Jossianna Arroyo’s Caribes 2.0: New Media, Globalization, and the Afterlives of Disaster will be published by Rutgers University Press in April 2023.

Description: In Caribes 2.0, author Jossianna Arroyo looks at the Caribbean mediasphere in the 21st 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.

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.

For more information, see https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/caribes-2-0/9781978819740