Jana Lipman

My first book told the history of the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay (GTMO) from the point of view of Cuban base workers. Based on rich and previously untapped regional Cuban archives, U.S. government documents, and oral histories, Guantánamo argued that historians must “count” working people as diplomatic actors and that overseas military bases are critical nodes of political power. Guantánamo was a prize-winning book, reviewed in the London Review of Books and numerous scholarly journals, and adopted in graduate and undergraduate courses across the country. After publication, I was asked to be an advisor to the Guantánamo Public Memory Project, a traveling exhibit which brought questions related to U.S. empire, U.S-Cuban relations, refugee camps, and post-9/11 detention practices to more than a dozen universities and communities. I initiated bringing this exhibit to Tulane and the Ashe Cultural Arts Center in 2014, and organized three months of on-campus and community events related to Cuba, migration, and human rights.

Although my work now focuses more on Southeast Asia, it continues to engage with questions, which have relevance for the Caribbean, namely the legacies of U.S. empire and migrations between the Caribbean and the United States. To this end, I spearheaded two collaborative projects that included substantial Latin American content. First, I co-edited American Quarterly’s Special Issue “Tours of Duty and Tours of Leisure,” which investigates the interconnected relationships between the military and tourism. This included soliciting, selecting, and editing the Special Issue, which included an essay on understanding child adoptions in Guatemala and unaccompanied minors fleeing Central America in the same frame, an article on the legacies of slavery in Jamaica’s tourist industry, and a review on early American borderlands and travelogues. Second, I co-edited Making the Empire Work: Labor and U.S. Imperialism (NYU Press, 2015), which was the first book-length volume to conceptualize U.S. empire through its network of workers and labor. It too contained substantive essays on the United Fruit Company in Guatemala and Costa Rica, a banana massacre in Colombia, coffee workers in El Salvador, and Caribbean migrants throughout the region. In both cases, my expertise in Latin America and the Caribbean enabled these projects to recognize the relationships between U.S.-Latin America and the legacies of U.S. economic and military power elsewhere. (My co-collaborators largely studied the U.S. and the Pacific).

I continue to write about Caribbean topics and mentor graduate students in Latin American Studies. I recently wrote an essay for Modern American History on Haitian refugees in the United States and an article about the Cuban representations of “Guantánamo” in its state run media. Next year, I plan to write a new article on British Guyanese MP Bernie Grant and his support for Hong Kong Chinese citizenship petitions. My expertise on the Caribbean is also recognized by senior colleagues, and this fall, I was invited to provide extensive commentary to Harvard University’s Global American Studies post-doctoral students, one studying Caribbean and Central American refugees and the other religion and race-making in Hispaniola. At Tulane, I mentor graduate students studying U.S.-Cuban relations, Puerto Rican hurricane relief efforts, the Latinx population in New Orleans, and Latin American economic overtures to the Gulf Coast cities during the Cold War.