David Scott teaches in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University, New York. He is currently completing a book titled "Omens of Adversity: Revolution, Tragedy, and the Ruins of Our Time."
Why has the category “gender” not figured transformatively in anti-colonial resistance, or nationalist politics in the region? This is a question posed in this forum by literary scholar Natasha Barnes (1991). Despite the centrality that Caribbean feminists have accorded to “gender” in their pursuit of social justice I argue that “gender's” analytical marginalization persists because the philosophical underpinnings of these nationalist/anti-colonialist projects have all but insisted upon the supplanting of gender by race. Toward this end, I examine the fraught role that “gender' plays in Frantz Fanon's work by revisiting his engagement with Mayotte Capécia's Je Suis Martiniquaise. For post-colonial subjects the assertion of one's humanity is simultaneously a claim of one's value. While, Caribbean feminists have deployed gender as the primary category through which a critique of human condition is invoked I argue that is now woefully inadequate when faced with the complex terrain of 21st century Caribbean feminist advocacy.
Bio
Michelle V. Rowley is assistant professor in the Women's Studies Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research interests address issues of gender and development, representations of black maternal identities, and the politics of welfare, as well as state responses to questions of Caribbean women's reproductive health and well-being. She is the author of a number of published essays and is currently completing a manuscript titled "Gender Equity and Development: Feminist Advocacy and Gender-mainstreaming in the Anglophone Caribbean."
In this essay, I focus on soca, a music that has been criticized by numerous journalists, academics, calypsonians, politicians, and listeners for not engaging the political. Instead of dismissing soca as a legitimate critical public discourse, I address soca in relation to its politics of pleasure and the cultural work that live soca performances achieve through the creation of what I refer to as intimacies. Drawing on Lisa Lowe's critical insights, I use the word “intimacy” in two ways: to speak about the spatial proximity soca helps create, and to address the variety of contacts among people that it makes possible. Based on these definitions, this study focuses on the public intimacies enabled by live performances of soca by examining how they unfold among artists on stage, between the artists on stage and their audiences, and among audience members during the performance. This study shows how the pleasures and public intimacies enabled by these live performances do not come free, but rather work at times to reformulate long-held cultural understandings of things such as race, class, gender and sexuality, and at other times, to reinforce them.
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Jocelyne Guilbault is professor of ethnomusicology in the Department of Music at the University of California, Berkeley. Since 1980, she has done extensive fieldwork in the French Creole–and English-speaking islands of the Caribbean on both traditional and popular music. She has published several articles on ethnographic writings, aesthetics, the cultural politics of West Indian music industries, and world music. Her main publications include Zouk: World Music in the West Indies (1993) and Governing Sound: The Cultural Politics of Trinidad's Carnival Musics(2007).
This paper explores the existence of `ital chic' in Jamaica. A cross between ethical consumerism and the marketing of cool, ital chic represents an aesthetic repertoire and a commercial strategy based on Rastafari. The symbols and aesthetics of a Rastafari lifestyle, or `ital livity', are mobilized to market a variety of products and services, ranging from restaurants and hairstyles to candles, clothing and cosmetics. This reflects a move towards localism, environmentalism and ethics that is tied, somewhat paradoxically, to globalized identities, consumption and elite lifestyles. An initial exploration is made of the implications of the ital chic phenomenon for Jamaica in terms of class and cultural politics, as well as its relation to the politics of sustainable development.
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Rivke Jaffe is lecturer in the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University, Netherlands. Her research focuses on the spatialization of power, difference, and inequality within cities. She has conducted research in Jamaica, Curaçao, and Suriname and is currently developing a project on crime and citizenship in Caribbean cities. Her edited volume The Caribbean City (2008) presents a cross-disciplinary range of contemporary perspectives on the urban Caribbean.
This article examines a privately published newsletter, The Jamaica Gaily News, in circulation from 1978 to 1984, as an archive of gay and lesbian community building initiated by the Gay Freedom Movement (GFM). Contending that recent efforts of organizations like the Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals and Gays (J-FLAG) to redress legal and social discrimination against sexual minorities continue the efforts of the GFM to create, in Benedict Andersen's famous words, an “imagined community,” I argue for a historical understanding of the print-mediated community generated by the Gaily News. This history is of relevance to Jamaican and other postcolonial sexuality based movements existing under threats of archaic colonial statutes criminalizing homosexuality. The article further argues that an understanding of sexual activism in Jamaica can serve as a supplement to transnational histories of sexuality which often dismiss postcolonial gay and lesbian activism as “undertheorized” and “politically immature.”
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Kanika Batra is assistant professor in postcolonial literatures in the Department of English at Texas Tech University, Lubbock. Her publications have appeared in such journals as African and Black Diaspora, Interventions, and Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies. Her bookFeminist Visions and Queer Futures in Postcolonial Drama will be published by Routledge in 2010.
This essay interrogates the jamette's influence in the movements of contemporary women masqueraders. The jamette is important since she tapped into the potential of corporeal expression once colonial authorities felt it unfit for women to sing the popular kalinda songs of the late nineteenth to early twentieth century. The essay examines the history of the term jamette and how it eventually encompassed the debased traits of a certain type of woman in mid-twentieth century Trinidad. I theoretically frames how jamettes, recognizing that their anatomies were considered debased by the elite, acknowledged how effective their socially sanctioned, “primitive” physicalities were in inciting insubordination. Despite being abhorred by society, the jamette's legendary deeds became influential to the performance of contemporary women masqueraders. Finally, I theorize her movements, which I termed jametteness, by employing the writings of feminist writer Toril Moi.
