo Dias, and Eduardo Domenech. The cover features a red tinted photograph taken from ground level of people walking from behind with light shining through. Layered over the feet of one individual on the left is a red and yellow gradient that the title appears on in white. The subtitle is below to the left in an italicized font fading from yellow to white. The editors’ names are in the bottom right.

Today on our blog, see all our great new titles coming this month, including “The Borders of America,” edited by Soledad Álvarez Velasco, Nicholas De Genova, Gustavo Dias, and Eduardo Domenech. For the full list, head to buff.ly/yFB1kAQ

Reimagining the Landscape of Identity: Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Approaches | Keynote Speaker: Lewis R. Gordon | February 3-5, 2026 | University of West Indies, Mona | Kingston, Jamaica | For more info, visit: www.mona.uwi.edu/dllp/C2026-r...

I was hunting through my sign collection about ready to head over when I learned this.

I'll see your tonnage and raise you some poundage.

If You Missed It The First Time (July 2024): An Ordinary Landscape of Violence: Women Loving Women in Guyana - By Preity R. Kumar | Rutgers University Press | More information can be found here: www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/an-ordinary-...

A Slave Empire | Los Angeles Review of Books Brooke N. Newman’s ‘The Crown’s Silence’ dives into the long history of transatlantic atrocities committed by Charles III’s ancestors in the name of empire.

” In The Crown’s Silence: The Hidden History of the British Monarchy and Slavery in the Americas, Newman describes centuries of royal entanglement in the slave trade and urges King Charles III—himself the descendant of slave owners—at last to apologize formally.”
lareviewofbooks.org/article/crow...

Today I:
1. updated several parts of the ACH website and did so in three languages while fixing broken links and formatting problems
2. finished a newsletter
3. updated constant contact lists
4. sent a constant contact campaign
5. made sure all the deets about our 2026 conference were available […]

Organisation et Inscription de la 57ème assemblée annuelle
Kingston, Jamaïque du 24 au 29 mai 2026!

associationofcaribbeanhistorians.org/fr/reunion-a...

Disposiciones y Registro para la 57ª Reunión Anual
Kingston, Jamaica, del 24 al 29 de mayo de 2026!!

associationofcaribbeanhistorians.org/es/reunion-a...

Information and Registration for our 57th Annual Meeting in Kingston, Jamaica, 24-29 May 2026!

associationofcaribbeanhistorians.org/annual-meeti...

‘Unjust and inhuman’: how royal family ignored a Black abolitionist’s plea to end the slave trade In this adapted extract from The Crown’s Silence, which examines the royal family’s links with slavery from Elizabeth I to the present, Ottobah Cugoano directly appeals to the monarchy – but is met wi...

In this adapted excerpt from The Crown’s Silence, which examines the royal family’s links with slavery from Elizabeth I to the present, Ottobah Cugoano directly appeals to the monarchy – but is met with silence. www.theguardian.com/news/2026/ja...

Via Caribbean Studies Association | Inaugural Past Presidents’ Forum: Caribbean Zones of Peace and U.S. Global Ownership Desires | January 30, 2026 - 4PM to 6PM EST | Virtual | Register Here: t.co/MA52pp97mN

Notes on Casta Paintings in the Longue Durée of anti-Blackness — The Caribbean Philosophical Association Shifting the Geography of Reason.

Our new posting of “Caliban’s Readings” is now available. Please join Rosa O’Connor Acevedo in exploring the "anti-Black gendered ontologies" of casta paintings as well as the "ongoing resistance by Black and African descended women" to such depictions.

I used to run this as a debate case in the late 1990s.

Book Friday Reboot: The Coloniality of Catastrophe in Caribbean Theater and Performance | Friday, January 30th - 5PM EST | CPA Graduate Student Network | RSVP Here: forms.gle/BAnhJEZh9HzZ... | For more information, visit: caribbeanphilosophy.org/book-fridays