Iʻve been travelling to islands before realizing I was seeking them. It was my political convictions that brought me to Haiti and Cuba, and later to Indonesia and Thai Islands due to my philosophical interests. When I headed to Greece for the first time it was to Corfu and the Peloponnese, my lineage, but also to Ithaca, Crete, the Cyclades, and eventually to Lesvos. Now I live in Hawaiʻi. I was attracted to the poetics of island landscapes, but as a scholar of space, society, and justice, I also understood that islands hold distinct sets of constraints and opportunities that require further study with intersectional and decolonial perspectives.
I wrote...
Sappho's Legacy: Convivial Economics on a Greek Isle
It is an ethnographic and historical account that includes extensive interviews with Greek women cooperatives and micro-entrepreneurs, and the lesbian enclave in Skala Eresos on Lesvos. Set between Europe and West Asia, Lesvos offers an ideal setting to identify the subtleties of Northern European imperialism and the ethnicization of Greeks to demean Greek economic practices past and present. Sappho’s Legacy reveals that Greek island cultures hold robust forms of ancient and contemporary practices of hospitality, negotiated rather than contracted economic ties, and conviviality, that counter the neoliberal ethos. The volume combines post-colonial queer and feminist and lesbian analyses of space and economy to develop an understanding of Lesvos' island food system and the collective resistance it embodies across a diverse group of actors.
In writing From a Native Daughter, Haunani Trask—the late and highly-regarded Native Hawaiian scholar-activist—empowers and articulates the rising Indigenous movements in Hawaiʻi and across the Pacific. Her straight talk about tourism and settlers are disquieting but thatʻs what is appealing, she names the US occupation for what it is. What really shines through is the deep love she holds for her island home. Her precise and elegant language rapt me, reading it the year I relocated to Hawaiʻi Island from the island of Miami Beach, Florida.
This revised text includes material that builds on issues and concerns raised in the first edition. It explores issues of native Hawaiian student organizing at the University of Hawaii, the master plan of the native Hawaiian self-governing organization Ka Lahuni Hawaii and its platform on the four political arenas of sovereignty, the 1989 Hawaii declaration of the Hawaii ecumenical coalition on tourism, and a typology on racism and imperialism. Brief introductions to each of the essays bring them up to date and situate them in the native Hawaiian rights discussion.
Monique Roffey takes you on a father-daughter escape trip sailing from Trinidad to the Galapagos in a sketchy boat to leave behind the loss and sorrow they experienced after a major storm. Thanks to Grace Carr, I was shaped into who I am as a writer and researcher in Trinidad, where I carried out my dissertation work. The Trini cadence for life and love is ubiquitous in this book—it also reminds me of the bond between me and my Dad and our mutual appreciation for a little risk and chaos.
When a flood destroys Gavin Weald's home, tearing apart his family and his way of life, he doesn't know how to continue. A year later, he returns to his rebuilt home and tries to start again, but when the new rainy season arrives, so do his daughter's nightmares about the torrents, and life there becomes unbearable. So father and daughter - and their dog - embark upon a voyage to make peace with the waters. Their journey will take them far from their Caribbean island home, into other unknown harbours and eventually across a massive ocean. They will sail through…
This is a spectacular and detailed book—think city as island—that can engross you over and over again. Simone, development activist and scholar, carries us into four African cities and shares the grassroots efforts of people coming together to create systems of trust for economic exchange and meeting social needs—without or outside the state and capital. It is the potential for alternatives that makes this book so attractive to me and inspired my own work on convivial economics. Simone helps us to see that new ways of being and acting collaboratively can spring up and offer a blueprint for how we can move forward in solidarity.
Among government officials, urban planners, and development workers, Africa's burgeoning metropolises are frequently understood as failed cities, unable to provide even basic services. Whatever resourcefulness does exist is regarded as only temporary compensation for fundamental failure. In For the City Yet to Come, AbdouMaliq Simone argues that by overlooking all that does work in Africa's cities, this perspective forecloses opportunities to capitalize on existing informal economies and structures in development efforts within Africa and to apply lessons drawn from them to rapidly growing urban areas around the world. Simone contends that Africa's cities do work on some level and to…
This novel is both sexy and chilling. It is the journey of a young woman, about her lovers, the intimacy of friendship, and her alluring social life in Havana, Cuba. With each page you sip the intensity of youth and political drama on the island. After traveling to Cuba to protest the US embargo in the 1990s and living for so many years in Miami with friends in the Cuban diaspora, Cuban's transnational socio-cultural complex frames how I think about islands. I relish how Portela writes, she is the friend who coaxes you out, keeps you up all night, with the promises of thrill, excitement, and a bit of danger.
One Hundred Bottles, with its intersecting characters and unresolved whodunits, can be read as a murder mystery. But it's really a survivor's story. In a voice that blends gossip, storytelling, and literature, Z-the vivacious heroine of Portela's award-winning novel-relates her rum-soaked encounters with the lesbian underground, the characters carving up her home, and the terrifying-but-irresistible Moises. As entertaining as any detective drama, One Hundred Bottles is ultimately made real by very rough love, intense friendship, and something small that decides to live.
Hinds' mesmerizing paintings set the scene for a beautiful graphic rendition of The Odyssey. Anyone who has moved or travelled a lot, or seems to not be able to find a way home, can appreciate the story of Odysseus. I read this book many times with my two (once) young children, hopefully preparing them for a life of travel and living in Greece with their wanderer, researcher mom. For us Greek mythology is not for learning a "western" canon, which was never defined by ethnic Greeks anyway. We read the Odyssey to appreciate our roots in Greek island cultures and the hospitality they offer, which this lovely version makes palpable.
Bright but unassuming Marilyn Jones has some grown-up decisions to make, especially after Mama goes to prison for drugs and larceny. With no one to take care of them, Marilyn and her younger, mentally challenged brother, Carol, get tossed into the foster care system. While shuffling from one home to another, Marilyn makes it her mission to find the Tan Man, a mysterious man from her babyhood she believes holds the key to her family’s happiness.
But Marilyn’s quest is halted when her daddy, an ex-con she has never met, is chosen by…
Bright but unassuming Marilyn Jones has some grown-up decisions to make, especially after Mama goes to prison for drugs and larceny. With no one to take care of them, Marilyn and her younger, mentally challenged brother, Carol, get tossed into the foster care system. While shuffling from one home to another, Marilyn makes it her mission to find the Tan Man, a mysterious man from her babyhood she believes holds the key to her family's happiness.
But Marilyn's quest is halted when her daddy, an ex-con she has never met, is chosen by the courts as the new guardian. Caleb…
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