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Samantha A. Noel is a writer and art historian, currently pursuing her doctorate in the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University, Durham, where she focuses on African diasporic art, with an emphasis on Caribbean performance traditions. Her dissertation is titled "Carnival Is Woman!: Gender, Performance, and Visual Culture in Contemporary Trinidad Carnival."
Chandra D. Bhimull is assistant professor of anthropology and African American studies at Colby College, Waterville. She has conducted ethnographic and archival research on flight in, above, and between Barbados, Jamaica, and England, and is now writing a book, tentatively titled "Empire in the Air: Speed, Perception, and Airline Travel in the Atlantic World," based on her dissertation. She is also coeditor of Anthrohistory: Unsettling Knowledge and the Question of Discipline (forthcoming).
Andrea Shaw is assistant director of the Division of Humanities and assistant professor of English at Nova Southeastern University, Ft. Lauderdale. She is a creative writer and scholar of Caribbean and African Diaspora studies, and author of The Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat Black Women's Unruly Political Bodies (2006).
Obediah Michael Smith is a poet living and working in The Bahamas. He is the author of twelve books of poems, including Christmas Lights(2003), Poems to Sit On to Shell Peas (2003), On the Hinges of This Town (2003), Seventy Poems (2009), and Open Testament (2009). He was the Bahamas Writers Summer Institute poetry workshop instructor in July 2009.
Donnette Zacca is presently head of the Photographic Department and a lecturer at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, Kingston. She is a practicing fine artist and the creative director of the JBW Fine Art Photography Club in Kingston. Her recent exhibitions include "Living Sculpture Exploring Memory," Revolution Gallery, Kingston, 2009; School of Visual Arts Faculty Show, Edna Manley College, March, 2009; "Issues of Fertility," solo exhibition, May 2008; and the National Biennial, National Gallery of Jamaica, December 2008.
Michael Elliott attended the Edna Manley College's School of the Visual Arts, Kingston, Jamaica, where he graduated in 2002 with a diploma in painting. Since graduating, he has exhibited in "Young Generation" and "Super Plus Under-40 Artist of the Year" at Mutual Gallery, Kingston, and in the 2002, 2006, and 2008 National Biennials, Kingston. He also had a first-time appearance in the Festival Fine Art Exhibition in 2008, where he was awarded a silver medal and two trophies.
This essay brings law more fully into the rituals of terror, the fictions of slavery that Brown portrays so powerfully in *The Reaper's Garden.* In tracking the ghost-ridden traces of persons and property, I consider how palpable and visible remain the deposits of slave history, how natural become the uses of the supernatural. What are the limits of legal thought, and how deeply did it impress and transform the understanding of the sacred, not only for slaves but also for masters?
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Colin Dayan is professor of English and Robert Penn Warren Professor in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University, Nashville. Dayan is the author of Haiti, History, and the Gods (1995) and The Story of Cruel and Unusual (2007), and has just completed a new book titled, "The Law Is a White Dog."
The bleak moral vision in Vincent Brown's The Reaper's Garden offers to us a version of early America that is profoundly at odds with established, or at least popular, narratives of American historical development. It is also at odds with customary narratives of Caribbean history. These narratives deal as much about creativity as about destruction. They also see the merging of white and black in the crucible of slavery as producing not just death but also a viable Caribbean culture. Consequently, Brown's work is both a challenge to Caribbean orthodoxy and also a reiteration of long-standing jeremiads about how the settlement and exploitation of the Americas exemplified the darkness that is present in men's souls. Brown's vision of a Jamaica that looked like heaven but which was instead a hell on earth is compelling. I do wonder, however, whether in this hell there may have been some patches of sunlight that allow us to create a usable Jamaican past in which even planters might have some place.
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Trevor Burnard is professor of the history of the Americas and director of the Caribbean Studies Centre at the University of Warwick, Coventry. He has written extensively on the history of early Jamaica, including Mastery, Tyranny, and Slaves: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (2004). He is currently at work on two book projects, one comparing eighteenth-century Jamaica and Saint-Domingue, and the other on the state of early American history.
In this essay, Shepherd explores what she terms the “'call to action'/ politics of death dimension” of Vincent Brown's The Reaper's Garden.
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Verene A. Shepherd is professor of social history at the University of the West Indies, Mona. Her research areas include African enslavement in Jamaica, non-sugar economic activities in colonial Jamaica, Asian migration, and Caribbean women's history. She is the author of many books, including, most recently, Livestock, Sugar, and Slavery: Contested Terrain in Colonial Jamaica (2009).
This response to commentaries by Trevor Burnard, Colin Dayan, and Verene Shepherd on The Reaper's Garden recalls some of the inspirations that motivated research for the book, the assumptions that framed its analysis, and the aims of its storytelling. The book begins where most demographic histories of slavery have left off, exploring how social, cultural, and political life articulated with the brutal facts of morbidity and mortality. It seeks to offer a dynamic understanding of how the idioms that related the living to the dead mediated the way people in Jamaican slave society strove to achieve particular ends. For those contending with the conditions of Atlantic slavery, enacting assumptions about the role of the dead in the fortunes of the living required daily struggle over the means of existence and the exercise of will, and these beliefs and behaviors associated with death became a driving force in slavery's political history.
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Vincent Brown is professor of history and African and African-American studies at Harvard University, Cambridge. He is the author of The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (2008) and producer and director of research for Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness (Vital Pictures, 2009), an audiovisual documentary about the anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits.
