[Review] Our Caribbean Kin: Race and Nation in the Neoliberal Antilles by Alai Reyes Santos

Abstract

Our Caribbean Kin interrogates the means by which inhabitants of the Domini can Republic, Puerto Rico, and 1 aiti may imagine themselves as "kin" in the context of actious colonial legacies and current geopolitical forces that com plicate, deepen, or diminish their impulse to gather together as one people, as "family " Self-identi ing as Puerto Rican, Alai Reyes-Santos is unambigu ously invested as an ethnonational subject in the book's matter, which themat ically and chronologically spans nineteenth-century independence struggles in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hispaniola against imperial Spain, I-lispanophone Antillean novels of the 1930s, and present day issues of cross border migra tion 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 t o reconceptualize political alliances while "paying atten tion to kinship metaphors as well as representations of empathy, sympathy, love, and compatibili " across the regions under consideration (p. 187).