2026 Gordon K and Sybil Lewis Book Award Winners
2026 GKSL 1st Place Winner:
B êtes Noires: Sorcery as History in the Haitian Dominican Borderlands.
Author: Lauren Derby.
Publisher Details: Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2025.
The Gordon K and Sybil Lewis Book Award Committee wishes to congratulate Lauren Derby, the author of Bêtes Noires and Duke University Press for winning the Gordon K and Sybil Lewis Book Award for CSA 2026!
Bêtes Noires ranks first as the most theoretically rigorous, intellectually ambitious, and epistemologically disruptive of the 40 books reviewed by the Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Book Award Committee. Across 356 pages, the book dismantles colonial discourses that demonize Haitian and Dominican cosmologies as merely “superstitious.” Instead, it approaches indigenous memory, the animal world, spirits, and colonial histories as legitimate archives of knowledge, rather than supernatural tropes invented by outsiders.
Centered on the Haitian/Dominican borderlands, the text utilizes orality—specifically storytelling centered on shape-shifting animals—as an epistemological framework to understand the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans, their trauma at the hands of European colonizers, and the subsequent racialization of Haitian and Dominican material and popular culture.
Derby convincingly demonstrates how “sorcery” serves as a vital archive through which the brutal consequences of colonialism—land dispossession, exploitation, and wealth extraction—were subversively critiqued by the dispossessed themselves. Within these folk narratives, Derby discerns the Bakas: shape-shifting demons that possess the very animals introduced by Columbus (dogs, pigs, horses, and cattle). As Derby argues, Bakas are material traces of a long history of environmental despoilage, predatory capitalism, and the enduring “curse of Columbus.”
The book’s conceptualization of the Bakas as a “commodity familiar” is a major theoretical intervention in History and Caribbean Studies. Students and scholars of History, Material Culture, Heritage and Memory, Caribbean Studies, Decolonization Studies, Anthropology, and Political Economy will benefit richly from the book’s razor-sharp analysis and innovative methodologies. Overall, Bêtes Noires’ historical scope, theoretical originality, and imaginative depth cements its place as a groundbreaking contribution to global historiography.
2026 GKSL 2nd Place Winner:
After Caliban: Caribbean Art in the Global Imaginary.
Author: Erica Moiah James.
Publisher Details: Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2025.
The Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Book Award Committee wishes to congratulate Erica Moiah James and Duke University Press for producing an outstanding book contributing to global art history.
In After Caliban, James re-centers Caribbean art as a critical catalyst in global art history. Drawing on Aimé Césaire’s adaptation of The Tempest, the text utilizes the repositioned figure of “Caliban” as a central framework for exploring art as the focal point of Caribbean identity and futures. Through an examination of notable Caribbean artists, James demonstrates how regional culture and history reclaim agency, asserting their rightful place within global art imaginaries. Ultimately, the author argues that the Caribbean is better understood through Césaire’s Caliban—a figure embodying the possibilities of true freedom and nationhood—rather than Shakespeare’s portrayal of colonial abjection. In doing so, the work masterfully implicates Césaire himself as a modern Caliban, perpetually wrestling with the evolving meaning of freedom for the Caribbean. The book is a welcome addition to Material Culture Studies, Memory, Heritage, Art History, Diaspora Studies and Caribbean Studies.
2026 GKSL 3rd Place Winner:
Us According to Them: Stateside Portrayals of Puerto Ricans and Their Culture, 1898-2010.
Author: Ligia T. Domenech.
Publisher Details: Jackson: The University Press of Mississippi, 2025.
Us According to Them significantly contributes to our understanding of the negative portrayals of Puerto Ricans by outsiders immediately following the island’s colonization by the United States in the late nineteenth century. Shaped by an analysis of mainstream media, travel writers, and missionary narratives, the work examines how American writings constructed and perceived Puerto Rican culture and its people.
By assessing over 132 texts written between 1898 and 1899—during and immediately after the Spanish-American War—the author demonstrates how contemporary prejudices were systematically manufactured in the past. The study utilizes intersectional categories of analysis, including class, labor, gender, race, and culture, to show how US citizens were conditioned to view Puerto Ricans through a deficit lens.
Crucially, the author challenges these historic representations, acknowledging the deeply offensive nature of texts that were explicitly written for an American, rather than a Puerto Rican, audience. In these colonial portrayals, Puerto Ricans are routinely cast as “uncivilized” and in desperate need of American civilization and identity.
Ultimately, the book exposes how these writings weaponized a dangerous “single narrative” designed to erase the complex histories of colonized peoples and impose the Americanization of Puerto Rican History, Memory and Culture.
2026 GKSL Honorable Mentions:
Fueling Development: How Black Radical Trade Unionism Transformed Trinidad and Tobago.
Author: Zophia Edwards.
Publisher Details:Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2025.
This work is significant for foregrounding Black working-class struggle as central to Caribbean development, liberation, and nation-building. Its analysis creates important opportunities for newer scholars to further explore labor, resistance, and social transformation intersectionally through race, class, ethnicity, gender, and postcolonial power relations within Caribbean societies.
Breadfruit: Three Global Journeys of a Bountiful Tree.
Author: Russell Fielding.
Publisher Details: New York: Columbia University Press, 2025.
This book is especially important for how it transforms everyday creolized and local knowledge into serious academic inquiry, demonstrating that Caribbean foodways, memory, and survival practices are themselves rich sites of theory, history, and civilizational analysis. It opens important space for younger Caribbean scholars to further theorize ordinary cultural practices often dismissed as informal or “non-academic.”
The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henri Christophe.
Author: Marlene L. Daut.
Publisher Details: New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2025.
This text is especially valuable for continuing the project of reshaping Caribbean historical figures long interpreted through Eurocentric and colonial frameworks. By offering a more nuanced reconstruction of Henri Christophe, it encourages future Caribbean scholarship to critically revisit misunderstood Black revolutionary figures and reclaim historical narratives through more regionally grounded and decolonial approaches.
GKSL Exceptional Press Recognition Award 2025:
This year, 2026 marks an historic year of recognition for Duke University Press. Five of Duke University Press’ books were evaluated by the GKSL Committee against a highly competitive pool of 40 submissions. Duke University Press emerged as a dominant force in global historiography and Caribbean studies securing both First and Second Place, alongside a prestigious Honorable Mention. By securing the top position, Duke University Press has solidified its reputation as a powerhouse for the following:
- Decolonial Scholarship: Books that challenge traditional/colonial narratives and center Caribbean perspectives.
- Epistemological Disruptions: Books that change how we think about knowledge, history and culture; rather than re-emphasizing one-sided perspectives from the outsider approach.
- Material Culture: Books that explore history through the physical environment, objects and everyday items.
The GKSL Committee wishes to congratulate Duke University Press for its remarkable achievement and looks forward to the ground-breaking epistemological disruptions, vibrant scholarship and radical reframing of Caribbean Studies in the years to come!
Congratulations to all our winners and honorable mentions from all of us from the GKSL Committee, 2026!
