This book provides a much-needed study of the lived experience of militarization in the Caribbean from 1914 to the present. It offers an alternative to policy and security studies by drawing on the perspectives of literary and cultural studies, history, anthropology, ethnography, music, and visual art. Rather than opposing or defending militarization per se, this book focuses attention on how Caribbean people negotiate militarization in their everyday lives. The volume explores topics such as the US occupation of Haiti; British West Indians in World War I; the British naval invasion of Anguilla; military bases including Chaguaramas, Vieques and Guantánamo; the militarization of the police; sex work and the military; drug wars and surveillance; calypso commentaries; private security armies; and border patrol operations.
1. Introduction: Subjects of Militarization; Lara Putnam and Shalini Puri.- 2. The Haitian Military as a Family Affair; Chelsey Kivland.- 3. British West Indian Memories of World War One: From Militarized Citizenship to Conscientious Objection; Richard Smith.- 4. Writing War and Empire: Poetry, Patriotism, and Public Claims-Making in the British Caribbean; Reena N. Goldthree.- 5. Occupied Thoroughfares: Haitian Women, Public Space, and the United States Occupation, 1915-1924; Grace L. Sanders Johnson.- 6. Base Impulses: Sex Work and the Military in Trinidadian Literature on World War Two; Shalini Puri.- 7. Killing Mapepe: Race, Sex and Colonial Politics in Cold War Vieques; Katherine T. McCaffrey and Bonnie Donohue.- 8. The Anguilla Revolution and Operation Sheepskin; Don E. Walicek.- 9. Pensions, Politics, and Soul Train: Anglo-Caribbean Diasporic Encounters with Guantánamo from theWar to the Special Period; Andrea Queeley.- 10. Cuban Narratives of War: Memories of Angola; Marisabel Almer.- 11. In "The Back Yard": Experiencing War in the Greater Caribbean (A Photo-Essay); Jenny Matthews.- 12. A "Parvenu Predator"? When the Kill Zone and the Contact Zone Collide on the Isle of Spice; John C. Nelson.- 13. Mourning Marķa Pantalones: Military Rule and the Politics of Race, Citizenship, and Nostalgia in Panama; Aims McGuinness.- 14. Half-Mast: Shifting Landscapes of Protest and Demilitarization in Vieques; Daniel Arbino.- 15. Public Secrets, Militarization, and the Cultivation of Doubt: Kingston 2010; Deborah A. Thomas.- 16. "Who Going to Guard These Guards?" The Treatment of the Military in the Calypso; Louis Regis.- 17. Music and Militarization: Soca, Space, and Security; Jocelyne Guilbault.- 18. Interdict: Scenes of Military Maritime Encounter in the Caribbean; April Shemak.- Index.
