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This preliminary essay introduces the Spanish translation of "The Caribbean as a Socio-cultural Area", a major article by Sidney W. Mintz published a half-century ago. In "The Caribbean…", Mintz questions the usual emphasis on the cultural (linguistic, political, racial and religious) diversity of the Caribbean. He conceptualizes culture itself as a historical process and the Caribbean as a distinct societal or sociocultural area with a history of its own vis a vis the continental Americas. An important dimension of the Caribbean is its trajectory as an old colonial region that is also an integral part of the history of the West, and which underwent an early modernity that resulted in historic backwardness. Mintz concludes that the Caribbean has been a cornerstone of the very configuration of the West, a key to the rise of global capitalism, and a hothouse of modernity. "The Caribbean ." is not as well-known as it should be, in contrast with the importance that many scholars attach to the article. ; Este trabajo preliminar presenta la traducción al español de "The Caribbean as a Socio-cultural Area" ("El Caribe como área sociocultural"), de Sidney W. Mintz, un artículo fundamental publicado hace medio siglo. En "El Caribe…", Mintz cuestiona los acostumbrados énfasis en la heterogeneidad cultural (lingüística, política, racial y religiosa) del Caribe. Conceptúa a la propia cultura como un proceso histórico y al Caribe como un área sociocultural distintiva con una historia propia vis a vis la América continental. Una dimensión importante del Caribe es su trayectoria de antigua región colonial que forma parte integral de la historia de Occidente, y que experimentó una modernidad precoz que generó un atraso histórico. Mintz concluye que el Caribe ha sido pieza fundamental de la configuración misma de Occidente, un escenario clave del surgimiento del capitalismo mundial y una incubadora de la modernidad. El relativo desconocimiento de "El Caribe…", sobre todo entre las generaciones de estudiantes jóvenes, contrasta con la importancia que le conceden muchos estudiosos de la región.

El 1898 puertorriqueño se valora de formas diversas en nuestra historiografía. La eterna controversia de "invasión" o "cambio de soberanía" prepondera a menudo con sinónimos: "trauma" vs. "triunfo de la democracia". También se ha planteado una amalgama ecléctica de "trauma" y "democracia". Pero bajo estas interpretaciones contrapuestas corre un consenso de que el 98 significó una ruptura radical en la historia de Puerto Rico. El concepto de "invasión" o "trauma", evidentemente, apunta hacia una ruptura; pero curiosamente también insisten en una ruptura los historiadores que conceptúan al 1898 como un "cambio de soberanía". muy a pesar de que este concepto sugiere una profunda continuidad. De la perspectiva general de ruptura han disentido hasta ahora pocos historiadores.

The sugar workers of large-scale capitalist plantations in the Caribbean are familiar figures in social history. As portrayed in Sidney Mintz's landmark research in southern Puerto Rico, sugar workers are manifest rural proletarians: landless wage labourers exploited by "land-and-factory combines". In Mintz's studies, Puerto Rican sugar workers became the classic case of modern rural proletarians. Such rural proletarians are the dichotomous opposite of peasants: hence given rural populations areeitherpeasants or rural proletarians.

Issues of migration, environment, rurality, and the visceral "politics of place" and "space" have occupied center stage in recent electoral political struggles in the United States and Europe, suffused by an antiglobalization discourse that has come to resonate with Euro-American peoples. Race and Rurality in the Global Economy suggests that this present fractious global politics begs for closer attention to be paid to the deep-rooted conditions and outcomes of globalization and development. From multiple viewpoints the contributors to this volume propose ways of understanding the ongoing processes of globalization that configure peoples and places via a politics of rurality in a capitalist world economy, and through an optics of raciality that intersects with class, gender, identity, land, and environment. In tackling the dynamics of space and place, their essays address matters such as the heightened risks and multiple states of insecurity in the global economy; the new logics of expulsion and primitive accumulation dynamics shaping a new "savage sorting"; patterns of resistance and transformation in the face of globalization's political and environmental changes; the steady decline in the livelihoods of people of color globally and their deepened vulnerabilities; and the complex reconstitution of systemic and lived racialization within these processes. This book is an invitation to ask whether our dystopia in present politics can be disentangled from the deepening sense of "white fragility" in the context of the historical power of globalization's raced effects.

Issues of migration, environment, rurality, and the visceral "politics of place" and "space" have occupied center stage in recent electoral political struggles in the United States and Europe, suffused by an antiglobalization discourse that has come to resonate with Euro-American peoples. Race and Rurality in the Global Economy suggests that this present fractious global politics begs for closer attention to be paid to the deep-rooted conditions and outcomes of globalization and development. From multiple viewpoints the contributors to this volume propose ways of understanding the ongoing processes of globalization that configure peoples and places via a politics of rurality in a capitalist world economy, and through an optics of raciality that intersects with class, gender, identity, land, and environment. In tackling the dynamics of space and place, their essays address matters such as the heightened risks and multiple states of insecurity in the global economy; the new logics of expulsion and primitive accumulation dynamics shaping a new "savage sorting"; patterns of resistance and transformation in the face of globalization's political and environmental changes; the steady decline in the livelihoods of people of color globally and their deepened vulnerabilities; and the complex reconstitution of systemic and lived racialization within these processes. This book is an invitation to ask whether our dystopia in present politics can be disentangled from the deepening sense of "white fragility" in the context of the historical power of globalization's raced effects. ; Open Access version supported by Knowledge Unlatched. ; VoR ; SUNY Press ; N/A