In Caribes 2.0, author Jossianna Arroyo looks at the Caribbean mediasphere in the twenty-first century. Arroyo argues that we have seen a return to tropes such as blackface, brownface, cultural and ethnic stereotypes, and violent representations of the poor, the marginalized, and the racialized. Caribes 2.0 looks at these tropes as well as the work of writers, vloggers, performers, and photographers that have become media figures or have used new media platforms to promote their work and examines how they are challenging and negotiating these media representations. It analyzes contemporary Caribbean cultures to discuss, taste, guides, and actions (social and virtual) that shape Caribbean global communities today. Departing from Edouard Glissant’s insight that “Caribbean reality might not be accessed by remote control” the book considers what types of political and social agencies are created by mediation. Caribes 2.0 deviates from these historical-globalized views of subjected, colonized Caribbean bodies, and their material conditions, to examine the relationship between the local and the global in contemporary Caribbean cultures, and the role that media is playing in the invisibility or hyper-visibilty of Caribbean cultures in the islands and the U.S. diaspora.

Focusing on the complexities behind Caribbean mediascapes, Jossianna Arroyo’s Caribes 2.0 represents an important and timely contribution to Caribbean, Latin American, Latinx, Afro-diasporic, media, and cultural studies. This provocative study does not shy away from addressing controversial topics (such as blackface) or lesser-known figures and cultural products, thus offering us a blueprint for engaging in the critical analysis of various forms of cultural expression, even those that have not been traditionally considered ‘worthy’ of academic attention because of race or class origins. Latino Studies

Jossianna Arroyo’s Caribes 2.0 brings a variety of understudied sources to light, providing a fruitful addition to media scholarship and Caribbean studies. Most strikingly, her work forms part of a wave of Caribbean scholarship that regards the visual prominence of Black and brown death and precarity in processes of racialization. Caribes 2.0 will prove especially useful to researchers of contemporary Caribbean cultural production and virtual economies. Film Quarterly

Jossianna Arroyo offers a magistral deconstruction of 21st-century forms of necropolitics insidiously wielded via Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and other digital platforms; television; and literary and cinematic production. With sophisticated straightforwardness, Arroyo compels us to critically look at the too-familiar imagery accompanying the invention and reproduction of Caribbean otherness across centuries and nations. Odette Casamayor-Cisneros, associate professor of Latin American and Caribbean Literatures and Cultures, University of Pennsylv

Caribes 2.0 offers canny insight into the logics of visibility, performance and politics that blossom in the mediascapes of a globalized Caribe. Refusing easy takes, the book tracks the afterlives of slavery and ongoing anti-Black racism as they morph and reassemble in twenty-first-century Caribbean media. Moving seamlessly between TikTok and Televisa, Santo Domingo and Orlando, Arroyo offers fascinating readings of what 'viral' racial images and outlaw performativity reveal about neoliberal codes for self-making—and their refusal. Rachel Price, associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese, Princeton University

JOSSIANNA ARROYO is a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Department of African and African Diaspora at the University of Texas, Austin. She is author of Travestismos culturales: literatura y etnografía en Cuba y Brasil and Writing Secrecy in Caribbean Freemasonry.

1 Caribbean Mediascapes: After the Image

2 Enacting Others: Blackface, Brownface, and Caribbean Selves

3 Ratchetness and Vlogging the Self

4 Cities of the Dead: Performing Life in the Caribbean

5 Indebted Citizenships and Afterlives of Disaster

Acknowledgments
Notes
Works Cited
Index

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