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Chapter two focuses on well-known Afro-Caribbean women writers, Jamaica Kincaid and Edwidge Danticat, who reside in the United States and make a significant contribution to “resistance culture.” Through narratives of return, Kincaid and Danticat challenge exploitative consumption and tourism in their literary works by exposing and utilizing the power that lies in the production of history. They do this by using their mobility and prominence in North American literary markets to inform potential tourists and fellow Caribbeans abroad of the injustices of the tourist industry that are rooted in the history of slavery and colonialism. Kincaid directly confronts and criticizes the tourist industry in her satirical essay/memoir A Small Place; while Danticat participates in and critiques the tourist industry with her travel guide/memoir After the Dance. They produce alternative travel narratives that resist the travel guide genre, which has historically defined “natives” (the other) outside of history, modernity, and humanity.

Chapter 3 turns to the establishment of Harlem’s Dame Lorraine Carnival dances in the mid-1930s and the founding of an outdoor Carnival parade on Seventh Avenue in 1947. The importance of calypso music and the early steelbands in the parade is examined, and the music’s role in maintaining connections to Trinidad and uniting Harlem’s Caribbean migrants is considered. The first large-scale Carnival dances were those produced by the bandleader Gerald Clark, who called his events “Gala Dame Lorraine,” a reference to an early nineteenth-century female Carnival character who was always elegantly dressed. At these dances, bands came clad in themed costumes to compete for prize money. These events showed that New York’s Caribbean migrant communities were eager to support annual Carnival celebrations that combined three essential components of Trinidadian Carnival: dance orchestras, calypso song battles, and masquerade contests. Their success led to an outdoor Carnival parade up Harlem’s Seventh Avenue.

This chapter looks at the racialising of Englishness. This is explicitly expressed in the Notting Hill riots, which led to the re-alignments of identity among the Caribbean migrants and indigenous English in London. It shows that these riots framed complex re-formations of national identity in metropolitan London. The chapter also proposes alternatives where English and American racial discourse and performance shaped regional England during the 1950s and 1960s.

This chapter highlights white, black, and indigenous people’s efforts create new opportunities for political power during the inflation and bursting of Miami’s real estate bubble during the 1920s. It illustrates the links between racial violence and economic growth, and details how white supremacy set the terms for real estate speculation, for conflicts between black Americans and black Caribbean people, and for a series of political transactions that included the surrendering of some 150,000 acres of Seminole Indian land to the real estate interests of the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce. During the 1920s, this chapter illustrates, South Floridians laid the foundation for Jim Crow’s political culture. And that culture included accepting violence against black people, and “unlawful” black people in particular, as part of acceptable practices of commercial development and good government.