This essay argues that Caribbean histories of slavery and emancipation have served as a crucial site for the generation of the Marxist antiwork politics popularized by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Recovering a transnational network of radicals that disseminated the work of C. L. R. James's varied coteries throughout Italy, the author argues that James's methodological innovations in the field of slave historiography were central to the formulation of strategies of refusal and flight eventually popularized in Hardt and Negri's Empire. These methodological homologies disclose systemic and material continuities in the constitution of work in postemancipation and post-Fordist societies. Indeed, post-Fordist empire is itself a repetition of structures of rule and refusal characteristic of the postemancipation Caribbean.
Bio
Christopher Taylor is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago. He has published articles in Social Text, American Literature, and History of the Present. He is currently working on a book, “Empire of Neglect: West Indian Writing, British Liberalism, and New Worlds of Care,” which explores the relationship between anglophone Caribbean writing, British political economy, and hemispheric imaginaries during the era of free-trade liberalism.
This essay addresses the limits of conventional Western political categories for apprehending postcolonial Caribbean political landscapes. Specifically, it suggests that in the case of the Dominican Republic standard political differentiations of periods of “dictatorship” and “democracy” obscure continuities and elide the crucial impact of US imperialism. The practice of the US military occupation (1916–24) in clothing itself in a discourse of democratization and modernization was perpetuated by the Rafael Trujillo dictatorship (1930–61) to long-lasting effect. Through close readings of key political discourses from the Trujillo era, the author highlights the dictatorship's appropriation of key modern democratic vocabulary, terms including modern politics, democracy, progress, equality, and social justice. Ingrained for more than three decades, these meanings did not simply vanish with the arrival of “true” democracy in the country and remain partly alive today. The work of Argentine political theorist Ernesto Laclau on hegemony may help account for these continuities and be usefully brought to bear on other Caribbean postcolonial contexts.
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Maja Horn is an assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Latin American Cultures at Barnard College. From 2005 to 2006 she was a research associate at the Latin American Social Sciences Institute (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, FLACSO) in Santo Domingo. Her articles on Caribbean literature, visual arts, and performance have appeared in the journals GLQ, Latino Studies, and Latin American Literary Review, among others. Her book Masculinity after Trujillo: The Politics of Gender in Dominican Literature was published in 2014.
What accounts for the peculiar history of Jamaican broadcasting? This essay considers Kingston as a sonic terrain and examines the ways both colonial officials and residents of the islands engaged in a process of understanding Kingston's place within an emerging electroacoustic soundscape with points in New York, Havana, Port-au-Prince, and London. The author relies on an implicitly comparative framework but is also interested in following people and things as they traveled between these places and instigated new sonic routes. The notion of the disposition of things animates this preliminary exploration of the politics of broadcasting. Concomitant with the reconfiguration of politics in the early twentieth century, the technologies that recorded and delivered information underwent a dramatic transformation, including, notably, the introduction of wireless. Receivers, transmitters, loudspeakers, words, and sounds become actants in this story. This essay looks at what difference they made in the waning moments of British rule in Jamaica and whether it might it be useful to attend to the role of sound in discussions of governance and colonial encounters.
Bio
Alejandra Bronfman is an associate professor in the Department of History at University of British Columbia. Previously she was an assistant professor at the University of Florida and Yale University. She is the author of Measures of Equality: Race, Social Science, and Citizenship in the Caribbean (2004) and On the Move: The Caribbean since 1989 (2007), and is coeditor of Media, Sound, and Culture in Latin America and the Caribbean(2012). Her current research aims to record the unwritten histories of radio and related sonic technologies in the Caribbean.
Arguing for an understanding of the capitalist world-system as the interpretative horizon of world-literature, this essay considers how the formal and stylistic mannerisms of Edgar Mittelholzer's My Bones and My Flute (1955) register the contradictory inflection of capitalist modernity in Guyana. Specifically, it uses Mittelholzer's narrative as a means to approach these issues in environmental terms. The novel's amalgamation of Euro-American gothic tropes and Guyanese folklore, the author argues, registers the “bewitching” impact of the sugar industry on the socioecological development of Guyana. The analysis is framed by geographer Jason W. Moore's concept of “world-ecology,” which designates the epochal reorganization of the worldwide production of nature that was integral to the rise of the capitalist world-economy.
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Michael Niblett is a research fellow at the Yesu Persaud Center for Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick. He is author of The Caribbean Novel since 1945 (2012) and coeditor of Perspectives on the “Other America”: Comparative Approaches to Caribbean and Latin American Culture (2009). He is currently principal investigator on the AHRC-funded project “Decolonizing Voices: World Literature and Broadcast Culture at the End of Empire.”
