Kamau Brathwaite is a distinguished historian, literary-cultural critic, and poet. After a long career teaching in the Department of History at the University of the West Indies, Mona, he now teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University. A founder of the Caribbean Artists Movement and a founding editor of Savacou, Brathwaite 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 article provides a set of readings toward what I am calling a “queer performance hermeneutic” of dancehall culture. It argues that although dancehall appears to be rigidly heteronormative, there are modes of queer performance within its culture, modes that may even be enabled by its various discourses of homophobia. I suggest that the development of an interpretative practice that brings together queer theory, African diasporic studies, dancehall studies, and performance studies will enable the reading of those elements of dancehall that exceed or go against the grain of normative discourses in dancehall lyrics. I offer readings of male dance crews at street dances, a comedy interlude at a dancehall club night, and a dancehall video, each of which provides the opportunity to read “the queer” in dancehall culture.
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Nadia Ellis is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in the literature and culture of the African diaspora. Her current research includes a book project that considers the interplay between materiality and immateriality in formulations of a black diaspora, particularly in relation to Caribbean independence movements. She teaches courses on black literature, postcolonial studies, and queer theory.
This essay examines C. L. R. James's relationship to the heroic and inspiring arc of labour rebellions that swept the colonial British Caribbean during the 1930s. The essay begins by discussing James's 1932 work putting the case for West Indian self-government, The Life of Captain Cipriani, and its generally positive reception in the Caribbean. We then turn to the “outbreak of democracy” represented by the Trinidad general strike in 1937 and James's attempt to rally solidarity with this and subsequent rebellions elsewhere while in the imperial metropole itself as a leading member of the International African Service Bureau. Finally, this essay stresses how the Caribbean labour rebellions themselves, with their demonstration of the “modernity” of the mass of working people in the West Indies and apparent vindication of the Marxist theory of permanent revolution, played their part in the shaping of James's majestic The Black Jacobins.
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Christian Høgsbjerg has completed a PhD titled “C. L. R. James in Imperial Britain, 1932–38,” in the Department of History at the University of York (UK). He is the editor of a forthcoming special edition of C. L. R. James’s 1934 play about the Haitian Revolution, Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History, and in 2008 co-organized a one-day conference in London to mark the seventieth anniversary of the publication of The Black Jacobins. He is a member of the editorial board of International Socialism.
Reading Heading South as a decolonial romance reveals anxiety about the liminal location of young male citizens in 1970s Haiti caught within the necropower of state terror and US imperialism. Focusing on young men selling “romance” on the beach within the continuing colonial relations between the United States and Haiti and black and white bodies, the film engages with the limits of transracial, heterosexual romance in sex tourism. The impossibility of romance shows that for Haitian citizens, nationalist redemption lies in politics not in transracial intimacies. However, politics is itself necropolitical, since death is the only passage to narratable citizenship. As a decolonial moment, death speaks about the necropower of daily existence for Haitian citizens caught between state terror and US imperialism; asserts agency in the “will to death in order to be free”; and highlights the disposability and (un)grievability of poor, young black bodies in Baby Doc Duvalier's Haiti.
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Shirley Tate is a senior lecturer in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds, UK. She has written extensively in the area of “race,” culture, and aesthetics that reflects her research interest in the racialized body, “race” performativity, and affect and beauty in the black Atlantic diaspora. Among her publications are the monographs Black Skins, BlackMasks: Hybridity, Dialogism, Performativity (2005), and Black Beauty: Aesthetics, Stylization, Politics (2009).
While discussions of transnational migration now offer rich studies of the embodied transgression of territorial boundaries, empirical investigations in the social sciences have largely tended to be preoccupied with the relations sustained between origin/home/departure and destination/away/settlement societies. This emphasis has arguably restricted our comprehension of the complexity of transnational practices that connect people not just with the place they left but across sites of migration. Drawing on the example of Caribbean women who travel regularly between Toronto and New York, this essay explores gendered and routinized modes of travel across sites of migration that displace the home-away dyad. How might we explain these visits to Caribbean people in places other than the Caribbean and to Caribbean places in North America? How might we account for the prominence of women across these circuits, and what might such gendered journeys offer to discussions of Caribbean culture and identity?
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D. Alissa Trotz is an associate professor of women’s and gender studies and director of Caribbean studies at New College, University of Toronto. She is the coeditor of Gender, Ethnicity, and Place: Women and Identity in Guyana (1999) and “Caribbean Trajectories,” a special issue of Race and Class (2007). She is also the editor of a weekly column (“In the Diaspora”) in the Guyanese newspaper Stabroek News.
