Glyne A. Griffith is associate professor of English and chair of the Department of Latin American, Caribbean, and US Latino Studies at the University at Albany, State University of New York. He is the author of Deconstruction, Imperialism, and the West Indian Novel (1996), editor of Caribbean Cultural Identities (2001), and coeditor (with Linden Lewis and Elizabeth Cresbo-Kebler) of Color, Hair, and Bone: Race in the Twenty-First Century (2007). He is finishing a book on Henry Swanzy and the BBC’s Caribbean Voices program.
This article offers to the consideration of readers a number of site-specific vignettes that highlight the ways in which the experience of blackness--as different from the fact of blackness--may take different forms depending on the moment, the socio-cultural setting, the history, and the existential context in which it occurs. It asks about the wisdom of promoting ideas about global blackness that do not at the same time examine the political economy that explains the globalizing of blackness nor the deleterious legacy of Western discourse that construed people of African descent as a homogeneous branch of the human family. The article invites reflection on the need to study the black experience internationally without a preordained narrative of racial self-affirmation, warning that the expectation that blacks will articulate their racial identity everywhere in the same way may result in the misrecognition an ensuing neglect of seminal chapters of the black experience.
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Silvio Torres-Saillant is professor in the Department of English and director of the Latino-Latin American Studies Program at Syracuse University and directs the New World Studies Series at the University Press of Virginia. One of the senior editors of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States and an associate editor for Latino Studies, he has authored, among other works, An Intellectual History of the Caribbean (2006), El retorno de las yolas (1999), Caribbean Poetics (1997), and The Dominican Americans (1998).
Looking back at the dialogue between Black British Cultural Studies and African American Studies that occurred during the 1980s and 1990s, when Stuart Hall first asked the question, “What is this black in black popular culture?” this article explores how that conversation has evolved in the context of current discussions of black cross-culturality and diaspora. New concerns have emerged about the relevance of US notions of race and blackness for describing the cultures, experiences, and identities of members of other diasporic populations. Also, gender and sexuality still function as theoretical categories of lesser priority in the discussion of a racial diaspora imaginary, despite the hypervisibility of certain notions of black masculinity and femininity in popular cultural forms that travel between home and abroad. With readings of one canonical diaspora text, Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, the article teases out what is at stake in making US based comparisons when discussing racial dynamics in the colonial world. This article ultimately argues that only a broad and complex understanding of modernity's racial unconscious can address both the hypervisibility of the US and the undefined role of gender and sexuality in contemporary conceptions of race and black culture.
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Michelle Stephens is associate professor of English at Colgate University, Hamilton, New York. A member of the editorial collective of the Radical History Review, she coedited the special issue “Reconceptualizations of the African Diaspora” (2009). She the author of Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914 to 1962 (2005) and is currently working on a book titled “Black Acts: Race, Masculinity, and Performance across the New World,” featuring discussions of the performers Bert Williams, Paul Robeson, Harry Belafonte, and Bob Marley.
This article analyzes anecdotes, jokes, standards of beauty, color categories, and media representations of “mixed-race” individuals to assess the junctions and disjunctions of whiteness and blackness in Brazil. While the multiple and contradictory meanings of “racial” mixture stimulates a preference for whiteness, thus reducing the access to power by those deemed black, it simultaneously fuels a rejection for “pure” forms of whiteness as witnessed in the country's celebration of morenidade (brownness). Not all forms of miscegenation are valued in Brazil's myth of racial democracy, and some “types of mixture” are clearly preferred in detriment of others. I argue that anti-black racism in Brazil is expressed not only against dark-skinned individuals, but it also operates in the devaluing of physical traits “deemed black” even in those who have lighter skin complexion, thus creating “degrees of whiteness.” One's “measure of whiteness,” therefore, is not defined only by skin color, but requires a much wider economy of signs where, together with other bodily features, hair texture is almost as important as epidermal tone. In any given context, the definition of whiteness is also, necessarily, shaped by the contours of gender and class affiliation.
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Patricia de Santana Pinho is assistant professor in the Department of Latin American, Caribbean, and US Latino Studies at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Her research focuses on blackness, whiteness, and racism and antiracism. Her recent publications include Reinvenções da África na Bahia (2004) and the forthcoming Mama Africa: Reinventing Blackness in Bahia.
This essay examines the problem of being Asian in the Caribbean, Asian referring generically to settled groups originating from the sub-continent of Asia. The essay traces how demographic minority status and religious difference have historically led to the process of becoming the outsider in the region. Focusing primarily on Indians, the essay explores the tropes of the “home and the world” in which “otherness” emerges as metaphors in the fictional works of Rabindranath Tagore's The Home and the Worldwhich resonates in V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas. The `Other' in this essay extemporizes on Edward Said's concept in Orientalism. Othering excludes Asians from the creole project of nationalisms in the region, conferring instead a script of antiquity and cultural spirituality that Asians have colluded with for negotiating difference. This collusion comes with its own metaphysical dilemmas of identity and belonging that remain unresolved.
