Issues

This examination of Marlon James’ novel The Book of Night Women and a selection of Clovis Brown’s newspaper cartoons, posits these Jamaican-authored works as texts that instantiate a uniquely Caribbean aesthetics of horror in their response to historical and contemporary events. Both artists excavate genealogies of horror at the root of Caribbean identity discourse, tracing this through sexual histories linked, respectively, to femaleness and male homosexuality represented as a male-feminine morphology. Ultimately, the texts excavate different spaces of a “demonic ground” to reveal the “unspeakable contents” of creolization, nationalism, citizenship and regionalism, all of which are brought into deep question by acts of  psychic and political border control.

This article examines the relationship between debt and memory that is emerging in contemporary calls for reparation and Caribbean-Canadian literature. CARICOM and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ discussions of reparatory justice as well as David Chariandy’s Soucouyant (2007) and Ramabai Espinet’s The Swinging Bridge (2003) characterize the Black Atlantic’s colonial history as an outstanding debt. Collectively, they demonstrate this past continues to overdetermine the transnational present, and pose two challenges to contemporary scholarship. The first challenge concerns cultural studies’ tendency to parse “the colonial,” “the postcolonial,” and “the transnational” as distinct historical phases in a teleologic progression. The second challenge exposes the polarization of history and memory, archive and body, that increasingly undergirds diaspora studies’ memory-work. Although the concept of “diasporic memory” has scholarly traction, it also places enormous pressure on diasporic bodies to demonstrate specific forms counter-memory. Rather than supporting this binary or the ethical distinctions it relies on, Chariandy and Espinet underscore embodied memory’s fragility and offer an unexpected archival alternative: diasporic characters’ financial records. 

This essay introduces the project of rethinking the cultural-political historiography of Jamaica of which “The Jamaican 1960s” is a contribution. It sets out the question in relation to the idea of a Jamaican intellectual tradition. Specifically it inquires into the way the idea of the making of a “modern" Jamaica has been crucial to a nationalist historiography—a paradigm that might be less cogent in the contemporary period. 

Jamaican fiction published in the 1960s was fundamentally pessimistic. These writings drew from regional ontologies of religious millenarianism, colonial abjection and racial damnation as well as existentialist philosophies of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre to offer representations of pessimisms that embraced life’s absurd futility rather than its abject hopelessness.  Reading the corpus of this Jamaican literary archive—twelve novels and one memoir, I examine the heterogeneous nature of the decade’s literary pessimisms—best characterized as a sensibility of radical skepticism, which approached the absurdity of the current conjuncture by deploying critical distance to cast doubt on the past, the present and the very idea of single-island sovereign futures. I resituate this independence era’s literature by identifying its multitudinous plotlines that included resentment, betrayal, disillusion, disappointment, detachment, shame and contempt.  Thus, rather than understanding pessimism as debilitating impasse or frustrated returns, thinking through its generativity reveals how these late colonial Jamaican writers anticipate current critical theories about failure’s productivity. Radical skepticisms, I argue, create conceptual ground to accommodate the multiple political and affective responses in, and to, the independence era.   

In Mirror, Mirror, Rastafari appears as an expression of black knowledge and politics, and as a barometer of the immediate post-independence security concerns as they related to black Jamaicans.  In this essay, I am interested in what Nettleford couldn’t have interpreted at the time.  Using surveillance reports from the “migrated archives” in the U.K., I will show that the intensifying concern with anti-communism that grew throughout the 1950s undergirded a transition in the approach toward Rastafari on the part of the colonial government, from racialist nuisance to the local elite to a primary threat to the security of the Jamaican state.  I will argue that a deeper understanding of the extent to which post-1952 U.S. foreign policy shaped both local and colonial perceptions of people’s struggles for sovereignty should foundationally transform both triumphalist and teleological narratives that often pervade our discussions of constitutional decolonization.  

In this paper, I use the coincidence of three facets of Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings to consider how Jamaican literature imagined political sovereignty during the 1960s. The first is a 1966 event characters refer to as “the fall of Balaclava.” The second is the ghost of Sir Arthur Jennings. The third is reference to global figures and events that index the destabilization of governments in Latin America and Africa.

The Jamaican sixties represented a critical phase in the island’s political history. The era provoked a second round of decolonization politics as the culturally Eurocentric political class that won power in the first round during the thirties, encountered stiff opposition to its autocratic power, anti-black racism and perceived accommodation to the island’s dependency on the economic, cultural and political institutions of the world system. A myriad of dissident organizations, personalities and social forces challenged this dependency and rejected the unapologetic “coloniality of power” that defined political rule in Jamaica. However, despite success in discrediting this power, serious weaknesses—including disunity, belief in radical will, all-consuming preoccupation with taking power and naiveté about the modern power arrayed against them—kept dissidents at bay with little success in winning the majority of Jamaicans to their cause. 

