In this essay Glenn A. Elmer Griffin adopts a January 2009 parricidal attack in St. Lucia as an instantiation of the escalating problem of fratricidal crime in the postcolonial Eastern Caribbean. Following the work of Kamau Brathwaite, Griffin argues that this violence constitutes the nonarrival of postcoloniality as it is anticipated by Frantz Fanon's periodization of fraternal violence. The familial murder embodies an unbroken period of self-killing that warrants a critical reexamination of the provisions of our postcoloniality and the terms of West Indian identity formation. The case resurfaces (m)other, ressentiment, hybridity, exile, and the notion of postkilling as the terms of this reexamination. Using Homi Bhabha and Achille Mbembe, Griffin reconsiders C. L. R. James's construction of West Indian identity as the preparedness for violence and victory in terms of an irreducible temporal relation to the colonial, something more complex and reparative than the after-killing or “postcolonial.”
Bio
Glenn A. Elmer Griffin was born in Nevis. He is a licensed clinical and forensic psychologist and professor of psychology in the Department of Critical Theory and Social Justice at Occidental College, Los Angeles. His work has previously appeared in Small Axe.
Curdella Forbes deploys a complex of historically marked territorial metaphors—plot, plantation, squatting, trespass, and transgression—to read two apparently different texts, Maryse Condé's quasi-tragic 1976 novel Heremakhonon, which is set on the African continent, and a hilarious e-mail (which Forbes has titled “Puncie”) circulated on the Internet. Arguing that these diachronous texts exemplify a culture of ideological disobedience that is celebrated as evidence of Caribbean identity yet undercuts Caribbean (and diasporic) modes of imagining identity and relation, Forbes shows how trespass and transgression, and the enduring concepts of plot and plantation, acquire completely different contours and raise different ethical questions depending on location. Thus Africa, as an ostensibly valorized original homeland for black Caribbean people, and the no-man's-land of cyberspace produce sites of ethical discomfort that radically test the celebrations associated with transgression in a postcolonial context.
Bio
Curdella Forbes is a creative writer and professor of Caribbean literature at Howard University. Her essays have appeared in several peer-reviewed journals, including Small Axe. She is the author of three works of fiction—Songs of Silence (2002), Flying with Icarus (2003), A Permanent Freedom (2008)—and of an award-winning academic work, From Nation to Diaspora: Samuel Selvon, George Lamming, and the Cultural Performance of Gender (2005). Peepal Tree will publish her latest novel, Ghosts, later this year.
Increased criticism and representations of violence in contemporary Jamaica often account for these tensions by citing poverty or gang and political rivalries in the post-independence era. However, both Marlon James's The Book of Night Women (2009) and Margaret Cezair-Thompson's The True History of Paradise (1999) take these explorations a step further, specifically examining women's responses to violence and reminding readers that present-day sexual violence creates conditions of entrapment, hostility, and lawlessness reminiscent of the barbarities of slavery and colonialism. In so doing, the authors highlight the ways historical gender and racial stereotypes inform contemporary understandings of Caribbean gender and sexuality. Anchoring this discussion in recent theories about sex and sexuality and specifically examining mixed-race and white Caribbean women, Sam Vásquez argues that both authors use neo–slave narrative tropes to simultaneously problematize acts of violence against these individuals and demonstrate how women engaged and even utilized limiting colonial paradigms.
Bio
Sam Vásquez is an assistant professor of English at Dartmouth College. Her research focuses on African American, Caribbean, and other African diasporic literatures. She is a published poet, and her critical work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Caribbean Quarterly, Meridians, and PALARA. She is the author of Humor in the Caribbean Literary Canon (2012).
A republication of Edward Baugh's essay “The West Indian Writer and His Quarrel with History,” previously published in Tapia in 1977.
Bio
Edward Baugh is professor emeritus of English, University of the West Indies, Mona. He served at various times as head of department. Between 1989 and 1992, he was chairperson of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies. He is the author of Derek Walcott: Memory as Vision (1978), Derek Walcott (2006), Frank Collymore: A Biography (2009), and a collection of poems, It Was the Singing(2000). He is the editor of Critics on Caribbean Literature (1978) and Derek Walcott's Selected Poems (2007), and coeditor, with Colbert Nepaulsingh, of Derek Walcott's Another Life (2004). Two compact discs of him reading his poems have been released: Edward Baugh: Poems from “It Was the Singing” (2002) and Edward Baugh Reading from His Poems (2011).
In this essay Alison Donnell returns to the material object of Edward Baugh's essay, published in the pages of the Trinidadian little magazine Tapia in 1977, in order to re-read the force of its arguments in the context of its own politicocultural history and to assess the significance of its publication venue. Donnell attends to Baugh's own standing in the highly charged field of Caribbean literary criticism as a critic of both Walcott and Naipaul, and acknowledges his creative contribution to this field as a poet. She also considers how, in the years between the original publication of Baugh's article and its republication, the questions of historical invisibility have entered newly disputed territories that demand attention to how gender, indigeneity, spirituality, and sexuality shape ideas of historical and literary legitimacy, in addition to those foundational questions around a politics of race and class.