Kamau Brathwaite is a distinguished historian, poet, and literary-cultural critic. After a long career teaching in the Department of History at the University of the West Indies, Mona, and subsequently the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University, he has recently retired from fulltime teaching. A founder of the Caribbean Artists Movement and a founding editor of Savacou, he is the recipient of a number of awards and prizes, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Among his most recent books are Ancestors (2001), MR (Magical Realism)(2002), Words Need Love Too (2004), Born to Slow Horses (2005), and Elegguas (2010).
This essay grapples with the problem of how to think Haiti's nineteenth century, analyzing a range of literature that has tackled the question and exploring key themes in these works. Understanding this period in Haiti's history is critical for any comprehension of the long-term trajectory of institutions, practices, social structures, and ideas in the country, and yet scholars writing about the period face a range of empirical and methodological challenges. Both older work and recent research, however, illuminates greatly this important period and offers examples for future scholarship.
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Laurent Dubois is Marcello Lotti Professor of Romance Studies and History at Duke University and author of, among other books, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (2004) and Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (2012).
Historiography of the nineteenth-century Caribbean often holds Santo Domingo (later, the Dominican Republic) to be something of an anomaly. This essay reconsiders that scholarship in a Pan-Caribbean frame, demonstrating how such a characterization can lead to a number of distortions. First, it allows projections of elite Dominican nationalism to serve as synecdoche for popular thought. Second, privileging this anxious and divisive rhetoric forecloses study of the nation as an emancipated state, together with Haiti, in a hostile Atlantic. Common Dominicans had a keen sense of this regional context, as demonstrated by popular unrest in the 1850s and 1860s. In the absence of plantation records or other prolific documentation, scholarship has often rested on the testimony of foreign observers; these sources demand further critical attention. Creative research that pointedly seeks out popular thought promises to elucidate connections across the island as well as ties to networks and neighbors throughout the Caribbean.
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Anne Eller is an assistant professor of Latin American and Caribbean history at Yale University. She formerly taught at the University of Connecticut. Her forthcoming book, “América Should Belong to Itself: Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Long Fight for a Free Caribbean,” explores the Spanish reoccupation of the Dominican Republic and the popular anticolonial fight that followed.
This essay offers the Spanish Caribbean as a showcase for the central role black Atlantic healers and their culture played in shaping the Atlantic world of knowledge production about the body and the natural world during the seventeenth century. The author examines how historiographical traditions deeply ingrained in the rise of the fields of medical history and black Atlantic studies have created distorting, and seemingly unconnected, narratives around medicine and corporeality. Arguing that black understandings about health, disease, and healing practices were not only widely circulated and adopted by Caribbean communities but also integral to the development of the novel, incorporative Atlantic healing culture that appeared in the seventeenth century, the author also proposes a model to reconcile the seemingly unrelated historiographies and epistemologies of medical history and black healing practices in the Caribbean.
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Pablo F. Gómez is an assistant professor in the Department of Medical History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His work examines the history of medicine, science, and corporeality in the early modern Caribbean, African, and Iberian Atlantic worlds.
A newly installed plaque at the port of Kolkata stands as a memorial to the indentured Indian diaspora. It conveys a collective story relevant to present desires, not past hauntings. Yet it is the tension of absences and silences that makes the port city an interesting site of individual memories and collective diasporic history. This essay attempts to show the possibilities of an imaginative construction of indentured return experiences intersecting with intergenerational memories as well as the cultivation of facts on the ground, inspired by Wilson Harris's argument that Caribbean scholarship needs to bridge the gap between historicity, space, and imagination.
Bio
Nalini Mohabir is a postdoctoral researcher with the City Institute, York University, Toronto. She is interested in the chaos of diaspora, and its fragments and fallouts, within a house of memory.
This essay argues for the utility of fugitive speech forms as primary sources for Caribbean historical research. It seeks to shift the discussion from forms such as autobiography and the memoir to more ephemeral speech forms such as hearsay, rumor, and gossip on the grounds that peripheral genres enable a glimpse of subaltern agency that often evades public discourse. The essay argues that unsanctioned speech forms get us closer to everyday experience, offer a more processual understanding of the unfolding of events, and enable a glimpse at embedded affect that is often occluded from view. It thus follows James Scott's call for research on “hidden transcripts,” including gossip, sorcery, and spirit possession as well as other anonymous speech genres that may reveal a critique of domination, an approach with particular salience for the Caribbean, a region deeply shaped by colonial biopower.
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Lauren Derby is an associate professor of Latin American history at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of The Dictator’s Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo (2009), which won the Bolton-Johnson Prize (CLAH/AHA) and co-won the Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis award (CSA). She is coeditor of Activating the Past: History and Memory in the Black Atlantic World (2010) and The Dominican Republic Reader(2014).
2013 Small Axe Literary Competition—First Place, Poetry
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Vladimir Lucien is a writer from St. Lucia. His work has been published in several journals, including the Caribbean Review of Books, Wasafiri, the PN Review, BIM magazine, and Caribbean Beat, as well as in the anthology Beyond Sangre Grande (2011). He is also the screenwriter of the documentary The Merikins, which premiered at the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival in 2012.
