Cuba’s small business owners are on the front lines of a changing economy. The Struggle for the Market takes readers inside Havana’s vibrant marketplaces, revealing small-scale entrepreneurs’ challenges and triumphs as they navigate the complexities of legal reforms and their relationship with the state that both empowers and constrains them.

Tracing the literal and literary uses of sugar in seventeenth-century England, The Sweet Taste of Empire shows how literary genres associated with gastronomic and aesthetic pleasure shaped representations of Caribbean colonization and slavery.

Examining island-wide and diasporic literary and cultural productions from 1791 to 2002, Sophie Maríñez challenges the “fatal conflict” paradigm dominating views of the relations between Haiti and the Dominican Republic through the framework of the Spiral, a concept at the core of Spiralism, a Haitian literary aesthetic developed in the 1960s.

The effect of the Cuban diaspora on Miami has long been observed, but how this history fits into broader trends in American history has not been properly understood. Only a Few Blocks to Cuba shows how a story of migration, federal largesse, and Cold War priorities shaped not only South Florida but our broader national politics.

A Home Away from Home examines the significance of mutual aid societies to the Caribbean immigrant experience in the twentieth century. These societies facilitated further immigration through their networks, provided various forms of support, fostered a shared West Indian ethnic identity, and strengthened kinship networks with those back home.

Unearthing personal stories from the archive, Wicked Flesh shows how black women, from Senegambia in West Africa to the Caribbean to New Orleans, used intimacy and kinship to redefine freedom in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Their practices laid the groundwork for the emancipation struggles of the nineteenth century.