Bio
Alison Donnell is professor of modern literatures in English at the University of Reading, United Kingdom. She has published widely on Caribbean and black British writings, including the book-length revision of literary history Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History (2006). She is coeditor, with Michael A. Bucknor, of The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature (2011), and serves on the editorial boards of Journal of West Indian Literature and MaComere. She is currently writing a monograph titled “Caribbean Queer: Desire, Dissidence, and Constructions of Literary Subjectivity.”
Edward Baugh's essay “The West Indian Writer and His Quarrel with History” (1977) presents the quarrel as a condition rather than an event and investigates this specifically Caribbean psychopathology and the defense mechanisms associated with it. The investigation implicitly follows a sequence of questions: Does the West Indies have a history of its own? What does it mean to have to ask that? Whether the answer is yes or no, how does one come to terms with the answer? Is it better to have a history or to be free of one—by a willful amnesia if necessary? The investigation is complicated by the multiple meanings of the word history and by the underrepresentation of West Indian history in either literature or pedagogy until the nationalist period. Baugh's primary example for negotiating the quarrel is Derek Walcott, and the analysis can be supplemented and extended by including two features of Walcott's essay “The Muse of History” (1974): the image of history as a Medusa and the concept of presences. The value of Baugh's analysis can be exemplified by applying it to the negotiation with history under way in four quite different West Indian writers: Louise Bennett, Kamau Braithwaite, Wilson Harris, and finally Baugh himself.
Bio
Laurence A. Breiner is professor of English at Boston University and a member of the African American Studies Program there. He has been a visiting professor in American studies at Tokyo University, a Rockefeller Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, an NEH Research Fellow, and an ACLS/SSRC Fellow at University of the West Indies, Mona. He is the author of An Introduction to West Indian Poetry(1998) and Black Yeats: Eric Roach and the Politics of Caribbean Poetry (2008), as well as numerous articles on and reviews of Caribbean poetry and drama. He is currently completing a book on Jamaican performance poetry.
This reading of Edward Baugh's seminal 1977 essay highlights its contextual affiliations and affinities and its relation to an anglophone Caribbean critical discourse on the representation and significance of history. Nadi Edwards delineates the intellectual genealogy of the concept of the quarrel with history, noting its intimations in critical reflections by George Lamming and John Hearne. Baugh's signal contribution to this critical tradition lies in his incisive theorizing of the relationship between history and literature, his articulation of a conceptual vocabulary for addressing the recurring meme of history in Caribbean literature and criticism, and his symptomatic reading of the quarrel as an ontological and epistemological anxiety. The theoretical cogency and continuing relevance of Baugh's intervention derive from his awareness and reformulation of the central critical questions that defined Caribbean writers' relation to the past.
Bio
Nadi Edwards teaches in the Department of Literatures in English at the University of the West Indies, Mona. He has published essays on Caribbean literature and popular culture, and his current research interests are in the areas of Caribbean critical traditions and cartographic tropes in postcolonial literature. He is a member of the editorial collective of Small Axe and on the editorial board of Postcolonial Text.
In this essay, Edward Baugh responds to comments on his 1977 essay “The West Indian Writer and His Quarrel with History” from Alison Donnell, Laurence Breiner, and Nadi Edwards.
Bio
Edward Baugh is professor emeritus of English, University of the West Indies, Mona. He served at various times as head of department. Between 1989 and 1992, he was chairperson of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies. He is the author of Derek Walcott: Memory as Vision (1978), Derek Walcott (2006), Frank Collymore: A Biography (2009), and a collection of poems, It Was the Singing(2000). He is the editor of Critics on Caribbean Literature (1978) and Derek Walcott's Selected Poems (2007), and coeditor, with Colbert Nepaulsingh, of Derek Walcott's Another Life (2004). Two compact discs of him reading his poems have been released: Edward Baugh: Poems from “It Was the Singing” (2002) and Edward Baugh Reading from His Poems (2011).
Ebony G. Patterson is an assistant professor in painting and mixed media at the University of Kentucky, Lexington. She graduated in 2004 from the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, Kingston, where she received an Honors Diploma in Painting, and in 2006 from Sam Fox College of Art and Design at Washington University, St. Louis, with a master of fine art in printmaking and drawing. She has exhibited extensively in the Caribbean and the United States, with recent solo shows in Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago (2012); CMAC, Scène Nationale Martinique (2012); and Bermuda National Gallery (2012). She is the recipient of several awards and scholarships, both in Jamaica and abroad, including the Prime Minister's Youth Award for Excellence in Art and Culture (2006), the SuperPlus Under-40 Artist of the Year (2005), the Washington University Young Alumni Award of Distinction (2011), and the Rex Nettleford Fellowship in Cultural Studies (2011).
Jamaican painter Roberta Stoddart has created a body of work in which personal and social histories intertwine to produce a contemplative response to what might be described as notions of enduring catastrophe. The work seeks to recognize a horizon of collective experience and shared subjectivity mediated through history and grounded in consciousness and the transcendent. Through a discussion of Husserl's Lebenswelt, or lifeworld, Gabrielle Hezekiah explores Stoddart's journey of reflection and transformation as it is evidenced in her paintings, showing that the thematization of the life-world produces a relationship of intersubjectivity and a multidimensional view of history.