2013 Small Axe Literary Competition—Second Place, Poetry
Bio
Ruel Johnson is winner of the 2002 Guyana Prize for Literature for Best First Book of Fiction (Ariadne and Other Stories) and the 2008 GT&T CARIFESTA X Publication Award (Fictions, Volume One). His unpublished collection of poetry, “The Enormous Night,” was shortlisted for the 2002 Guyana Prize. He was scriptwriter for the miniseries Tides of Life, produced by Women against Violence Everywhere (WAVE) with support from the United Nations Development Programme, and a scriptwriter for the satirical review, Link Show (2009).
2013 Small Axe Literary Competition—First Place, Short Fiction
Bio
Ruel Johnson is winner of the 2002 Guyana Prize for Literature for Best First Book of Fiction (Ariadne and Other Stories) and the 2008 GT&T CARIFESTA X Publication Award (Fictions, Volume One). His unpublished collection of poetry, “The Enormous Night,” was shortlisted for the 2002 Guyana Prize. He was scriptwriter for the miniseries Tides of Life, produced by Women against Violence Everywhere (WAVE) with support from the United Nations Development Programme, and a scriptwriter for the satirical review, Link Show (2009).
2013 Small Axe Literary Competition—Second Place, Short Fiction
Bio
Lesley-Ann Wanliss holds a BA in literatures in English from the University of the West Indies. In July 2012 she was a featured poet at the Poetry Society of Jamaica and in 2011 received an Honorable Mention Award for Prose from the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission (JCDC) for Runaway Love. She has been published in the Gleaner, the Literary Arts Section of the Observer, and Gage. She is a part-time lecturer at the Edna Manley College of the Performing Arts and at Kingston College. She teaches English, English literature, and performing arts at St. Thomas Technical High School.
Book Discussion: Julian Henriques, Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques, and Ways of Knowing; Alexander G. Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity
This essay reviews two recent publications in the area of black music and sound studies—Julian Henriques's Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques, and Ways of Knowing (2011) and Alexander G. Weheliye's Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (2005)—taking particular note of the role of critical theory, as well as of gender and sexuality, in the contemporary literature.
Bio
Tavia Nyong’o teaches in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. He is author of The Amalgamation Waltz (2009) and coeditor of the journal Social Text.
This short essay responds to Tavia Nyong'o's insightful “Afro-philo-sonic Fictions,” a discussion of Weheliye's Phonographies and Julian Henriques's Sonic Bodies, concentrating in particular on the analytics of blackness in Western modernity, the place of Africa in diaspora discourse, and the conceptual provenances of black feminist approaches.
Bio
Alexander G. Weheliye is an associate professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University. He is author of Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (2005) and Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (2014). Currently he is working on two projects. The first, “Modernity Hesitant: The Civilizational Diagnostics of W. E. B. Du Bois and Walter Benjamin,” tracks the different ways these thinkers imagine the marginal as central to the workings of modern civilization. The second, “Feenin: R&B’s Technologies of Humanity,” offers a critical history of the intimate relationship between R&B music and technology since the late 1970s.
This essay takes off from Tavia Nyong'o's “Afro-philo-sonic Fictions” to make a journey into the embodiment of sounding through the dread body. It starts with Prince Buster's Judge Dread persona and Rastafarianism rather than the sonic bodies of the bashment gal in the setting of the dancehall. It traces the dread body through the sounding of the single-multiple of the “I and I” and the dread for the Old Testament god of Jehovah, or Jah. Dread doubles and troubles. It is inflected and inflicted in two directions. One is dread of authority—whether the Greek god Apollo or Judge Dread. The other is for the “sufferah” for the forbearance of that authority. Sounding also doubles, echoes, and reverberates as a vessel for understanding embodiment, not only the particularities of the “Afro-philo-sonic fiction” of a Jamaican Rastafarianism but also the fundamental fissure of the Western philosophical “fiction,” that is, the dichotomy of mind and body, energy, and matter, or subject and object. In the dancehalls and as the first commodities in the cargoholds of the Atlantic slave ships, sonic bodies are restorative, disruptive, and procreative, accounting in part for why they are considered dread.
Bio
Julian Henriques is a reader at, and joint head of, the Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is convener of the MA scriptwriting program and director of the Topology Research Unit. Previously he ran the film and television department at theCaribbean Institute of Media and Communication (CARIMAC) at the University of the West Indies, Mona. His credits as a writer and director include the 1998 feature film Babymother, a reggae musical, and We the Ragamuffin. His sound sculptures include Knots & Donuts, Tate Modern (2011), and he is coauthor of Changing the Subject (1998) and author of Sonic Bodies (2011).
