This essay explores plantation geographies. In drawing specific attention to the ways past configurations of the plantation are recast in post-slave urban contexts, the discussion signals the links between black dispossession and geography, while also considering how assertions of decolonial practices, black life, and black futures are embedded in place.
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Katherine McKittrick is an associate professor of gender studies at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. She is the author of Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (2006).
In a context of educational, social, and financial marginalization of artistic practice in the anglophone Caribbean, the high degree of self-motivation and resilience required of artists is often manifest in their work. This essay profiles one such artist, the young Vincentian Caroline “booops” Sardine, for whom social violence, in the form of racial, class, and gender stereotyping, as well as a personal experience of physical violence and its attendant trauma, provide the substance of her work.
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Jane Bryce was born in Tanzania and was educated there, in the United Kingdom, and in Nigeria. After working as a cultural journalist and editor, she joined the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, in 1992, where she is a professor of African literature and cinema. She researches and publishes in the areas of contemporary Caribbean and African fiction, popular literature, women’s writing, memoir, visual culture, and film.
This analysis shows the affinity between the concept of essayism and the project of créolisation undertaken by Patrick Chamoiseau and other Martinican writers. By translating the essayistic spirit—the will to assay, to try, to attempt, or to strive—to a non-European context, Chamoiseau and his fellow writers overhaul the form and stealthily undo assumptions about what the essay can or cannot accomplish. Through examples from Eloge de la créolité, by Chamoiseau, Jean Bernabé, and Raphaël Confiant; Edouard Glissant's Poétique de la Relation and Philosophie de la Relation; and Chamoiseau's epic novel Biblique des derniers gestes, this study demonstrates how Chamoiseau and his larger cultural project accord perfectly with the essayistic and how his translation of the genre reveals as-of-yet unexploited stylistic and modal alternatives to Montaigne's original project. These examples all point toward vibrant prospects for essayistic fiction in the Caribbean and represent a productive appropriation and transformation of what is often considered a deeply rooted European form.
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Christy Wampole is an assistant professor of French at Princeton University. Her areas of focus include the essay and its correlative forms, such as the essayistic novel, the essay-film, and the photo-essay. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, L’Esprit Créateur, and Quaderni del ’900, among other publications. Her article on Michel Tournier’s virtual essayism is forthcoming in the Modern Language Review.
This essay asks, What can a romance novel teach us about being in a Caribbean diaspora? Can this genre offer insight into how Jamaicans living outside of Jamaica come to know themselves as “Jamaican” and as part of a Jamaican diaspora? It tackles these questions by putting the form of Colin Channer's novel Waiting in Vain—a blend of erotic and urban romances that the essay terms “urban romantica”—in conversation with its content. Reading Waiting in Vain through its form as well as its Amazon.com evaluations shows inordinate attention to the act of choosing an identity, particularly when characters are separated from the place and cultures of Jamaica. This essay, then, examines how “romance-ified” characters and characterizations depict a process of discovering loveable Jamaican identities that thrive outside of the island-nation.
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Rhonda Frederick teaches Caribbean and African diaspora literary studies at Boston College, where she also directs the African and African diaspora studies program. Her research interests include contemporary popular fiction, literatures of the African diaspora, cultural studies, and narratives of migration. She is the author of “Colón Man a Come”: Mythographies of Panamá Canal Migration (2005) and articles published in peer-reviewed journals and anthologies.
These introductory remarks frame the special section “Translating the Caribbean” and discuss the impetus behind the project as well as its future iterations. Each of the five essays in the special section is outlined in its broad strokes, and specific reference is made to Edouard Glissant's Caribbean Discourse, Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, and Lawrence Venuti's Rethinking Translation and The Translator's Invisibility.
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Kaiama L. Glover is an associate professor of French and Africana studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She has published articles in the French Review, Small Axe, and the Journal of Postcolonial Writings, among others, and is the author of Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon (2010). Current projects include “Disorderly Women,” a study of the ethics of narcissism in Caribbean fiction, and “Revisiting Marie Vieux Chauvet,” a coedited volume of critical essays forthcoming as a special issue of Yale French Studies.