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Patricia Mohammed is professor of gender and cultural studies as well as campus coordinator at the School for Graduate Studies and Research at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. She is president of the Caribbean Studies Association for 2008–2009. She has published extensively in gender and cultural studies and is currently directing her tenth documentary film, Coolie Pink and Green. Her manuscript Imaging the Caribbean: Culture and Visual Translation is in press at Macmillan/UK.
This paper examines contemporary debates around the US Census, US National Security Strategy, and various documents of postmodern war doctrine to delineate a mutation in domestic social order that is consistent both with the end of civil rights and with US planetary ambition. At one level this paper serves to critique a liberal progressive-activist tendency in the US that remains preoccupied with the very racial oppositions that such a tendency also ironically condemns. The contemporary juridical ethos finds its political analogue not in a post-white “cosmopolitan legal order,” as many would hope, but in the new absolutism of `World-American' rule. At a second level, then, this paper seeks to complicate and challenge US planetary ambition by describing what is ultimately an autogenic form of warfare, a declaration within civil society of a war between the US and itself. The pervasive fractalization of civil rights based forms of domestic social order, and equally, the new minoritarian condition of whiteness, provide apposite bases from within which to rethink race politics in an age of failed states.
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Mike Hill is associate professor and chair of the Department of English at the University at Albany, State University of New York. He is the author of After Whiteness: UnMaking an American Majority (2004), and editor of Whiteness: A Critical Reader (1997) and Masses, Classes, and the Public Sphere (2000). He is currently working on a book on race and contemporary cultures of war.
Rex Dixon is a painter trained in a number of art schools in the United Kingdom. He was visual arts officer at Midlands Art Centre, Birmingham, from 1972 to 1977. He taught painting as a full-time lecturer on the bachelor of art course at the New University of Ulster, Belfast, prior to teaching since 1985 in the painting department of the Edna Manley School for the Visual Arts, Jamaica. He has exhibited extensively in the Caribbean and internationally and represented Jamaica in the second and third Biennale of Caribbean and Central American Painting, the Museum of Modern Art, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. His work can be seen in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Jamaica and at the library of the University of the West Indies, Mona. He lives in Trinidad.
With reference to a little known nineteenth century novel by an Antiguan creole woman, With Silent Tread (c1890), this paper examines the different ways in which female creole whiteness is constructed in the West Indies and in England. Paradoxically, “transcultural whiteness” exposes the ambivalence of such racial distinctions in the colonial context, and underscores the need for a more nuanced perception of whiteness as well as blackness in the Caribbean.
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Evelyn O’Callaghan is professor of West Indian literature in the Department of Language, Linguistics, and Literature at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill. She has published The Earliest Patriots (1986), Woman Version: Theoretical Approaches to West Indian Fiction by Women (1993), and Women Writing the West Indies, 1804–1939: A Hot Place, Belonging to Us (2003). Her edition of the nineteenth-century Caribbean novel With Silent Tread by Frieda Cassin appeared in the Macmillan Caribbean Classics series in 2002. She is one of the editors of the Journal of West Indian Literature.
Whiteness has certain fixed meanings in Jamaica. Being white in a country where 95% of the population is black, but where whites still represent the upper echelons of society, produces a peculiar dilemma of privilege counterpoised by marginalization. Compounded by awareness of the past role of whites in a slave society, the dilemma of white Jamaicans is undeniable. Also undeniable, however, is the fact that the costs of being white are outweighed by the benefits, as the white Jamaican writer Anthony C. Winkler acknowledges in two autobiographical works. Winkler experiences those benefits both in black Jamaica and in white America, where he comes to fully appreciate just how much of a Jamaican he is, as well as to grasp the idiosyncrasies of Jamaican vs American constructions of whiteness vs blackness.
This paper examines issues of racial and cultural identity raised, directly or indirectly, by Winkler as a white writer of the Jamaican diaspora.
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Kim Robinson-Walcott is editor of books and special publications at the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies, University of the West Indies, Mona. She is also the editor of Jamaica Journal, published by the Institute of Jamaica. Her publications include Out of Order! Anthony Winkler and White West Indian Writing (2006); Jamaican Art (1989), coauthored with Petrine Archer-Straw; and the children’s book Dale’s Mango Tree (1992), which she also illustrated. Her scholarly articles and short stories have been published in a number of journals and anthologies, including Small Axe.
