Sugar Story: Island People, the Caribbean, and the World
I urge PLATFORM readers to pick up a copy of Island People: The Caribbean and the World and read it (Figure 1). Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, essayist and geographer, is the author—the rare scholar with a storyteller’s gift. Island People, a genial travelogue, a tribute to islands, water, music, and literature, and an unsparing account of greed, violence, and racism, reads like a novel. It is also an impeccable work of historical scholarship, grounded in years of archival research and fieldwork. Island People opens with two aphorisms that set the stage for the meditations on history, geography, imperialism, globalization, architecture, culture, economy, and oceans that follow. The first, written by George Lamming, the Barbadian novelist, essayist and poet, points out that when the “mischievous gift, the sugar cane,” was introduced, an extraordinary human migration began to the Caribbean—one with consequences that we still strive to understand. The second is from Junot Díaz (another exceptional storyteller from this part of the world) who states that, “We’re all in the Caribbean, if you think about it.”
Figure 1. Joshua-Jelly-Schapiro, Island People: The Caribbean and the World, cover to the paperback edition, 2017.
Jelly-Schapiro moves through space—aqueous and otherwise—and time—chronological and otherwise—in Island People to tell the story of the Caribbean, its peoples, its places, its waters, its exploitations, its violence, its cultures, its buildings, its borders (mutable and not) and, ever so profoundly, its music and literature (Figure 2). Along the way he traces the indelible stamp, the scars and the wounds, that European thirst for sugar left on the cultural landscapes of the islands and the many peoples who have inhabited them, from the Carab and Arawak Indians to the migrants from Africa, India, China, France, England, Spain, and Portugal who came over the sea, willingly and not, to work, live, and create in the Caribbean.
Figure 2. Herman Moll, A Map of the West Indies, or the Islands of America in the North Sea, 1720. Courtesy of Wikimedia and Geographicus.
Jelly-Schapiro starts in Jamaica, paying tribute to his love of reggae, acquired when he was a teenager, with chapters titled, “Branding,” “Badness,” and “Redemption Songs.” We follow him as he moves, often by boat, from island to island, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, other smaller islands, and ends in Trinidad, where this research began (he wanted to study the work of C.L.R. James when he was an undergraduate student at Yale University). After receiving his B.A. in Literature and Ethnicity and Race and Migration (2002), he came to the University of California, Berkeley to study geography, winning a prize from the Caribbean Studies Association for his dissertation, titled as the book that he developed from it. Jelly-Schapiro is also one of the writers responsible for the series Infinite Cities: A Trilogy of Atlases―San Francisco, New Orleans, New York.
“Island People will help you reframe architectural history.”
I hope you read Island People—you will learn so much about the Caribbean; you will learn so much about writing, and, if you teach, your students will too, when you assign a chapter or two to them to read. Jelly-Schapiro relates the present to the past and the past to the present in material and poetic ways, and he uses history to defuse destructive isolationist myths without falling prey to romanticism. “The Massacre River” describes the riverine border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic where Rafael Trujillio’s soldiers committed a mass murder in 1937—so horrific that the river ran red with blood. He shows that immigration and migration are constituent factors in the construction of modernity and democracy, and he recognizes the profound enduring impact of commodities, slavery, racism, and commodity exchange on environments, nations, and politics in the contemporary world. Reading Island People will help you reframe architectural history, redirecting it from old-fashioned notions of authorship to what I and others are calling spatial history, set in the analysis of the production of space. You may also catch the author’s love of the sea, boats, islands, sailors, and the dreams that seafaring unleashes.