Martin Munro is Winthrop-King Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Florida State University and is director of the Winthrop-King Institute for Contemporary French and Francophone Studies there. He previously worked in Scotland, Ireland, and Trinidad. His recent publications include Different Drummers: Rhythm and Race in the Americas (2010); Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide (2010); Haiti Rising: Haitian History, Culture, and the Earthquake of 2010 (2010); and American Creoles: The Francophone Caribbean and the American South (2012). He is currently working on the theme of the apocalypse in the Caribbean.
This essay examines the roles played by ethnographic writing and translation in Raphaël Confiant's 1994 L'allée des soupirs. This novel fictionalizes the 1959 riots in Martinique while simultaneously creating characters who debate the relative merits of modes of expression capable of capturing the linguistic, cultural, and racial hybridity of créolité in literature. Confiant translates into fictional terms important precepts on Caribbean literary production set out in Eloge de la créolité, which Confiant wrote with Patrick Chamoiseau and Jean Bernabé. By transforming the aesthetic problems taken up in Eloge into a thoroughly creolized novel that deals with the hybridized messiness of everyday life, Confiant presents a text that ethnographically allegorizes its own conditions of production. This allegorization mobilizes a process the essay calls “interdisciplinary translation,” which relies on an ongoing process of conversion between ethnographic and literary modes of representation.
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Justin Izzo is an assistant professor of French studies at Brown University. Trained in anthropology and literary studies, he teaches classes on francophone African and Caribbean literature, politics, cinema, and cultural studies. He is currently completing a book manuscript that deals with the hybrid genre of “ethnographic fiction” created by anthropologists and literary writers from France, West Africa, and the Caribbean in response to colonial and postcolonial encounters.
“The intellectual journey,” Edouard Glissant reminds us, “is destined to have a geographical itinerary.” This essay considers Glissant's insistence on a poetics of landscape in the case of translation, a practice that intertwines linguistic transition with the spatial residue of its etymological meaning, “to carry across.” The first section maps the movement of one concept, the rhizome, as it travels between and beyond the work of Glissant and that of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The rhizome's travels reveal an uneven political economy of scholarly influence. The second section further examines how Glissant's discussion of translation articulates a praxis and rhythm of Relation. Considering translation practice alongside Glissant's notion of a “spiral retelling” brings into relief new political horizons for Caribbean studies specifically and modes of shared life more generally.
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Max Hantel is a doctoral candidate in women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University. His work has appeared in Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge and Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. His dissertation explores the revolutionary humanism of Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, and Edouard Glissant.
In French Caribbean literature, translations from Creole to French, along with the inclusion of Creole orality in novels written in French, constitute a broader form of intracultural translation that expose problematic tensions between sameness and difference. The essay starts by exploring some of the modes of intracultural translation used by the authors of the créolité movement but focuses on Ina Césaire's novel Zonzon tête carrée, where cultural difference is downplayed in favor of another approach to translation developed from an internal Caribbean perspective. Even though Ina Césaire explicitly builds her novel from the tales she has collected in her professional ethnographic research, the art of storytelling is only referred to indirectly and is built into a larger structure based on environment, music, rhythm, dance, and movement. These alliances between literature, nonlinguistic forms, and spatial geography, along with orality, suggest that the author attempts to radically reconsider the way creole folk culture should be translated into writing.
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Christina Kullberg is a research fellow in the Department of Modern Languages at Uppsala University and has written extensively on French Caribbean literature. Her book The Poetics of Ethnography in Martinican Narratives: Exploring the Self and the Environment will be published by the University of Virginia Press in 2013. Her current project focuses on French travelers to the Caribbean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
In 1943, Cuban writer Lydia Cabrera published a Spanish translation of Aimé Césaire's poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land with illustrations by Cuban artist Wifredo Lam. The translation introduced the concept of Négritude to a Cuban and Spanish-language readership. It was also the first and only collaboration between Césaire, Cabrera, and Lam, and its publication reflects a Pan-Caribbean avant-garde spirit that these individuals articulated to varying degrees. By translating Césaire's experience of postcolonial uprootedness and homecoming for a Spanish-speaking readership, Cabrera intimates a connection between the postcolonial context of Martinique and Republican Cuba, and between Négritude and cubanía (Cubanness). Yet, just as Cabrera's translation of Notebook is a symbolic moment in the shaping of black internationalism in the Caribbean, it can equally be viewed as a failed opportunity for creating further dialogue, both within Cuban racial discourse and within a transnational Caribbean context. This essay argues for viewing Cabrera's translation of Césaire's text as a disarticulation: a hopeful gesture of connection and understanding that is ultimately an expression of nonequivalency and fundamental difference.
