Issues

This essay explores the roots of the reggae revival in Jamaica. It considers what it means that the revival is not singularly located in music and sound but that revivalists imagine an artistic community and aesthetic that includes a number of other art forms as well. Through a close analysis of revivalists, it posits that while the revival suggests a reaching back to a defining cultural form—reggae, which is both local and national—it is as well globalized in its commitment to engaging sounds and forms. Insofar as the revival takes significant impetus from the 2010 Tivoli Gardens incursion, its global reach constitutes a pushback against neoliberalism. Ultimately the revival recreates reggae as a principle rather than a music or a music industry, and in so doing suggests a new genealogy for reggae that is both epistemological and ontological.

The purpose of this essay is to understand the language of spiritual work and healing in St. Lucia as well as the moral impregnation of the term obeah. This ethnographic study of ordinary ethics of obeah explores the significant gap between the designation and auto-legitimation of healers and spiritual workers. Because, in most cases, the term is not used by practitioners to identify their spiritual and healing practice, the author proposes to relocate the definition of obeah from its specific practices to its moral burden. This approach helps reevaluate the use of obeah in social science writings related to the St. Lucian context. Social scientists must be very attentive to not contribute to the othering of healing and spiritual practices and to consider their involvement in its construction.

This special section focuses on the work of women whose artistic practices are grounded in a feminist ethos and engage multiple and nuanced meanings of the Caribbean and its diaspora across linguistic, geographic, material, and formal boundaries. Through diverse written and visual contributions, the section presents the Caribbean as a critical space that recognizes an existing foundation yet facilitates and expands conversations between artists and writers who have shaped and are shaping local and global art discourses using intertextual formal art practices. It aims to mark the archive of Caribbean art history through its focus on the remarkable contributions of women from the Dutch-, English-, Spanish-, French-, and Creole-speaking Caribbean to the making of this history as well as the ongoing cultivation of arts practice and discourses.

This essay provides a cultural analysis of the work of Trinidadian-born artist Nicole Awai and is derived from a collaborative process between author and artist, including a studio visit in 2014. This discussion presents the author's reflections on the deeper philosophical implications of Awai's work, as an artist striving to represent her Caribbean and diaspora experience in an art practice that moves between mediums. This movement is interpreted as a way of figuring the slippery relationship between multiple perceptual dimensions and real worlds.

This essay explores the photographic and film work of New York–born artist Rachelle Mozman (of Panamanian heritage) and the paintings and drawings of Dominican-born artist Firelei Báez. Both artists make use of the form, the image, the representation, and the reading of the female body. Through their imagery, the body serves as a sign for presence and invisibility, for fearlessness and fragility. The permanence of the body's surface becomes a kind of visible text that both artists develop through their narratives. By examining specific series of works by each artists, one sees similarities in their ways of working and defining the female body and in their ways of using historical and contemporary references in the narratives in which they place these gendered bodies.

Using the lens of relationality as posited in Stuart Hall's idea of identity and Terry Smith's notion of the contemporary, this essay analyzes the work of Jamaican contemporary artist Olivia McGilchrist, who, upon her return to the Caribbean after decades of living and studying in Europe, is interpellated into the position of white other, or “whitey,” as she is called on the streets. It argues that McGilchrist's art constitutes a poetics or a “how” of stepping into and negotiating white identity as a place of recognition. The essay explores McGilchrist's visual engagement with relationships between self and other and between past and present. It also examines the implications of McGilchrist's dialogic configuration of her still and moving images.

What does it mean to embody the Caribbean as performance/art? In this coolaborative essay, two Caribbean women artists respond to this question in a dynamic dialogue of text and images. Each has individually performed at and been exhibited in more than fifty venues across the Caribbean, Africa, and the United States. Artistic comrades for twenty years, they have also collaborated with each other in performance and video. Here, they offer a deep exchange about their creative practice, paying special attention to two works individually premiered on a split bill in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, in 2004. Incorporating both self- and peer reflection, their remarks provide historical and critical context for their own and each other's work. They also address the Caribbean as influence and inspiration, and as both a real and an imagined site.

