This essay details the implications of focusing on the forest as a point of figuration and analysis for a world literature emanating from English-, French-, and Spanish-language work on the Caribbean. Of primary interest are two instances of meta- and paratextual comment on forests in the south: André Breton and André Masson’s Martinique, charmeuse de serpents, and Alejo Carpentier’s uses of José Marti and Wifredo Lam in his prologue to El reino del este mundo. Though Carpentier is known for his rejection of Breton and Masson’s surreal forest for Lam’s visual representation of the marvellous in the Caribbean selva, I suggest that Breton, Masson, and Carpentier were each committed to a territorialization of the Antilles. And as alternatives, I offer Lam’s translation of Césaire and Glissant’s exploration of William Faulkner — both attempts to deterritorialize an oeuvre known for its grounded, rooted character, and so important approaches for landscaping a Global South, and by extension a contemporary world literature.
Bio
Alvan A. Ikoku is assistant professor of comparative literature and medicine at Stanford University. He is a graduate of Harvard Medical School and Columbia University, where he earned his MD and PhD in comparative literature, respectively, and has since worked at the intersection of literature and medicine. He specializes in African and African diasporic literatures, with particular attention to fiction, narrative ethics, and post-nineteenth-century movements in world literature and world health.
Just after World War II, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation hired the Trinidadian calypsonian Lord Caresser to host a weekly program airing on its nationwide network and its fledgling International Service. His engagement, I argue, had less to do with “carry[ing] calypso to the world” (as a CBC press release put it) than with projecting to the world a particular image of Canada—as a modern, diverse, racially tolerant nation. That project was compromised, however, by Canada’s fraught history with the West Indies. Reading Caresser’s CBC career in the context of proposals for Canada-West Indies “union” and the infamous West Indian Domestic Scheme of the 1950s, I uncover some of the more obscure origins of Canada’s imperfect multiculturalism.
Bio
Michael Eldridge teaches literary and cultural studies at Humboldt State University. His essays have appeared in Diaspora, World Literatures Written in English, Transition, and Anthurium. With Ray Funk, he co-compiled and edited the Bear Family Records box set The Calypso Craze.
Re-examining Dr. No reappraises the unexpected success of the first “Bond” film and its depictions of colonial Jamaica just prior to Independence. Re-casting Ian Fleming’s novel into a film prompted re-writings and alterations. Some reflect the transition to a script, others and particularly the addition of a C.I.A. agent to the cast, mark wider shifts as Britain’s imperial presence came to an end. The choices made on how Jamaicans were depicted, along with the local resonances that helped make it surprisingly popular in Jamaica, shed unexpected light onto wider imperial transitions.
Bio
A Londoner, he has taught at the Department of History & Archaeology at the University of the West Indies, Mona, since 1995. He has written on British, Jamaican and West Indian history, including a book _"Gone is the Ancient Glory!": Spanish Town, Jamaica, 1534-2000_ (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2005) as well as several essays on the writing of history, botany and creole architecture in colonial Jamaica.
My essay is a personal reflection on how my scholarship on gender, sexuality and performance in the Hispanophone Caribbean has been shaped by the oeuvre of the late critical theorist José E. Muñoz. In particular I compare and contrast the uses of “hybridity” and “performance” in Muñoz’s work and in the work of Antonio Benítez-Rojo, another Cuban/Cuban-American scholar who has foregrounded the role of performance in the Caribbean. I furthermore suggest how Muñoz’s later critical work on subjectivity, sexuality, and evidence speak to queer Dominican cultures, experiences and epistemologies
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Maja Horn is Associate Professor of Spanish and Latin American Cultures at Barnard College, specializing in contemporary Hispanophone Caribbean literature, visual and performance art, gender and sexuality, and political theory. She published Masculinity after Trujillo: The Politics of Gender in Dominican Literature (UP Florida 2014), and she is currently completing a second book on queer Dominican literature, visual and performance art.
In this essay, I attend to José E. Muñoz’s influence on Hispanophone Caribbean Studies through the work of Dominican lesbian performance artist Rita Indiana. I argue that in her music video “’Da Pa’ Lo’ Do’” or “There Is Enough for Both,” Indiana uses Muñoz’s theory of disidentification in order to critique the prevalent narrative in the Dominican Republic that positions Haiti as the Black Other against which a “White” Dominican nationalism is created. I attend to Indiana’s appropriation of the moniker “La Montra,” or female monster, alongside her usage of drag, and Black/Brown Face in order to reimagine the historical relationship between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Ultimately, I argue that Indiana signals a move towards a different way of being in the Dominican Republic, where the literal and figurative borders are porous enough to allow for the queer, for the female, for the Black, and for the Other, to coexist.
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Karen Jaime, a Post-Doctoral Research Associate in the Department of Performing and Media Arts and the Latina/o Studies Program at Cornell University earned her Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University. She is a former Rockefeller Foundation Research Fellow and a Chancellor’s Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign currently working on her book, Queering Poetry in Loisaida: Language, History, and Performance at the Nuyorican Poets Café.