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Emily A. Maguire is an associate professor of Spanish at Northwestern University, where she specializes in literature of the Hispanic Caribbean. She is the author of Racial Experiments in Cuban Literature and Ethnography (2011) and has published articles on contemporary Caribbean literature, afrocubanismo, black internationalism, and Latino science fiction.
This essay reads the eccentricities of William Carlos Williams's translations from the Spanish, collected in By Word of Mouth (2011), as extensions of the archipelic and hemispheric poetics developed in such early works as Kora in Hell: Improvisations(1920) and In the American Grain (1925). Specifically, the essay focuses on Williams's idiosyncratic translations of Hispanic Caribbean poets Luis Palés Matos and Eugenio Florit, reading them as instances of what Lawrence Venuti calls a “resistant translation” that insists on a “foreignizing” viscosity—what Barbara Folkart critiques as a graininess—against the unmarked fluency of the conventional translator. Repurposing Folkart's metaphor, this essay argues that graininess is central to Williams's poetics, from his associative leaps to his transcultural approach to vernacular language. Paying particular attention to Williams's rendering of Caribbean/American landscapes (akin to Edouard Glissant's paysage), this essay considers the nonequivalences in Williams's translations within a poetics of Caribbean/American graininess.
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Urayoán Noel is an assistant professor of English at State University of New York, Albany, and a visiting assistant professor of English at New York University. His book In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam, completed while a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, is under contract with the University of Iowa Press. His most recent book of poetry is Los días porosos (2012).
Over fifteen years have passed since Michel-Rolph Trouillot issued his critical call for the renunciation of Haitian exceptionalism. Trouillot's principled argument remains as urgent today as when it was first written, if not more so. Particularly in the wake of the 2010 earthquake, Haiti continues to be portrayed as extra-ordinary: exceptionally tragic, remarkably resilient, singularly radical. This essay expands Trouillot's arguments and extends his critical stance to another trope of exceptionalism in Caribbean studies: that of political sovereignty. It examines how Caribbean spaces that trouble the Westphalian order are cast as exceptions, and, following Trouillot's lead, it attempts to discern the political and intellectual perils of this casting. Echoing Trouillot, the essay calls for us to reimagine Caribbean social and political processes as ordinary—that is, to place them within their historical and geopolitical coordinates. Moreover, it urges us to shift our gaze away from the odd to the production of the norm, the universal, and the unmarked—not as transcendental principles but as localized fictions that don the mask of transcendence.
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Yarimar Bonilla is an assistant professor of anthropology and Caribbean studies at Rutgers University, where she is on the advisory board for the Critical Caribbean Studies Initiative. She teaches and writes about social movements, colonial legacies, political sovereignty, and historical memory in the Caribbean and the French outre-mer. Her publications have appeared in such journals as Cultural Anthropology, Caribbean Studies, Interventions, and Cultural Dynamics. She is currently completing a manuscript about historical memory and political activism in the French Antilles.
This essay explores the significance of Michel-Rolph Trouillot's final work, Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. It posits that Trouillot's argument contains three key claims. First, that anthropology is predicated on a problematic alterity, a way of thinking about otherness and difference constituted in relation to the universal unmarked category of the West. Second, that this relation between anthropology and alterity can be fully exposed only by tracing the historical emergence of the West through its imaginative and material relations with others—a history best seen from the experience of Caribbean societies and peoples. Third, that anthropology has the capacity to provide us with the necessary moral optimism to rethink the relation between plurality and universalism that grounds the human condition, but to do so we must first rescue the concepts of culture and difference from liberal identity politics.
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Greg Beckett is an assistant professor of anthropology at Bowdoin College. He has published articles on environmental, urban, and political crises in Haiti and on the ethical and political dimensions of international intervention and emergency response.
As we consider the points of articulation between and among scales of analysis, Michel-Rolph Trouillot's theorization of how small places matter in the world, and further, of how seemingly marginal people might be central to our understanding of systems of power, remains an urgent project. In Peasants and Capital (1988) he examines three units—the village, the world, and the nation—that offer us one way to connect these people and places to global concerns. This essay suggests that Trouillot's intervention might be productively extended if we take seriously the body and its constituent parts as a fourth unit of analysis. Drawing from recent work in feminist science studies and from her own fieldwork on sexual politics in Martinique, the author asks how the body might function as an important scalar intertext in our ongoing efforts to demonstrate the centrality of the Caribbean to contemporary debates about power, politics, and the postcolonial.
