Strictly Facts: A Guide to Caribbean History and Culture

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There is a common myth surrounding Caribbean indigenous history that starts and ends with colonialism. In today's episode, we are joined by linguist Dr. Paula Prescod to explore what her new scholarly collection The Carib, Kalinago, and Garifuna Peoples: Indigeneity, Hybridization, and Mobility in the Americasreveals about indigeneity, mobility, and the myths we inherited from coloni...

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In honor of Calypso History Month this October and the recent passing of the great "Calypso King of the World" Slinger “Mighty Sparrow” Francisco, we reshare this throwback episode with music sociologist Dr. Meagan A. Sylvester. Calypso isn’t just a sound you dance to, it’s a way Caribbean people have documented power, pain, pride, and punchlines for centuries...

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Caribbean people know all too well that the story of migration doesn’t end at the border. Dr. Tyesha Maddox, Associate Professor at Fordham University, joins us for a conversation about the history of Caribbean mutual aid societies and benevolent associations that help communities upon their arrival in the US. We dig into what mutual aid actually means in Caribbean migration hi...

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Country music in Jamaica sounds like a contradiction until you hear the connections. We connect the dots between Radio Jamaica Rediffusion, Western films on local screens, farm work migration, and a Caribbean listening culture that never treated genres like sealed boxes. We are joined by Jamal Khadar, writer and host of Reimagining Country, who explains how artists like Jim Reeves an...

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Most of us talk about Caribbean language like it only lives on the tongue, but the region has a whole world of languages that live on the hands, in space, and through community memory. We sit down with linguist Kris Ali, a PhD candidate at UC Santa Barbara from Trinidad and Tobago, to trace the real story of Caribbean Sign Languages and why they deserve the same respect we fight for ...

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Jamaica qualifying for the 1998 FIFA World Cup is one of those rare moments that people can locate in their body: where they stood, who they were with, what they heard first, and how the whole community sounded afterward. We wanted to honor that feeling, so we built something different this time, a chorus of voices sharing what France ‘98 meant to them in real time and in memor...

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Reggae has never been a boys-only story, so why do women keep getting filed under “backup,” “footnote,” or “first female to…”?  Mikelah Malcolm from Style and Vibes guest hosts a Breadfruit Media crossover and sits down with me to talk about my dissertation on women in reggae, what pushed me to spend years on the research, and what I fo...

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A child grows up learning that love can arrive in a barrel, but comfort cannot. That tension sits at the heart of our conversation with Grenadian director, producer, and creative industry strategist Meschida Phillip, whose documentary work asks what migration costs families long after the plane takes off. We trace how the Grenada Revolution, early separation, and years of “wait...

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Caribbean food travels the world as flavor, nostalgia, and restaurant culture but what if it also traveled as real economic infrastructure? We’re asking a harder question: how do we move from beloved recipes to Caribbean food systems that reduce import dependence, strengthen food security, and create durable industries across the region. I’m joined by Taymer Mason, a Barb...

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Caribbean culture is one of the most copied, quoted, and consumed forces on the planet and yet the Caribbean is still too often treated like a place to extract value from, not a place to build value with. That tension sits at the heart of my conversation with Alistair Scott, founder of the Diaspora Legacy Collective, as we dig into how Caribbean futures can be shaped through renewed ...

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Caribbean culture is everywhere, but visibility is not the same as power. As we mark Caribbean American Heritage Month this June, I want to push past the easy parts of celebration and ask a harder question: what are we building with what we know about our history, politics, and cultural practices?

In today's episode, we ground ourselves in Caribbean American Heritage Month's o...

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Museums don’t just preserve history. They decide which stories become a nation’s memory and which stories get buried under polite silence. I’m joined by Kevin Farmer, Deputy Director of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society, to talk about Caribbean museums as real tools of nation building, cultural heritage, and post-independence identity. We start by tracing t...

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Obeah has been called superstition, “black magic,” and even a crime but those labels have a history, and that history was built to serve colonial power. We sit down with historian Dr. Katharine Gerbner to trace how African-derived spiritual and healing traditions in Jamaica were deliberately stigmatized through slavery, missionary politics, and law.

We follow the c...

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The strangest thing about the truth is how often it arrives late. A story your elders carried for years gets dismissed as “just talk” until an archive opens, a report drops, a government admits wrongdoing, or scholars finally confirm what communities already knew. When that happens, the past doesn’t simply become clearer. It becomes heavier, more complicated, and ha...

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Today, we reshare our reasoning with Dr. Paul López Oro to trace the Garifuna story across Caribbean history, from St Vincent and the Carib Wars to forced exile in 1797 and the building of communities along the Central America Caribbean coast in Honduras, Belize, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and beyond. Along the way, we wrestle with what it means to be Black and Indigenous at the same time...

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Headlines turn migration into a single story about borders and crisis. We open the lens, traveling through the Caribbean and Latin America to reveal routes, identities, and cultural worlds that rarely make it into the frame. Joined by co-editors Dr. Patsy Lewis and Dr. Kristen Kolenz, we share how our new book, Unbordering Migration Studies in the Caribbean and Latin America, brings ...

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What happens when you go searching for the words of Caribbean women—and find silence where there should be an echo? We follow that uneasy question into the kitchens, verandas, classrooms, and studios where wisdom has always lived, then ask why so little of it appears on slides, posters, and timelines. Along the way, we unpack how publishing power, archival choices, and diaspora...

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A woman signs up 3,000 new members, walks into a meeting she was invited to lead, and is assassinated at the podium. That single moment opens a window into the hidden architecture of a global movement and the women who kept it alive when headlines and historians looked away. We continue our conversation with Dr. Natanya Duncan to explore the life and legacy of Princess Laura Adorkor ...

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What happens when the archive starts talking back? We sat down with Dr. Natanya Duncan to illuminate the women who built the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) from the ground up and gave the movement its global muscle. From a Kingston porch to Harlem kitchens and London cafés, their labor carried Garveyism across continents while reshaping what Black leadership looked li...