Joshua I. Jelly-Schapiro

This dissertation explores the central role of the Caribbean and its artists on the cultural landscape of the wider world from the 1950s to the present. Glancing back to the period when the British West Indies were gaining their independence, coincident with the triumph of Cuban Revolution, it explores how and why many of the region’s foremost intellectuals came to argue that the Caribbean’s diverse territories should all be understood to belong to a single region bound together by key commonalities of history and culture. It offers a reading of how the islands’ foremost musicians, artists, and writers have shaped understandings of “Caribeanness” across the half-century since—and of what is at stake in their continuing to conceive of the Caribbean as coherent region.