The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean: Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making from the Cayman Islands to Key West with Dr. Sharika Crawford

The Key West Art & Historical Society is hosting Dr. Sharika D. Crawford for a special lecture related to the exhibition, “Bahama Village: Relics of a Fading Community”. Dr. Crawford will discuss the entangled histories of peoples and commodities that circulated across the greater Caribbean, which connected places like Key West to the Cayman Islands and further south toward Nicaragua and Costa Rica. The story of the humble turtle and its hunter, Dr. Crawford argues, came to play a significant role in shaping the maritime boundaries of the modern Caribbean. Focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, she traces and connects the expansion of turtle hunting to matters of race, labor, political, and economic change, and the natural environment.

Dr. Sharika D. Crawford is associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis. Her scholarship focuses on Latin America, the circum-Caribbean, and the West African nation of Ghana. Recently, her book “The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean: Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making” was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2020. Several institutions generously funded the research and writing of this book. These include the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH), the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, the American Philosophical Society, and the United States Naval Academy.

This program is free to attend, and registration is required. The program is funded in part through a Florida Humanities Community Project Grant in partnership with the Key West Art & Historical Society.