This article traces José Esteban Muñoz’s critical contributions to Caribbean Studies. By paying particular attention to his commitment to futurity, this article suggests that the Hispanophone Caribe’s “alloverness”, its subjectivity on the move, is at the heart of Muñoz’s critical vision of temporality. Through readings of the revolutionary performances of excess by Carmelita Tropicana, La Lupe, and Dolores “Lolita” Lebrón Sotomayor, this article explores the relationship between aesthetics and politics and the potential of anti-colonial horizons.
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Sandra Ruiz is Assistant Professor of Latina/Latino Studies and English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she also acted as the Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Associate from 2012-2013. She received her PhD in Performance Studies at New York University and previously taught at NYU, Pratt Institute, and Wesleyan University. Sandra has published in Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory. She is currently working on her book manuscript, “Timing Ricanness: Bodily Endurance and Anti-Colonial Performance.”
A brief reflection on Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Series, the Cuban diaspora, Latinidad, and ultimately brownness, after the loss of José E. Muñoz.
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Leticia Alvarado is an assistant professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies in the Department of American Studies, Brown University. She is currently a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow hosted by UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center where she is completing her book manuscript tentatively titled “Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production.” She has published in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies and Latino Studies.
Mario Alejandro Ariza was born in Santo Domingo but grew up between Miami and the Dominican Republic. He currently teaches Spanish and history at a suburban Boston private school. The recipient of a Breadloaf Writers Conference work-study scholarship, his poetry and prose appear or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, the Baffler, Bodega Magazine, Guernica, Lunaluna, the Rumpus, and Keep This Bag Away From Children.
Shivanee Ramlochan is a Trinidadian poet and fiction writer. Her creative writing has been published in tongues of the ocean, Draconian Switch and The Caribbean Review of Books. An alumna of the 2010 Cropper Foundation Residential Workshop for Caribbean Writers, Shivanee was selected as one of three New Talent Showcase writers at the 2013 NGC Bocas Lit Fest.
Nova Gordon-Bell is a Jamaican creative writer and a university teacher in media and communication. Her extensive professional experience in the public and private sector spans public information and education, journalism and advertising. Her short-stories and poetry appear in local and international publications.
This article is a contribution to the book discussion of the publication Timed Out: Art and the transnational Caribbean (2011) by Leon Wainwright, 2011. Roshini Kempadoo offers an exploration and commentary on the way in which Wainwright’s publication has been structured and conceived, exploring the rationale for the range of artists as the subjects of the book. She discusses ‘timing’ and temporality as the central narrative for Wainwright in researching Caribbean art as transnational. And as a consequence, Kempadoo comments on the implications and limitations of the publication in addressing the complexity of contemporary Caribbean visual art within the context of global art practices and set against more radical postcolonial art critique.
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Roshini Kempadoo is a photographer, media artist, and scholar. She is Reader in Media at the University of East London. Her projects are factual and fictional re-imaginings comprising of photographs, audio and screen-based art installations. They combine sound, animations, and interactive use of objects, to introduce characters that once may have existed, evoking hidden and untold narratives.
An assessment of Leon Wainwright's recent monograph, Timed Out, focusing in on the temporal dimensions of Caribbean art production and reception, including the reception of Caribbean art in the UK and US as being "out of time" and behind the pace of modernity. In contrast, Wainwright argues for an understanding of Caribbean art as reflecting the immediacy of a Caribbean present, with its particular relation to the circulation of Caribbean works and artists between home and diaspora.
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Michelle Stephens is an Associate Professor in English and Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University, and author of Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914 to 1962 (Duke 2005) and Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis and The Black Male Performer (Duke 2014). She is also currently co-editing with Brian Russell Roberts a collection of essays entitled: Archipelagic American Studies: Decontinentalizing the Study of American Culture.
This article reflects on the contribution, made by Leon Wainwright’s book Timed Out: Art and the Transnational Caribbean (Manchester University Press, 2011), to alternative futures for the Caribbean-focused study of art and its histories. It emphasizes the need for better attention to the complex ‘geopolitics of time’ which is central to the formation of Caribbean creative experience, and outlines the discursive field, the art market, and the policy and funding landscape through which Caribbean and diaspora artists move. In response to the forerunning discussion of Timed Out in this issue of Small Axe, the article explains the continuing need to explode the existing dominant art canons (while highlighting the problematic assimilation of counterdiscursive and plural positions) and proposes various pathways by which the Caribbean’s role in changing powerful modes and priorities of art historical scholarship may be extended fruitfully to the wider humanities.
Bio
Leon Wainwright is Kindler Chair in Global Contemporary Art at Colgate University and Reader in Art History at The Open University, UK. He is the author of Timed Out: Art and the Transnational Caribbean (Manchester University Press, 2011), and the forthcoming book Phenomenal Difference: A Philosophy of Black British Art, and leader of a major internationally funded project on art, cultural policy and geography in the Dutch-, Spanish- and English-speaking Caribbean and their global diasporas.