The author's thesis is that the patois term “Ole negar” which Jamaicans use to vilify and categorize the uneducated among them is more than a simple pejorative meant to stigmatize a whole class of people. From the various contexts in which the phrase ole negar is used can be inferred a begrudging admiration for the defiance of this lowly, downtrodden Jamaican who stuck tenaciously to his own culture and refused to play the game of colonialism by the Englishman's elitist rules. Ole negar, in sum, was the Jamaican who clung to the African ways of his ancestry while rejecting the dandified pretensions of the usurping English.
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Anthony C. Winkler was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica. He was educated at Excelsior primary school in Kingston and at Mount Alvernia Academy and Cornwall College in Montego Bay, to which his family had moved in 1950. In the United States he attended Citrus Collegein Glendora, California, and California State University at Los Angeles. He is the author of fifteen college textbooks, as well as several novels, plays, short stories, and essays, and a recently published autobiography, Trust the Darkness: My Life as a Writer (2008). He lives in Atlanta with his wife, Cathy.
Albert Chong is professor of art at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he teaches photography. The recipient of several artist fellowships, including a 1998 Guggenheim fellowship in photography, a 1998 grant from the Pollock Krasner Foundation, and a 1992 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in photography, Chong has had his work widely exhibited nationally and internationally at such venues as the Venice Biennale (2001), the Museum of Modern Art (1991), the Havana Biennale (2000), and Kaoshiung International Container Festival, Kaoshiung, Taiwan (2001). He was also Jamaica’s representative at the São Paulo Biennale in 1998. A book of his photographs, Ancestral Dialogues: The Photographs of Albert Chong, appeared in 1994.
Andrea Chung is a multimedia artist. She holds a bachelor of fine arts from Parsons School of Design in New York and a master of fine arts from the Mount Royal School of Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. Her work has been shown in the exhibition “NEXT” at Art Chicago and in “Off Color,” curated by Hank Willis Thomas and Kalia Brooks, at Rush Arts Gallery in New York, as well as at Conner Contemporary, Washington DC; the Arlington Arts Center, Virginia; the Sonya Hayes Stone Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and the Gateway Gallery, Maryland Institute College of Art. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture artist residency in 2008 and is a recipient of a 2008–2009 Fulbright scholarship to Mauritius.
Ras Akyem-i Ramsay studied at the Edna Manley School of Visual Arts, Jamaica, and the Instituto Superior de Arte, Cuba. His work has been exhibited at the Havana Biennial (fifth and sixth); the Biennial of Caribbean and Central American Painting (first, second, and third; winning a gold medal in 1996); “Arte del Caribe,” Madrid; “Caribbean Visions” (traveling, United States); and “Carib Art,” Curaçao. In addition to several solo exhibitions in Barbados, his numerous joint shows with Ras Ishi since 1986 include “Personal Views” (Barbados Museum), Susalito Art Festival (California), “Vexx” (Queen’s Park, Barbados), “Havana Antes y Después” (Kirby Gallery, Barbados), and “Caribbean Connections” (Islington Arts Factory, London). His artists’ residencies include the Bag Factory, Johannesburg (2005), and Winona State College, Minnesota (2009).
Sonia Boyce's two-screen video, Crop-Over, visually samples the many traditions, histories and cultural practices that inform this Barbadian festival, culminating with the carnivalesque parade known as Kadooment. Presenting a wide range of related performances, some real and some staged by the artist, Boyce constructs a pseudo-documentary, pseudo-pantomime collage of events that subtly reveals the multiple dimensions of this creolized spectacle, deliberately building up layers of interpretation and presentation that seek to identify, historicize and problematize these cultural icons. Unlike many of the pre-lenten carnivals in the region, Crop Over celebrates the end of the sugar cane season, and directly ties the subversive elements and inversions of traditional carnival to the sugar economy of the Caribbean, and its historical dependence on slavery. While traditional representations of Carnival by artists such as Belisario are marked, according to Stuart Hall, by what is not said, Boyce's Crop Over is motivated by what remains unexplained.
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Allison Thompson lectures in art history and directs the BFA (Studio Art) Programme at the Barbados Community College. She works with several cultural organizations, including the National Art Gallery Committee and ICOM Barbados, and was the founding president of AICA Southern Caribbean, a regional chapter of the International Association of Art Critics. She has written numerous articles and catalogue essays on Caribbean art and is the coauthor of Art in Barbados: What Kind of Mirror Image? (1999).
This essay reflects on how social unrest and violence are responded to in the mainstream visual arts of postcolonial Jamaica. The focus is on two particular moments of crisis: the social unrest and political violence during the Michael Manley administration in the 1970s and the current escalation in violent crime. Both moments have also coincided with intense cultural activity, in which the lived experience of these crises commands centre stage. This essay explores how this has resulted in visual art works that record, critique or seek to transcend the crisis at hand and how these, along with the popular visual culture and the news media, forge the visual imaginaries of these moments and the visual memories of the future. The essay also reflects on the role of art in times of social crisis and the ethical questions that surround the artistic representation of violence and trauma, especially in the market-driven context of contemporary Jamaican art.
