Issues

This essay urges that in considering the question of Caribbean studies we think not only about the substantive content of our work but also about the senses in which this work makes assumptions about the idea and project of Caribbean studies as a conceptual-ideological field. The essay briefly refers to two generative moments in the history of Caribbean studies: one in the 1950s framed around M. G. Smith's A Framework for Caribbean Studies and another in the 1970s framed around Kamau Brathwaite's “Caribbean Man in Space and Time.” The point in considering these moments in the figuring and refiguring of Caribbean studies is to encourage a certain kind of history of ideas, namely, one that thinks through the kinds of ideological-conceptual problem-spaces that shape and orient their respective formulations.

This essay explores the visual arts for models of an archipelagic way of thinking that is endemic to the Caribbean and yet obscured by nationalist frameworks. Unpacking the ways Caribbean studies is imbricated within and articulated through a number of discourses—area studies, the trope of the isle, visuality, and creolization—and investigating the ways these four approaches to the Caribbean are articulated to each other clarifies some of the issues at stake in defining Caribbean studies as a contemporary epistemological field. In contrast, the essay poses alternatives: maritime studies rather than area studies, given the former's focus on the geography rather than culture; the notion of a repeating, fractal island form rather than the isolated desert isle of colonial discourse; relationality rather than difference in defining Caribbean identities; and the visual traces of these alternative modes of expression and knowing in the work of contemporary artists.

This essay discusses the process of field formation within Caribbean studies in relation to the building of archives, challenging Eurocentric conceptualizations of history and history making as well as counterdominant tropes about the region and the people who have inhabited it. It explores the purposes served by such archival projects and in so doing interrogates how and why certain social phenomena are more easily captured within the vindicationist ethos surrounding archive building. While many of the early archives that were created were easily and explicitly mobilized toward the projects of political and cultural nationalism, one archive in particular—the emergent archive of violence—cannot be effortlessly rallied toward these ends. Instead, archives of violence bring into relief the limits of the anticolonial and immediately postcolonial focus on the nation-state as the primary locus of vindication. They also encourage us to return our vision more pointedly to the transnational geopolitical spheres that both constituted the frame of reference for earlier internationalists and Pan-Africanists and infuse the social and political worlds of contemporary Caribbean people. Using reparations as a framework for thinking can move us in that direction.

This article critically appraises the wealth of cultural criticism and epistemological developments in the study of Caribbean societies now increasingly grouped under an emerging discipline termed Caribbean cultural studies. It advances the claim that the critical study of Caribbean culture is in many ways inseparable from a study of its intellectual traditions in their social, political, and aesthetic dimensions. While this may seem unremarkable, it bears emphasizing that the study of culture and the creation of a Caribbean cultural studies emerged in a manner quite distinct from the formation of cultural studies in Europe and North America. To this end, the author sketches a number of overlapping traditions of writing on culture in the Caribbean that take us from the late nineteenth century and considers the work of two Caribbean theorists, C. L. R. James and Sylvia Wynter, for their own sustained meditations on the question of culture in the Caribbean.

Reflecting on the methodology for the author's forthcoming book, The Grenada Revolution in the Caribbean Present: Operation Urgent Memory, this essay argues for the importance of fieldwork in Caribbean literary and cultural studies and contributes to the development of a shared public discourse about fieldwork by articulating and refining the untheorized practices of fieldwork in the humanities. It situates literary fieldwork in relation to practices of literature, area studies, anthropology, and trauma studies.

This essay advances the definition of Caribbean studies as a practice. Rather than understanding this field of study as a preconceived category open for arbitrary self-appointment, a Caribbeanist practice should be something “which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened)”—to refer to E. P. Thompson's dictum. It “happens” through the multidisciplinary and border-crossing research of the Caribbean establishing intra- and extraregional connections that enable the better understanding of Caribbean processes. The article begins by reviewing the ideas on the field advanced by several pioneering scholars. It then provides two concrete examples of the author's own research practice: one of a violent incident in the Cuban Republican era and another of intra-Caribbean migration processes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a conclusion, the author reconsiders the relation of Caribbean studies with other geographical frameworks of analysis and fields of study.

