Issues

Claude McKay's “Cudjoe Fresh from de Lecture” first saw print in his 1912 volume Songs of Jamaica. Its speaker, whose voice appears in a densely patterned representation of Jamaican Creole, meditates on biological variation and colonial history. Setting the poem against discourses of race and poetics in contemporaneous Kingston print culture (and other intertexts, from Paul Laurence Dunbar's “When Malindy Sings” to Erving Goffman's “The Lecture”), this essay links the thematic concerns of “Fresh from de Lecture” with its medium: McKay, it argues, uses the principle of accident to explore the intersection of evolution, history, and poetic performance. In many accounts of McKay's early work, scholars have read “Fresh from de Lecture” as evidence of McKay's youthful internalization of imperialist apologism and formal conservatism. Conversely, this essay highlights the poem's political intractability—its ironization of social evolutionism, its allusions to insurrection, its emphasis on the counterfactual—and suggests that it offers a surprising view of dialect poetry, one that foregrounds the potentially radical mutations involved in the act of reading aloud.

“Certain songs have the power to overthrow a government,” Haitian president and musician Michel Martelly remarked on the eve of Carnival 2013, evoking a long-standing tradition of musical dissent in Haitian politics. The historic role of popular Creole-language songs in the political life of the country has been noted by twentieth-century ethnomusicologists and historians, yet a comprehensive musical “folk history of Haiti” (Harold Courlander) is inexistent, with much of the music of the revolutionary nineteenth century altered or lost through processes of oral transmission and politicized rewritings. This essay proposes an “archaeological” approach to Haitian Creole popular music through the lyrics of several lost Haitian songs of the 1840s and 1850s, recently rediscovered in a Paris archive. While Haitian popular music is inherently engaged in a process of constant evolution, this historical snapshot of archived Creole songs gives us a unique and complementary perspective on music and politics in the nineteenth century.

This essay introduces Sylvia Wynter's “Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World,” an unpublished 900-plus-page manuscript written by Wynter in the 1970s. “Black Metamorphosis” is a remarkable manuscript, and it deserves close study for a number of reasons. It is arguably the most important unpublished nonfiction work by an anglophone Caribbean intellectual and is the major guide to the transition in Wynter's thought between her work mainly on the Caribbean and black America in the 1960s and 1970s and her theory of the human from the early 1980s onward. Not only does the manuscript clarify Wynter's reflections on the process of indigenization and black cultural nationalism, it is her most sustained discussion of the politics of black culture in America. It constitutes a highly significant contribution to the black radical tradition and one of the most compelling interpretations of the black experience in the Western hemisphere ever written by a Caribbean intellectual.

This essay illustrates how Sylvia Wynter's “Black Metamorphosis” reconceptualizes the question of labor as it relates to the history of blacks in the Americas and generally to the being of Being Human. It does so by situating Wynter's distinctive intervention within the context of both Marxism and the engagement by black intellectuals of the issues of labor and class. Moving beyond the presuppositions of liberal humanism, Marxism, and Black Cultural Nationalism, Wynter put forth an interpretation of the cultural forms of blacks in the Americas (both as slaves and postslavery subjects) that could provide insight into the formation and stabilization of human cultural orders. “Black Metamorphosis” can therefore be seen as an earlier elaboration of what she later identified as the laws of human auto-institution, the process by which humans performatively enact our governing symbolic codes of life and death. The issue of material provisioning remains an indispensable but only proximate mechanism for a comprehensive explanation of human behaviors, since capitalism, Wynter argues, serves the central function of instituting and verifying our present conception or genre of being human as Homo oeconomicus, Economic Man.

This essay reads Sylvia Wynter's “Black Metamorphosis” as a text that both examines and embodies maroonage, significantly, in various ways and on various levels. It takes off from Aimé Césaire's underacknowledged imperative, “Marronnons-nous,” recognizing and demonstrating the import of Césaire's work for Wynter's own work over time. The argument is that “Black Metamorphosis” makes a contribution to the study of maroonage narrowly construed, while also transcending the ironically narrow conception of maroonage as a bound empirical reference. The manuscript speaks of “species of maroonage” and represents one such species itself as an epic political project of African/diasporic resistance anchored all across the Americas.

This essay studies Sylvia Wynter's “Black Metamorphosis” and draws attention to the ways plantocratic systems generated black creative activities that rebelled against the tenets of white supremacy and its attendant order of consciousness. Building on Wynter's insights, the essay argues that plantation activities were rebellious and inventive spaces that enunciate “the revolutionary demand for happiness.” This demand for happiness draws attention to how musical beats and grooves are rebellious enthusiasms that recode ongoing plantation logics and, as well, open up a new order of consciousness.

