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Alai Reyes-Santos Our Caribbean Kin: Race and Nation in the Neoliberal Antilles. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015. xvi + 225 pp. (Paper US$29.95)
Our Caribbean Kin interrogates the means by which inhabitants of the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Haiti may imagine themselves as "kin" in the context of fractious colonial legacies and current geopolitical forces that complicate, deepen, or diminish their impulse to gather together as one people, as "family." Self-identifying as Puerto Rican, Alaí Reyes-Santos is unambiguously invested as an ethnonational subject in the book's matter, which thematically and chronologically spans nineteenth-century independence struggles in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hispaniola against imperial Spain, Hispanophone Antillean novels of the 1930s, and present-day issues of cross-border migration and contested citizenship. The book asserts itself also as a prise de parole, with Reyes-Santos's utterances exuding a deep sense of political and personal urgency. She sets out to reconceptualize political alliances while "paying attention to kinship metaphors as well as representations of empathy, sympathy, love, and compatibility" across the regions under consideration (p. 187).
The book's first part adds nuance to the social history of Antillanismo by forwarding the notion of a "decolonial affective matrix," a concept that relies on tropes of marriage, family, extended blood ties, and...