This essay explores the narrative of “aboriginal absence,” arguably the foundational colonial myth of Caribbean history. Since the early colonial period, the space of the “native” in the Caribbean context has been treated as a space left vacant for others to fill. Beginning in the 1960s, this narrative of aboriginal absence was widely incorporated across a range of genres into texts that constitute the anglophone Caribbean's decolonizing intellectual tradition. The essay critically engages with the claim—made most poignantly by Sylvia Wynter and Kamau Brathwaite—that diasporic peoples have indigenized in the Caribbean and replaced the region's first aboriginal peoples. In particular, Guyana's debates over the Amerindian Act illustrate the profoundly colonial implications of adopting “indigenization” as actual state practice.

“See you there. In the free.” This is the closing statement in Erna Brodber's fourth novel, The Rainmaker's Mistake (2007). In the novel, Brodber creatively imagines a past for the New World present, taking advantage of the space literary speculation and science fiction offer to create a counterhistory of the present. Reading the novel through the lens of Afrofuturism and via Kamau Brathwaite's conception of a Caribbean cosmology and Sylvia Wynter's theories of aethetics, this essay examines the novel's representation of “the free”: a rapidly changing present existing simultaneously with an imaginary past and slippery future, all unmediated by physical geography.

Recent political agitations across countries, including those in Southern Europe, the Middle East, South America, and North and Middle Africa, are further problematized by the perceived failure of “state multiculturalism” in Europe. European citizens of different cultures—such as the racialized “black” diasporic figure of African, Middle Eastern, Asian, South American, and Caribbean descent, now a significant urban population in Europe—are feeling the brunt of such regressive thinking. The contemporary backdrop for this essay emphasizes such contexts for future Caribbean studies and particularly for conceiving of Caribbean visual culture. It considers ways the exploration of Caribbean art practices and research of Caribbean visual culture might require reconsideration as global and interconnected structures requiring a transnational and intercultural approach. Insight of contemporary Caribbean visual culture is inextricably linked to circulation of knowledge and production of global culture and visual representation.

Drawing on the way international financial institutions, development organizations, and the state have “discovered” the investment possibilities of diasporic populations, this essay suggests new directions for a reinvigorated approach to Caribbean studies, one that is well placed to historicize the ways the diaspora is approached, and one that can also engage reflexively with how contributions in the field have created the conditions of possibility for the current official romance with diaspora.

Caribbean studies, institutionalized from inception as part of the “third world,” might be beneficially reconceptualized minus the postwar geopolitical presumptions of three worlds and, remapped, instead, within the two-world schema. To resituate the Caribbean this way enables recognition of the region as an inaugural space in the invention of a modern consciousness—not as a problematic tertiary portion of the globe where modernity is a belated burden. In advancing this case for a hemispheric recasting of the Caribbeanist field, it helps to reread a little-known essay that took the New World approach to the region. Titled “Paths to National Self-Discovery: USA and Puerto Rico,” it first appeared in 1956 and was written by Daniel J. Boorstin, a historian of the United States. Unlike conventional scholarship on the Caribbean, including the definitive work, The People of Puerto Rico: A Study in Social Anthropology, Boorstin's essay framed Puerto Rico within the familiar “New World” rather than the exotic “third world” in relation to First World North America.

Architecture is a form of cultural production that evolves as a response to fundamental human needs and desires and to the economic, social, and political circumstances that triangulate broader culture. If in mapping our understanding of the location and nature of Caribbean architecture our purpose is critical clarity, we may wish to consider it not purely through the tired perspective history or style habitually used but as a dynamic component of Caribbean culture, an operation mediated and influenced by the individual, the local, and the global.

Instead of dismissing skin bleaching, this photographic project's intention is to understand both the practice and the means by which a person would attempt to ascertain some kind of beauty where many saw none. Some proclaimed it was merely a fad; others felt it elevated their confidence. This concept may have been born from a flawed perception of beauty, through global advertising. They are entitled to their portrayal.

Born in British Guiana (now Guyana) in 1936, a resident of London in the 1950s, and dividing his time between London and New York since the late 1960s, Frank Bowling is one of the foremost artists of his generation. As a pioneer of abstraction during the 1960s, his work as both a painter and critic for the New York–based Arts Magazine is of singular importance to the historiography of the visual culture of the “black Atlantic.” In particular, the six articles he wrote for the magazine between 1969 and 1971, in which he meditated on the notion of “black art,” reveal the ambivalent complexities that inform his aesthetic practices as both theorist and painter, or what Kobena Mercer has aptly referred to as Bowling's “discrepant abstraction.” The nature of the “discrepancies” in Bowling's work is the focus of this essay.