2025 Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Award Winners
2025 GKSL Award Winner:
Making Never-Never Land: Race and Law in the Creation of Puerto Rico
by Mónica A. Jiménez
Puerto Rico has been an “unincorporated territory” of the United States for over a century. For much of that time, the archipelago has been mostly invisible to US residents and neglected by the government. However, a series of crises in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, from outsized debt to climate fueled disasters, have led to massive protests and brought Puerto Rico greater visibility.
Mónica A. Jiménez argues that to fully understand how and why Puerto Rico finds itself in this current moment of precarity, we must look to a larger history of US settler colonialism and racial exclusion in law. The federal policies and jurisprudence that created Puerto Rico exist within a larger pantheon of exclusionary, race-based laws and policies that have carved out “states of exception” for racial undesirables: Native Americans, African Americans, and the inhabitants of the insular territories. This legal regime has allowed the federal government plenary or complete power over these groups. Jiménez brings these histories together to demonstrate that despite Puerto Rico’s unique position as a twenty-first-century colony, its path to that place was not exceptional.
2025 GKSL 2nd Place Winner:
Vibes Up: Reggae and Afro-Caribbean Migration from Costa Rica to Brooklyn
by Sabia McCoy-Torres
Making the Caribbean: Migration and Reggae from Costa Rica to Brooklyn uses a sensorial approach to ethnography to show we must rechart the Caribbean and expand it from being geographic and sociocultural phenomenon alone to sensorial and global ones that bring Limón, Costa Rica and Brooklyn, New York together as interconnected sites of Afro-Caribbean migration from the West Indies. In pursuit of this expansion, Making the Caribbean uses reggae culture as an ethnographic lens to center an analysis of migration, diaspora, queerness, Blackness, and Caribbean cultural subjectivity. Reggae is the chosen lens because it is a technology that produces affect (sensations and sentiments) and, in turn, infrastructure that joins seemingly disparate places. Reggae creates a public sphere and space (both physical and psychic) where, through affective attunement, Afro-Caribbeans create, enact, and embody empowered, proud racial, cultural, gender and sexual senses of self. The book suggests we must consider the micropolitics of the everyday, like those crystalizing in the public spaces of ethnic enclaves, performance venues, and ethnically themed bars and restaurants, as critical to identity politics, belonging, power, and sociopolitical transformations on a (trans)national level. For example: the book examines the shifting social and political terrain Afro-Caribbeans navigate to show how hetero and LGBTQ+ people together create possibilities for queer inclusion in the diaspora; particularly through embodied performance and reggae participants’ decoding of the music form’s gender and sexual normativity. This view is critical given the regular framing of reggae creators and participants as uniquely homophobic.
2025 GKSL 3rd Place Winner:
Politics in an Island State
by Diane Austin-Broos
Jamaica is most well-known for its popular culture, crime and violence. Government, the state, is viewed as a malign force. In Politics in an Island State noted anthropologist Diane Austin-Broos brings an alternative view of Jamaica, its culture and governance. This history of Jamaica, and more pointedly, the history of politics in Jamaica, is brilliantly told through the biography of Wills O. Isaacs. Never the leader of his party – the People’s National Party – Wills was active in politics from the 1930s and was nonetheless a prominent and notorious figure.
Informative and entertaining, this biography of a “second-tier” political leader departs from the usual heroic style and addresses the challenges of a fledgling social democracy in the mid-twentieth century. Decolonization and the decline of sugar, the Great Depression and two world wars frame the challenges of the time. Flanked by rural-to-urban migration, unemployment and industrialization, Jamaica’s struggles into the twenty-first century and the conduct of government – the successes, failures and foibles – are presented and viewed through a more nuanced lens.
Leaders shape history, though they seldom dictate its direction. Viewing history through their eyes affords a dynamic account of the structures and events that underpin a society’s development. Politics in an Island State will find a ready audience with readers generally interested in the Caribbean, but even more so with sages – both academic and unconventional – of anthropology, history, foreign affairs, sociology, political science, development studies and political economy.
GKSL Honorable Mention:
Forbes Burnham: The Life and Times of the Comrade Leader
by Linden F. Lewis
It is virtually impossible to understand the history of modern Guyana without understanding the role played by Forbes Burnham. As premier of British Guiana, he led the country to independence in 1966 and spent two decades as its head of state until his death in 1985. An intensely charismatic politician, Burnham helped steer a new course for the former colony, but he was also a quintessential strongman leader, venerated by some of his citizens yet feared and despised by others.
Forbes Burnham: The Life and Times of the Comrade Leader is the first political biography of this complex and influential figure. It charts how the political party he founded, the People’s National Congress, combined nationalist rhetoric, socialist policies, and Pan-Africanist philosophies. It also explores how, in a country already deeply divided between the descendants of African slaves and Indian indentured servants, Burnham consolidated political power by intensifying ethnic polarizations. Drawing from historical archives as well as new interviews with the people who knew Burnham best, sociologist Linden F. Lewis examines how his dictatorial tendencies coexisted with his progressive convictions. Forbes Burnham is a compelling study of the nature of postcolonial leadership and its pitfalls.
Fractal Repair: Queer Histories of Modern Jamaica
by Matthew Chin
In Fractal Repair, Matthew Chin investigates queerness in Jamaica from early colonial occupation to the present, critically responding to the island’s global reputation for extreme homophobia and anti-queer violence. Chin advances a theory and method of queer fractals to bring together genealogies of queer and Caribbean formation. Fractals—a kind of geometry in which patterns repeat but never exactly in the same way—make visible shifting accounts of Caribbean queerness in terms of race, gender, and sexual alterity. Drawing on this fractal orientation, Chin assembles and analyzes multigenre archives, ranging from mid-twentieth-century social science studies of the Caribbean to Jamaica’s National Dance Theatre Company to HIV/AIDS organizations, to write reparative histories of queerness. Chin’s proposal of a fractal politics of repair invests in the horizon of difference that repetition materializes, and it extends reparations discourses intent on overcoming the past and calculating economic compensation for survivors of violence.
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