Join us at Flatbush Library this fall of our three-part lecture series on Caribbean history. We are hosting a range of scholars and authors from across the Caribbean diaspora to share their research and insights as part of this exciting free lecture series. In our second lecture of the series, Dr. James Cantres will discuss the history of political organizing, resistance movements and anti-imperialism among Caribbean immigrants in Britain and the U.S. in the years following WWII.
Dr. James Cantres is an Associate Professor in the Department of Africana, Puerto Rican, and Latino Studies at Hunter College and affiliated to the Department of History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His book, Blackening Britain: Caribbean Radicalism from Windrush to Decolonization (Rowman-Littlefield, 2020), details the social and political histories of community formation, race consciousness, anti-imperialism, and radical intellectual and artistic activism among Caribbean subject-citizens in Britain following World War II and through the period of decolonization, independence, and radical political action across Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States.
A historian of the African diaspora, his current research focuses on twentieth Black Atlantic non-belongers, radical politics, migration, and social and political upheavals. His work foregrounds the power of Black narratives—reflecting personal and communal transformations and reckoning with the uncertainty of decolonization—which shaped movements oriented around novel practices of community, resistance, and sovereignty. His work has appeared in outlets including African and Black Diaspora, Public Books, Black Issues in Philosophy, and Global Hip Hop Studies. Professor Cantres returned to teaching this year after spending 2024-25 as a Scholar-in-Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.