Dennis Morris is best known for his iconic photographs of Bob Marley and the Wailers and of the Sex Pistols. He was eleven years old when one of his photographs was printed on the front page of the Daily Mirror. With a career spanning over many decades, Morris has had his work exhibited internationally (Sydney Opera House; Laforet Museum, Tokyo; Today Art Museum, Beijing) and published widely, including in Rolling Stone, Time, GQ, I-D, and Vogue magazines. His photographs are represented in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; English Heritage, UK; and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, Cleveland, OH. His books include Bob Marley: A Rebel Life (2011) andSouthall: A Home from Home (1999). Autograph ABP is currently working with Morris on a limited edition book, Growing Up Black, to be published in 2011. www.dennismorris.com
Marvin Bartley is an artist based in Jamaica. His interest in photography is an accidental one; he attended the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, Kingston, to major in painting. As his interest grew he recognized that the basic elements of classical painting, such as light and composition, could be applied to digital photography and editing in unimaginable ways. His bizarre portrayal of religious themes and the profound use of nudity—ideas stimulated by Dante’s Inferno—make his work easily discernible.
Since the early 1990s, the contemporary visual culture of slavery has been defined increasingly by installation, performance, and time-based media. This is particularly so for visual artists who chronicle Caribbean catastrophic history using the slave ship as a key iconic signifier. Their works, while presenting a contemporary perspective on the slave trade, slavery, colonialism, or postcolonialism, seem to do so by calling upon the viewer to be a participant. Kinesthetic interaction with theatrical environments, reenactments, and multiscreen, time-based projections inserts the viewer as part of the work of art in an attempt to physically, if not psychically, embody the voids and contours that these catastrophes have left in their wake. This essay considers the emergence of this progressively more interactive art form, focusing on artists such as Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Hew Locke, and others, as well as the sailing replica Freedom Schooner Amistad by examining the relationship between the mnemonic aesthetic practices at its root and the aesthetic urgency to address Caribbean catastrophic history.
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Cheryl Finley is acting director of the Visual Studies Program and assistant professor in the Department of History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University. A frequent writer and lecturer on such themes as African diaspora art, photography, the art market, heritage tourism, and the aesthetics of memory, she served on the editorial board of the innovative interdisciplinary Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (2010). She is the author of the forthcoming book Committed to Memory: The Slave Ship Icon in the Black Atlantic Imagination and coauthor of Harlem: A Century in Images (2010) and Diaspora, Memory, Place: David Hammons, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Pamela Z (2008). She is also a curator: Finley’s “African Diaspora Room” opened as part of the inaugural exhibition “In My Father’s House” at the August Wilson Center, Pittsburgh, in September 2010. Her research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the Alphonse Fletcher Sr. Fellowship, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Lauren K. Alleyne is a native of Trinidad and Tobago. Her work has earned the 2003 Atlantic Monthly Student Poetry Prize, the Robert Chasen Graduate Poetry Prize (Cornell University), the International Publication Prize (Atlanta Review), and honorable mention in the 2009 Reginald Shepherd Memorial Poetry Prize and the 2003 Gival Press Tri-Language Poetry Contest. She has been published in the journals Black Arts Quarterly, Caribbean Writer, Belleview Literary Review, and Crab Orchard Review, as well as in the anthologies Growing Up Girl (2006) andGathering Ground (2006). Alleyne is co-editor of From the Heart of Brooklyn: Fiction, Poetry, and Drama (2003), and her chapbook Dawn in the Kaatskills was published in 2008. She is currently the poet-in-residence at the University of Dubuque, Iowa, where she is also an assistant professor of English.
Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He studied at the University of the West Indies, Mona, and at New York University, and is currently completing his PhD at the University of Utah. His poetry and essays have appeared in several publications, including Callaloo,Caribbean Review of Books, Gulf Coast Magazine, The Forward Book of Poetry, L.A. Times Review, and Poetry International, and his work has been translated into German for the Berliner Anthologie. Hutchinson has received fellowships and residencies from the Calabash International Literary Festival Trust, Jamaica; Unabhängiges Literaturhaus, Austria; New York University; and the University of Utah. He is currently a Pirogue Fellow (Gorée Institute of Art) and teaches at the University of Baltimore. His first full-length collection, Far District, was published in the spring of 2010 by Peepal Tree Press.
“Battie Boy,” set in 1950s Barbados, explores a young boy's decision to fight the taunts thrown at him by school-yard bullies. It traces his realization that, to truly come of age, he must find a space where he can think and grow on his own terms.
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Stephen Narain was born in the Bahamas to Guyanese parents and moved to the United States as a teenager. He studied English at Harvard University, where he received the Edward Eager and Le Baron Russell Briggs Prizes for fiction. His stories have appeared in the Harvard Advocate and his poetry in Calabash. Narain will begin the MFA program at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, University of Iowa, in fall 2011. He lives in Brooklyn.
“Dieu est mon pilote à Tanqueray” is a short story about a young man named Lemuel and his journey from Haiti to South Florida. As Lemuel prepares for the trip, the ship's captain shows him the sail that is made out of material from a discarded billboard. On the sail is a handsome black man in a pin-striped suit. He is shown holding a glass, with a huge green bottle and the words “Ready to Tanqueray?” in the background. “This is how we will live when we get to Florida,” the captain assures Lemuel, but the journey to Florida is the farthest thing from luxurious.