This essay looks at the place of race in Creole Nationalism in Jamaica. It asserts that Creole Nationalism is also Brown Nationalism in Jamaica and its racial ideas can be seen through the thought of Norman Manley, the father of Creole Nationalism, his wife Edna, its cultural mouthpiece and the politics of Alexander Bustamante. The essay contends that Creole nationalism rooted itself in notions of indigeneity and the elevation of hybridity as the basis of the state’s claims to legitimacy, legitimized a racial hierarchy that centred brownness and provided a way to think self and nation in independence through the national motto. It contends that an aspiration to brownness was embedded in the identity politics emerging therein, which served to obscure the racial order and maintain the subordinate place of blackness in post-colonial Jamaica. 

This essay uses the discussion of Neville Dawes’s The Last Enchantment (1960) and Beverley Manley’s The Manley Memoirs (2008) to interrogate intimate scripts of the independence moment, and to suggest that these confound accounts of the era as radical or conservative.   

Starting in the late-1950s a new business center was created in Jamaica’s capital city hastening the decline of its old downtown, and coinciding with the emergence of elite suburbs. This essay explores the social significance of this “New Kingston’s” development, treating it as a critical marker of the creation of a parallel social infrastructure and all-encompassing set of social arrangements to serve the city’s elites. The paper’s central concern is with how social differences that were once openly coded through race and color now got articulated in spatial terms.  It aims to demonstrate how differences often viewed as inert, unchangeable facts of nature, are in actuality constituted, reconfigured and recoded over time: in this instance through discursive and symbolic spatial and place-making practices. 

This essay offers a discussion of Rex Nettleford’s classic book, Mirror Mirror: Identity, Race, and Protest in Jamaica. It aims to situate it in the wake of the Jamaican 1960s, both as a way of coming to terms with the first decade of political sovereignty, and at the same time a way of anticipating an unknown future to come. 

Jamaica gained her independence from Britain in 1962 after 152 years of Spanish colonialism and 307 years of British colonial rule. The first independence government had to tackle the legacies of colonialism which included over 300 years of slavery. But the emerging political and economic elites almost immediately ran into a crisis in their approach to tackling these legacies in pursuit of development. This crisis expressed itself in several ways. Four of these are highlighted along with a photo exhibition. They are denoted in: (1) The Carol Gardens Incident, 1963; (2) The state visit of Haile Selassie, 1966; (3) The government bulldozing of Shanty Town, 1966 and (4) The riots spawned by the government expulsion of University of the West Indies lecturer, Walter Rodney, 1968.  

This crisis arose from a clash of paths of development; a largely neo-colonial one which marginalized the epistemic, ontological and agential compass of the black majority and the other, the opposite.  

Through a discussion of Vanessa Pérez-Rosario’s  Becoming Julia de Burgos: The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon, this article argues that Julia de Burgos is an integral figure to consider in the development of a feminine genealogy of the uses of water in Caribbean and diasporic literature. Building on Pérez Rosario’s documentation of Julia de Burgos’s relationship to water and paying particular attention to how water served as an escape route for the poet, this work places Julia de Burgos in dialogue not only with Puerto Rican literature, but also with other Caribbean poets such as Derek Walcott and Edward Kamau Brathwaite. Ultimately, this article discusses the uneasy relationship between rooted land-based constructs of identity and flowing water imagery, arguing that exploring the tensions between them is productive not only in the case of Puerto Rico, but also in other Caribbean settings. 

This commentary, inspired to a large degree, but not solely, by literary critic Vanessa Pérez-Rosario’s remarkable book, Becoming Julia de Burgos: The Making of an Icon (2014), is to undertake a historical and critical engagement with some aspects of the author’s meticulous and insightful analysis that invite elaboration and an unpretentious effort to offer an intellectual and personal island and stateside Puerto Rican perspective that further contextualizes the ongoing reencuentro [reengagement] with the now indisputable iconic poet, as well as my own journey of rediscovering her writings.  

This review essay focuses on a critical reading of Vanessa Pérez-Rosario’s book, Becoming Julia de Burgos: The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon (2014) with the aim to shed light into these following questions: How could we read the writing of community in the work of Julia de Burgos? And to what extent exile and the condition of the living-dead, reproduces distinct dynamics and re-interpretations of Julia de Burgos? Departing from Nancy’s notion of community as “the excess that make up finite being” and the Freudian notion of mourning in relation to diaspora communities, I examine the ontological, diaspora, racial and ethnic readings of Pérez’s work about Burgos’s and how they articulate contemporary notions of Puerto Ricanness, and latinidad in the United States. 

This essay is a response to a discussion of my book Becoming Julia de Burgos: The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon. I focus here on the importance of generations, intellectual genealogies, iconicity, and the afterlives of Puerto Rican poet and writer Julia de Burgos.