This essay offers an account of Clara Morera's artistic course, considering the context and quality of her artwork. Morera has been one of the first female Cuban visual artists to formulate a gendered discourse in the plastic arts by making use of the symbolic and aesthetic force of the Cuban religious legacy. The analysis of the artist's work reveals the innovative aesthetic syntax she has developed by approaching, from her own gendered experience, the different cultural legacies that over time have interacted in Cuba and by avoiding any axiological view that would place one over the other.

This essay highlights the role of archives, archival research, and integration of archival records in contemporary Caribbean visual artwork that evokes and reimagines unevenly recorded historical processes/moments. It also suggests the defining role of this approach to contemporary visual artwork is the perspective of Caribbean women artists. Through a discussion of Roshini Kempadoo's interactive installation Ghosting, the essay considers alternative forms of archiving lived memory through Diana Taylor's notion of the repertoire. It also considers modernist and postmodernist techniques of recontextualization, such as montage, in Caribbean contemporary art (and specifically in Kempadoo's Ghosting), from a postcolonial and creolized context.

This essay examines two prominent Dominican visual artists—Belkis Ramírez and Raquel Paiewonsky—whose work encompasses new media such as video arts, installations, and performances. By defying traditional models of pictorial and sculptural art, these artists have revolutionized the Dominican art scene both thematically and technically. While Ramírez creates installations that include wood carving, xylography, and paint, Paiewonsky often combines textile design and sewing with other artistic media technologies, excelling at photography. Despite the diverse old and new materials and media used in their art, the artists have systematically challenged expectations of the role of women in the arts and in society as a whole. Their artwork explores the devastating impact on women of restricted gender roles and new forms of slavery imposed by patriarchal society, such as forced motherhood, the abortion ban, migration, and feminicides.

The artist reflects on her place within the black/white color spectrum in Jamaica and the United States and looks at how she addresses both whiteness and blackness within her work. Using her piece Face of the Enemy, on the Japanese Internment, from her solo show Rationalize and Perpetuate, and her video installations Snow White Remixed and Purity, Sanctity, and Corporeality, she reflects on how race and gender are much more open in the lives of children; the questioning of the idea of “purity” and its relationship to whiteness; and visual culture and its effects on identity. She also looks at her interest in video installations and how this visual space and language challenges the audience to connect in a deeper sense to the other.

This essay introduces part 1 of a special section on the créolité movement—“Eulogizing Creoleness? Rereading Éloge de la créolité”—in which a variety of essays explore and assess the impact, twenty-five-plus years on, of the controversial manifesto by Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, and Jean Bernabé. Éloge de la créolité has been much discussed and critiqued in relation to Antillean politics and literature; its claim to replace essentialist racial identities with an ever-evolving diversalité has been disputed by a variety of other authors from the Caribbean and beyond. The essays here fall broadly into four categories—intellectual contexts, politics, literature, and ethnography. This introduction asks, does the concept of créolité have a future in the current situation of Antillean writing, which has lost much of its momentum, especially in relation to writing from Haiti? (Part 2 of “Eulogizing Creoleness? Rereading Éloge de la créolité” will appear in Small Axe 55, in March 2018.)

The theme of identity runs throughout Édouard Glissant's work and constitutes one of his most original contributions to postcolonial thought. It is always considered in relation to change, but his formulations of both identity and change themselves change in the course of his career. In this essay, three different versions of the interrelation of identity and change are considered. In Glissant's 1981 Le discours antillais, the emphasis is on the conscious construction of a collective identity as a means of promoting the struggle for independence. In his texts of the 1990s, in contrast, identity is formed through contacts with others within the nexus of Relation and créolisation, whereas in his 2006 Une nouvelle région du monde, it is largely a question of the relationship between human beings and place. In this essay, Glissant's ideas are compared with those of the theorists of créolité, from the point of view of the question of essentialism.

Taking the publication of Éloge de la créolité as a starting point, a number of key questions can be posed: What was the discursive and thematic goal of the Éloge? How does it distinguish itself from creolization? And how do we assess its political stance and its sociocultural accomplishments? One key predecessor, Kamau Brathwaite, suggested that the binarisms undergirding the principle of cultural distinctness on which much of the historical definition of the region was drawn be abandoned in favor of an increasing recognition of its intrinsic cultural heterogeneity. For many, the programmatic nature of the tenets of créolité—highlighting specificities of periodization and linguistic and cultural practice—appeared to mark the opposite of an open approach to ethnocultural representation. But perhaps créolité's ultimate value lay in its instantiation of an enunciative framework for cultural identity, also visible in Caribbean carnivals and in regional musical rhythms such as zouk.

