Reviews

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Duke articulates the perspectives manifested in popular culture and provides an in-depth analysis of diasporan roles and reactions. . . . in this profound, well-researched, and lucid scholarly work....Highly recommended.
--Choice

Opens new perspectives on the building of a Caribbean federation in the twentieth century. . . . Connects the struggles for self-determination and self-government in the West Indies with black diaspora politics from the late nineteenth century to the onset of the independences of the Anglophone Caribbean in the 1960s.
--American Historical Review

A distinctive contribution to the historiography of the black diaspora in New York, and the historiography of the West Indies Federation.
--Journal of Caribbean History

Outlines the concatenation of twentieth-century developments that congealed into post-World War II concessions by Britain to grant some form of self-rule to its West Indian colonies under a version of a federal system.
--New West Indian Guide

Shows the evolving and often-conflicting relationships between black diaspora activists and the creation of a West Indian federation. . . . From start to finish, Building a Nation exhaustively addresses major themes that ran throughout the many decades-long process of imagining and creating federation, and connects each to race and black freedom struggles. . . . An important contribution to black diaspora studies as well as histories of the British Empire, Caribbean, and the black freedom struggle in the United States.
--Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology

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