This essay traces the rise of the crisis school of Caribbean heteromasculinity studies through a critical reading across popular writing, policy research, and scholarly work on Caribbean masculinity. Mobilizing insights that Sylvia Wynter articulated in “Black Metamorphosis” and developed in later essays, it examines the circulation of knowledge on gender and sexuality emanating from the crisis school. Highlighting the points of convergence found in government-sponsored policy studies, academic scholarship, and the newspaper column of a men's organization from Barbados, the essay reveals a particular investment in a specific way of being human and questions what such investments mean for black liberation, gender relations, and power/knowledge.

As the recent revival of Sylvia Wynter's scholarship has commanded the attention of a younger generation of scholars, the special section of Small Axe dedicated to her “forgotten” work provides an occasion to reconsider the prehistory to her theory of the human. Rather than simply chart Wynter's intellectual journey and rehearse the progression from a cultural concern to a seemingly more profound interrogation of the human, this essay suspends this narrative transition in order to traverse the conceptual field from which Wynter's “Black Metamorphosis” emerges. Focusing on Wynter's sustained engagement with racial subjection and/as the morphological production of blackness, the essay argues that the “underlife” Wynter traces from the provision grounds of the colonial plantation to the black urban ghettos in the United States effectively displaces her future critique of Western humanism with a source of vitality that undercuts the mechanization of black life. Ultimately, what gets lost in the anticipation of critique is a certain appreciation of black social living.

“Black Metamorphosis,” Sylvia Wynter's unpublished manuscript of the 1970s, is premised on the idea that the black experience of coloniality is crucial to comprehending the history of the New World. This essay traces the idea of black experience in “Black Metamorphosis” through the figure of the non-norm, a central category for Wynter throughout the manuscript. The black presence in the New World is subterranean but omnipresent, fugitive but hypervisible, condemned as the non-norm and nonperson but the foundation for the concept of free citizenship in the Americas. Black experience is crucial; without it the ideological fictions of the contemporary world order that consign the vast majority of its population to a subhuman status remain uncontested and grow every generation in weight and power.

This short essay is a response to Alexandra T. Vazquez's Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music (Duke, 2013). It aims to recreate the experience of reading the book and the transformation in listening that the book prompted. Written in both personal and academic registers, the essay begins with the author's analytic and affective responses to the book, before posing some questions it raises. Specifically, it asks for further explorations of our understanding of the publics generated by performances of Cuban music, in particular publics that might be critical or ideologically opposed to the political registers of the music. The essay raises the question of ethnographically produced knowledge and its role in tourist or commercial enterprises. Finally, the essay poses the issue, as raised in other contexts by Alexander Weheliye, of the relationship of technology to sonic blackness

This essay, a response to Alexandra T. Vazquez's Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music (Duke, 2013), follows Vazquez's lead to “listen in detail” to two ongoing musical projects, conceived and executed in the Little Havana nightclub known as Hoy Como Ayer, that dismantle popular Cuban musical forms and reinvent not only Cuban music but US popular music as well. The broken melodies of composer and violinist Alfredo Triff and the deep groove of the Spam Allstars, a jam band that draws from Cuban son, classic soul, and Miami Bass, deterritorialize Cuban music from fixed national imaginaries and reterritorialize an alternative Cuban repertoire within the forever-shifting imaginary of Miami.

This essay argues that there has been a subtle revolution in African diaspora studies that is emerging across very recent scholarship. Alexandra T. Vazquez's Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music(Duke, 2013) is part of a larger movement in the field of black diaspora studies, not only toward sound studies but toward feminist studies. Vazquez's work, alongside that of Edwin Hill, Shana Redmond, and Tsitsi Jaji (among others), pushes black cultural studies in new directions via feminist inquiry and methodologies, as well as via the basic inclusion of women as subjects/authors/performers of African diaspora culture. This scholarship is remaking the field as feminist in innovative and surprising ways, challenging scholars and students to ask questions about audience, circulation, authorship, and activism that embrace more capacious definitions of black cultural production and its global significance.

Alexandra T. Vazquez hopes that her Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music (Duke, 2013) can be a historical contribution to the work now being done in the fresh waves of Miami studies. At the generous urging of reviewers Alejandra Bronfman, Celeste Fraser Delgado, and Samantha Pinto—and as a way to honor their time and add-to—Vazquez introduces some new work to continue her long-term project that leaves open creative room for involvement with music. These next steps strive to extend “listening in detail” beyond getting lost in the singular and fully into the plural—and also to encourage experimentation with how music is researched. Listening, especially for those who work in musical geographies and traditions where documentation is far from comprehensive and ordered, is different from close reading.