Bio
Gabrielle A. Hezekiah is a writer and scholar currently teaching in cultural studies at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. She is the author of Phenomenology's Material Presence: Video, Vision, and Experience (2010).
Sonia Farmer is the founder of Poinciana Paper Press, a small fine press, based in the Bahamas, that produces handbound and limited-edition chapbooks of Caribbean writing. Her poetry has appeared in the Caribbean Writer, Poui, tongues of the ocean, WomanSpeak Journal, Correspondence, and Ubiquitous, as well as in An Anthology of Caribbean Poetry for Carifesta X (2008). She holds a BFA in writing from Pratt Institute. She lives and works in Nassau.
Danielle McShine was born in Trinidad and Tobago. She holds a bachelor's degree in French from the University of the West Indies and one in music and French from Indiana University, where she also earned a master's in French linguistics. Her poetry has appeared in online publications, and some recent work is included in Strangers in Paris: New Writing Inspired by the City of Light (2011), an anthology published by Tightrope Books.
Barbara Jenkins, clueless on retirement from teaching, widowed, and with children and grand-children gone into the diaspora, found that lying around all day reading did not bring the fulfillment she had expected. Bridge, aquarobics, cruises held no attraction, but when three years ago a friend said, “Let's form a writing group,” she said, “Yes!” It was the start of something quite wonderful.
H. N. Holder is a Trinidadian writer who has published in the Caribbean Writer and was awarded a Highly Commended Win in the 2009 Commonwealth Short Story Competition.
Book Discussion: Kobena Mercer, ed., Cosmopolitan Modernisms; Discrepant Abstraction; Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures; and Exiles, Diasporas, and Strangers; from the series Annotating Art's Histories: Cross-Cultural Perspectives in the Visual Arts
In considering Kobena Mercer's four-volume edited series Annotating Art's Histories (2004–8), Eddie Chambers sets out to critique the often unspoken but nevertheless hegemonic and complicated racial hierarchies that exist across many of the country's universities, with particular reference to the teaching of art history. Chambers explores why certain subjects or disciplines must, apparently, have their content racially signified by prefixes, such as African American art, African diaspora art, and so on, while supposedly more elevated disciplines within art history are allowed to exist in largely racially unfettered contexts, or contexts in which the racial dimension is coded, presumed, and understood. For example, how is it that the study of American art of the nineteenth or twentieth century can be taught with no reference whatsoever to ethnic diversity? Such pathologies presuppose the marginality of black artists. Similarly, must this marginality be attended to only by the provision of separate faculty and separate curricula that have the study of black artists at their core?
Bio
Eddie Chambers is a British-born curator and writer of art criticism. He secured his doctorate from Goldsmiths College, University of London, in the late 1990s, for his research into the emergence of a new generation of black artists in the 1980s in Britain. He is currently an assistant professor of art history at the University of Texas, Austin, teaching courses on art of the African diaspora. He is the author of Run through the Jungle: Selected Writings (1999) and Things Done Change: The Cultural Politics of Recent Black Artists (2011).
In this essay, Huey Copeland, taking his cue from artist Glenn Ligon's work on the family photo album, launches a consideration of cultural critic Kobena Mercer's important four-volume series Annotating Art's Histories (2004–8). Copeland argues that these anthologies, a veritable feast of scraps, not only productively reframe histories of modernism in light of structuralist, postcolonial, and cultural studies, but also point toward a new agenda for the description of African diasporic art and, more broadly, for art history's approaches to questions of racial and sexual difference. Ultimately, he contends, annotating black cultural production—and exploring its implications for subjects on all sides of the color line—means thinking seriously about how we constitute our objects of study as well as the methodological techniques we employ to narrate their material and temporal unfolding in the modern world.
Bio
Huey Copeland is assistant professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Art History at Northwestern University. His research and teaching focus on modern, contemporary, and African American art, with an emphasis on articulations of blackness in the visual field. His first book, Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.
Proposing Bakhtin's dialogical principle as a guiding light for cross-cultural studies in art historical research on the diasporic formation of Afro-modernism, Kobena Mercer's discussion essay highlights the value of his postformalist outlook as he responds to commentaries by Eddie Chambers and Huey Copeland on his edited series Annotating Art's Histories. Examining interactions among artists, artworks, and artworlds as a dialogical circuit facilitates close attention to art's aesthetic agency without the pitfalls of biographical reduction to identity or sociological reduction to context.
Bio
Kobena Mercer is professor in history of art and African American studies at Yale University. He teaches modern and contemporary art in the black Atlantic diaspora, and is an inaugural recipient of the 2006 Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing. His recent publications include “The Cross-Cultural and the Contemporary,” in Twenty-First Century: Art of the First Decade (2011), and “Art History after Globalization,” in Colonial Modern: Aesthetics of the Past, Rebellions for the Future (2010).