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Andrea E. Shaw is assistant director of the Division of Humanities and associate professor of English at Nova Southeastern University, Ft. Lauderdale. She is a creative writer and scholar of Caribbean and African diaspora studies, and is the author of The Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat Black Women’s Unruly Political Bodies (2006).
Faith Smith's Creole Recitations offers a feminist critique and compelling alternative to the dominant narratives of Trinidadian and black nationalism. Smith's analysis of Thomas's participation in the anglophone Caribbean public sphere of the late nineteenth century makes visible that already in the 1870s, Thomas defined creole identity as normative and national in part by contrasting it to Indian and other ethnic identities. Smith illuminates the significant role women and womanhood played in the construction of creole identity and respectable middle-class nationalism. As importantly, Smith offers “recitation” as a model for understanding social and cultural formation in the Caribbean. In contrast to the long-held view that recitation was necessarily an alienating act of mimicry, Smith reveals that recitation functioned as a creative process used both to resist and to appropriate colonial discourse. Through it, Thomas and other Afro-Caribbean intellectuals shaped the perception and material reality of their individual, ethnic, and national communities.
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Leah Rosenberg is an associate professor of English at the University of Florida, Gainesville, and is a fellow at the National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, NC. She is the author of Nationalism and the Formation of Caribbean Literature (2007) and is currently working on a book about the influence of tourism on Caribbean literature. She serves on the academic advisory board for the Digital Library of the Caribbean (www.dloc.com).
Faith Smith's analysis, in Creole Recitations, of the nineteenth-century scholar John Jacob Thomas's often contradictory allegiances offers us a way of reading the counterintuitively parallel career of the poet Eric Roach a century later. Roach is the subject of Laurence Breiner's monographBlack Yeats: Eric Roach and the Politics of Caribbean Poetry (2008). The positions Smith and Breiner ascribe to Thomas and Roach, respectively, articulate an enduring Caribbean contradiction between an aspiration to erudition on the one hand and the urgency of self-representation on the other. This essay argues that by obscuring the full range of Thomas' positions, which Smith's study so fully recuperates, and denigrating those same positions in Roach's work, which Breiner's study resuscitates, nationalist elites obfuscate their own connections to the full range of colonial and nationalist values by which they, too, have been influenced.
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Rhonda Cobham is the William J. Kenan Jr. Professor of English and Black Studies at Amherst College, where she teaches Caribbean and African literature and postcolonial theory. Her essays and reviews have appeared in such publications as Callaloo, Small Axe, Transition, and Research in African Literatures.
Apart from the fact that it is one of very few book-length studies of a Caribbean-based British Caribbean black intellectual from the nineteenth century, and one of even fewer written by a literary studies scholar, Faith L. Smith's Creole Recitations stands out because of the light it sheds on the mechanics of anglophone Afro-Caribbean intellectual formation, self-representation, and epistemology posited in newspapers, nonfiction books, and speeches produced in the Caribbean during this period. This article is a reading of a conceptual thread that runs through Smith's book—the ways in which the approaches to transnational engagement embedded within English colonialism are at once accepted, interrogated, or utilized by Caribbean public figures in the nineteenth century. As such, Smith's book provides a way for us to situate modern Caribbean studies within an intellectual genealogy and a model for contextualizing the issues, experiences, and approaches that began to be highlighted with the advent of postcolonial studies.
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Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo is an associate professor of English at Vanderbilt University. She is author of Black Cosmopolitanism: Racial Consciousness and Transnational Identity in the Nineteeth-Century Americas (2005), coeditor of Rhythms of the Afro-Atlantic World: Rituals, Remembrances, and Revisions (2010), and editor of “African Routes, Caribbean Roots, Latino Lives,” a special issue of Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies (2009), and “Critical Approaches to Louise Bennett,” a special issue of the Journal of West Indian Literature (2009).
This essay uses the three interlocutors' reflections to return to Creole Recitations, and to reconsider Thomas's nineteenth century as an arena for thinking about Caribbean male intellectuals' self-fashioning and desire, diaspora and degeneration, the sexual politics of creolization, and what it means to think of the period as merely preceding the anglophone Caribbean's important political and cultural developments.
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Faith Smith is an associate professor at Brandeis University, where she currently chairs the Department of African and Afro-American Studies. She is the author of Creole Recitations: John Jacob Thomas and Colonial Formation in the Late Nineteenth-Century Caribbean (2002) and is now working on a book project titled “Whose Modern? Caribbean Cultural and Intellectual Formation, 1885–1915.” She is the editor of Sex and the Citizen: Interrogating the Caribbean, forthcoming from University of Virginia Press in 2011.