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Veerle Poupeye is a Belgian-born, Jamaica-based art historian who specializes in Caribbean art. Her publications include Caribbean Art (1998), which appeared in Thames and Hudson’s World of Art series, and Modern Jamaican Art (1998), which she coauthored with David Boxer. She has been a curator at the National Gallery of Jamaica and has taught at the Edna Manley College, Emory University, and New York University. She is currently a research fellow at the Edna Manley College while completing her doctoral dissertation at Emory University.
Richard Price's Travels with Tooy culminates with a series of reflections on a fundamental fissure that has persisted in the theorization of African American culture. On one side are those who stress African cultural continuity of various kinds, and on the other, those who argue for the primacy of cultural dynamism, creativity and change. Drawing on ethnographic and philosophical insights gained from his close engagement with the book's protagonist, a Saramaka Maroon healer, Price seeks to transcend (if not nullify) the terms of the “hoary debate” kept alive by these opposed “camps.” This essay agrees with Price's argument against the starkly opposed positions of the past, but proposes that it may be too early to lay this continuing debate entirely to rest. Using music as a point of departure, it argues that experiential understandings that privilege cultural continuity, if properly contextualized, remain valuable, if not indispensable.
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Kenneth Bilby is director of research at the Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, and research associate in the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. He is the author of True-Born Maroons (2005); co-author of Caribbean Currents: Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae(1995); and author of numerous articles on Caribbean music, folklore, and language. He has also recorded, compiled, or produced fifteen albums of music from different parts of the Caribbean.
In this essay I explore key tropes in the study of the Caribbean and New World African diasporas, focusing on the work of Richard Price, and, in particular, Travels With Tooy. I engage some problematic issues in the definition and apprehension of memory, history, and cultural transformation (creolization). These issues include the constitution of “knowledge” and “evidence,” the value and meaning of empirical research, the relationship between the construction of experience and the construction of a discipline, and the ways that authority and legitimacy are established and maintained. The essay ends by briefly considering what the stakes are in the contemporary debate about memory, history, and cultural transformation in diaspora, and thus, consequently, what political projects are embedded in them.
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Aisha Khan teaches in the Department of Anthropology at New York University. Specializing in Asian and African diasporas in the Americas, race and ethnicity, postcolonial societies, and religion, she has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Honduras with the Garifuna and, for the past two decades, in Trinidad. Her most recent book is Callaloo Nation: Metaphors of Race and Religious Identity among South Asians in Trinidad (2004), and she is the coeditor of the forthcoming Empirical Futures: Anthropologists and Historians Engage the Work of Sidney W. Mintz.
This article reflects upon Richard Price's newest work, Travels with Tooy. In it, the author argues that the book - on the surface, a text about the transmission of esoteric knowledge passed down from “First Time” to the present among Saramaka Maroons - is actually an investigation of the role of anthropological knowledge within Caribbean Studies. As such, Travels opens a window on the anthropological contribution to more general debates about nation-building throughout the circum-Caribbean. The author tracks anthropology's disciplinary history vis-à-vis the Caribbean in order to explore some of the roads not traveled within Travels. This is done to highlight the ways issues emerge and change across generational cohorts of researchers. The author concludes by arguing that anthropology's continued relevance to Caribbean Studies depends on rethinking some of our main areas of focus and methods of engagement.
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Deborah A. Thomas is associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica (2004), coeditor of Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness (2006), and coeditor of the journal Transforming Anthropology. She is currently writing a book about violence in Jamaica.
In the course of responding to the comments of Kenneth Bilby, Aisha Khan, and Deborah Thomas on Travels with Tooy, Price raises some questions suggested by the book: What is the place of long-term ethnography of the sort represented by Travelsin Caribbeanist research? How do we best think about ways of knowing (including subject positions, relationships, disciplines) in the Caribbean? How do we best think about ways of writing Caribbean culture (literary modes, social science modes), the languages needed to express what Bilby calls the “ineffable”? To what extent and in what ways are apparently exotic or marginal peoples, such as the Saramaka Maroons of Suriname, truly part of the Caribbean world? While considering long-standing debates about African continuities vs. New World creativity, and discussing what Michel-Rolph Trouillot has called “the miracle of creolization,” the essay draws on the history of Caribbean studies to consider possible new directions.
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Richard Price divides his time between rural Martinique and the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, where he is Dittman Professor of American Studies, Anthropology, and History. His many books include First-Time(1983), Alabi’s World (1990), The Convict and the Colonel (1998), and, with Sally Price, Romare Bearden: The Caribbean Dimension (2006). His most recent work, Travels with Tooy: History, Memory, and the African American Imagination (2008), won the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing.