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Vanessa Agard-Jones is a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University. A political anthropologist, she focuses her research on the intersections of sexual and environmental politics and their relationship to debates about sovereignty in the (French) Caribbean. After her tenure with the society, she will join Yale University’s faculty as assistant professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies.
This essay takes its departure from Michel-Rolph Trouillot's discussion of what he calls North Atlantic universalisms, that is, categories that took their origin in the particulars of the West's historical experience but have come to be extended and naturalized as quasi-normative standards of presumably universal human relevance. Trouillot's important intervention in Western conceptions of history and historiography in Silencing the Past notwithstanding, the essay argues that the distinction he draws between “historicity 1” and “historicity 2” betrays his struggle with the continued effects of historicism as an ideology that Karl Mannheim once called the “worldview of modernity.” It is in this respect that we ought to extend and sharpen Trouillot's pathbreaking critique.
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Stephan Palmié is a professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Das Exil der Götter: Geschichte und Vorstellungswelt einer afrokubanischen Religion (1991), Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition (2002), and The Cooking of History: How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion (2013), as well as the editor of several volumes on Caribbean and Afro-Atlantic anthropology and history.
The article is a critical examination of Michel-Rolph Trouillot's conceptualization of the Duvalierist regime as a form of totalitarianism. It argues that while the regime was a brutal and extreme form of dictatorship, it was not a totalitarian system. It lacked the bureaucratic capacity and the totalizing ideology to impose its total control over the Haitian population. In fact, the totalitarian paradigm obscures rather than illuminates Trouillot's otherwise powerful analysis of Duvalierism and its contradictions.
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Robert Fatton Jr. is the Julia A. Cooper Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. He is the author of several books and a large number of scholarly articles. His publications include Black Consciousness in South Africa (1986); The Making of a Liberal Democracy: Senegal’s Passive Revolution, 1975–1985 (1987); Predatory Rule: State and Civil Society in Africa (1992); Haiti’s Predatory Republic: The Unending Transition to Democracy (2002); and The Roots of Haitian Despotism (2007). His newest book, Haiti: Trapped in the Outer Periphery, is forthcoming in February 2014.
Yarimar Bonilla is an assistant professor of anthropology and Caribbean studies at Rutgers University, where she is on the advisory board for the Critical Caribbean Studies Initiative. She teaches and writes about social movements, colonial legacies, political sovereignty, and historical memory in the Caribbean and the French outre-mer. Her publications have appeared in such journals as Cultural Anthropology, Caribbean Studies, Interventions, and Cultural Dynamics. She is currently completing a manuscript about historical memory and political activism in the French Antilles.
Elizabeth Colomba is a representational artist of Martinican descent, born and reared in France and currently living and working in New York City. On graduating from college, she applied her skills to storyboard advertising and moved to Los Angeles to pursue painting while working on feature films (Catwoman, A Single Man, Jesse James). Nicknamed “the black Vermeer,” she creates paintings that depict “traditional” historical and literary subjects as black, enabling her to challenge our inherited perceptual modes and conspicuously generating a space for her subjects to inhabit the rewriting of their history. Her message is an egalitarian one of beauty in coexistence.
As has recently been observed by Matthew J. Smith, “It is a peculiar feature of Haitian historiography that increased production of new literature often follows national crisis.” A parallel pattern has been evident in Haitian visual arts, yet this has not always been at the impulse of the artist. This essay looks closely at one collaborative and two solo works by Mario Benjamin to explore the impact that commissioning projects has had on the development of a body of contemporary Haitian art represented as focusing on localistic catastrophe. In each case, the essay juxtaposes against the dominant interpretive discourse the alternative reference points of the artist, who can be seen intervening in the space of the commissioned artwork to confront viewers' expectations about the relationships linking Haiti, art, and catastrophe.
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Wendy Asquith is a PhD candidate at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom and an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award Holder with Tate Liverpool for the project Haiti in Art: Creating and Curating in the Black Atlantic. Her research focuses on the exhibition of Haitian art from the late nineteenth century to the contemporary moment, with a particular focus on postcolonial identities in a global context.
