From sugar to indentured labourers, tobacco to reggae music, Europe and North America have been relentlessly consuming the Caribbean and its assets for the past five hundred years. In this fascinating book, Mimi Sheller explores this troublesome history, investigating the complex mobilities of producers and consumers, of material and cultural commodities, including:
Consuming the Caribbean demonstrates how colonial exploitation of the Caribbean led directly to contemporary forms of consumption of the region and its products. It calls into question innocent indulgence in the pleasures of thoughtless consumption and calls for a global ethics of consumer responsibility.
'This is a stunning book! It is beautifully reasoned and well-documented and demonstrates Sheller's mastery of her material, but it is much more. It is original in its approach … and above all, it is elegantly and sensitively written.' - Janet Abu Lughod, New School of Social Research, USA
'Beautifully written, clearly argued and well exemplified, Consuming the Caribbean illustrates the importance of historically embedded and geographically extensive narratives of interconnection in helping to foster more ethical global relationships. My hope is that the book will serve to encourage greater reflexitiviy among both those who work on the Caribbean region and those who do not, but imagine that it must be 'fun' to do so. Consuming the Caribbean is a wonderful book that deserves considerable attention from geographers.' - Cultural Geographies
'Sheller tracks some of the transatlantic pathways of people, goods, images and ideas, and in so doing unearths a number of links between - as it were - then and now' -British Bulletin of Publications
Part 1: Natural and Material Mobilities Part 2: Bodies, Cultures and Creolization
The International Library of Sociology (ILS) is the most important series of books on sociology ever published. Founded in the 1940s by Karl Mannheim, the series became the forum for pioneering research and theory, marked by comparative approaches and the identification of new directions in sociology, publishing major figures in Anglo-American and European sociology, from Durkheim and Weber to Parsons and Gouldner, and from Ossowski and Klein to Jasanoff and Walby.
Its new editors, John Holmwood (University of Nottingham, UK) and Vineeta Sinha (National University of Singapore), plan to develop the series as a truly global project, reflecting new directions and contributions outside its traditional centres, and connecting with the original aim of the series to produce sociological knowledge that addresses pressing global social problems and supports democratic debate.
e–Inspection Copy