This essay sets Éloge de la créolité (and the créolité movement) in the comparative context of earlier identitarian movements in the Caribbean and Afro-America, such as the Caribbean Artists Movement (anglophone Caribbean), Wie Eegie Sanie (Suriname), and the Grupo Antillano (Cuba). It stresses the extent to which each of these other movements relied on active dialogue among differently positioned individuals, from artists and poets to dancers, musicians, journalists, publishers, and politicians—people with a variety of backgrounds and perspectives and priorities who engaged in debate over a period of years in order to arrive at answers to questions of mutual concern. And it argues that the authors of the Éloge, unlike their cultural forefathers in Martinique, Aimé Césaire and Édouard Glissant, missed an opportunity to include creative people outside of their own francophone literary universe when composing their manifesto.

Conceived as a contribution to a 2014 symposium reconsidering Éloge de la créolité—written by three Martiniquan intellectuals—twenty-five years after its publication, this essay draws a distinction between the French use of créolisation as a mainly philosophical and poetic concept and the more historically grounded use of creolization in the anglophone world. After outlining the various criticisms of the Élogeexpressed in the author's 1995 essay “Shadowboxing in the Mangrove” (coauthored by Sally Price), it sketches in a history of the use of the creolization metaphor in the anglophone academy, drawing examples mainly from historical and anthropological work on Afro-America. It ends by considering the limitations of the perspectives put forth in the Éloge and the potential usefulness of the creolization concept for the future.

Békés (white Creoles) are the descendants of the original plantation owners in the Antilles. They remain economically dominant in the islands, forming a privileged and self-segregating minority. They are, perhaps surprisingly, invoked by Raphaël Confiant as fundamental to both Éloge de la créolité's conception and failure. This essay analyzes a number of texts (novels, films, manifestos) produced by, or about, békés since 1989, to investigate how the principles valorized in the Éloge have resonated (or have failed to resonate) with békés: Marie-Reine de Jaham's La grande béké and its TV adaptation; Roger de Jaham's Tous Créoles! movement; and Romain Bolzinger's documentary Les derniers maîtres de la Martinique. Through the prism of the manifesto, the essay sketches a number of tropes, images, and discursive positions that, whether directly influenced by créolité or articulated in opposition (or in parallel) to it, illuminate the (lack of) development in béké identity politics over the last quarter century.

This essay responds to Rosamond S. King's Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination (2014) by noting the convergence of progressive legislation and violence that renders notions of transgression and freedom contradictory and fraught in our contemporary moment, thus helping to frame the book's relevance. Island Bodies draws attention to the sexed subject's embeddedness in notions of authenticity (within the Caribbean as well as in relation to first-world narratives of emancipation) and to the dominance of biological men in discussions of Caribbean sexualities, among other issues. King's insistence on analyzing fiction alongside nonfictional contexts, such as court cases and queer organizing, provides a rich texture for the consideration of transgressive sexualities, while also raising questions about archives, presence, and the production of knowledge.

This essay offers a critical engagement with Rosamond S. King's Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination (2014), arguing that King enacts a ground-shifting interdisciplinary and translinguistic approach to the study of Caribbean sexualities and gender explorations. King's work is notable for its bridging of the divide between scholarship, literature, and activism, producing new understandings of transgression and agency that challenge both those who see the Caribbean as homophobic and those who see gender-nonconformity and sexual freedom of expression as global North–influenced corruptions. The essay explores the implications for King's conception of the “Caribglobal” and for her expansive and nuanced explications of the ways Caribbean peoples engage with gender, sexuality, visibility, and community belonging.

King responds to essays by noted scholars Faith Smith and Lisa Outar critiquing her 2014 book Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination. In particular, she addresses the choice to examine interracial relationships between Caribbean men of color and foreign white woman rather than between Caribbean people of African and Indian descent. King also addresses recent portrayals of Caribbean trans people and of Caribbean women who desire other women, in particular Shani Mootoo's Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab. Several recent court cases related to Caribbean sexuality and nonbinary gender are addressed. King ends by introducing her current research project, which uses existing and imagined archives to examine Afro-Trinidadian women's protest and performance in the late nineteenth century.