Making Space: The Caribbean in Transnational American Studies

The region features prominently in archipelagic American studies, which connects the Caribbean to the Americas, decentering North American dominance, and to islands and continents over ocean space.1 The literary critics Belinda Edmondson and Donette Francis and the historian Harvey Neptune have recently argued that the study of the Caribbean disturbs the Cold War chronologies and ideas that set the United States apart from the American hemisphere, particularly the First-World/Third-World divide and US exceptionalism.2 These paradigms have illuminated the role of the Caribbean as a critical part of the American hemisphere and as central to plural rather than bounded understandings of sovereignty. [...]at times these works have also reproduced the division of knowledge-of slavery or indenture and their legacies-in the archives, the university, and other official, classificatory spaces. Because Intimacies refers to but does not focus on the Caribbean, I want to place Intimacies in conversation with four other works to illuminate the interplay between labor, freedom, and place in the region.