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.
Bio
Curdella Forbes is a fiction writer and a professor of Caribbean Literature at Howard University. Her essays have appeared in numerous peer-reviewed journals including Small Axe. She is the author of From Nation to Diaspora: Samuel Selvon, George Lamming and the Cultural Performance of Gender (University of the West Indies Press, 2005); Songs of Silence (Heinemann 2002, 2010); Flying with Icarus (Walker, 2003); A Permanent Freedom (Peepal Tree 2008) and Ghosts (Peepal Tree 2012).
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.
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L. Camille van der Marel is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Her dissertation, “Bookkeeping: Discourses of Debt in Caribbean-Canadian Literature,” demonstrates how diasporic texts’ conflations of material and ethical obligation unsteady the ‘transnational turn’ in contemporary humanities scholarship. She also researches eco-critical approaches to Canadian literature and has recently published on settler-colonial representations of northern Canada in Ariel.
Kamau Brathwaite, a distinguished poet and a friend of Roberto Fernández Retamar's, was born in Barbados in 1930. After a long career teaching at the University of the West Indies, Mona, he taught for many years at New York University. A founder of the Caribbean Artists Movement and founding editor of Savacou, he is the author of a number of important recent books, including Ancestors (2001), MR (Magical Realism) (2002), Words Need Love Too (2004), Born to Slow Horses (2005), and Elegguas (2010). In 1994 he received the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and in 2015 he was awarded the Poetry Society of America's Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry.
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.
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Donette Francis is founding member of the Caribbean Studies Collective, Director of the American Studies Program and Associate Professor of English at the University of Miami. Her book Fictions of Feminine Citizenship: Sexuality and the Nation in Contemporary Caribbean Literature mobilizes the term “antiromance” to rethink feminist and Caribbean politics. Her current book projects include Creole Miami: Black Arts in the Magic City, a sociocultural history of black arts in Miami and The Novel 1960s: Form and Sensibilities in Caribbean Literary Culture.
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.
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Deborah A. Thomas is the R. Jean Brownlee Term Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica and Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and The Politics of Culture in Jamaica. Thomas also directed the documentary film Bad Friday: Rastafari after Coral Gardens, and is currently collaborating on a multi-media project called Four Days in May.
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.
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Sheri-Marie Harrison is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri where she researches and teaches Caribbean, Global Anglophone, and African Diaspora literature and cultural studies. Her book Difficult Subjects: Negotiating Sovereignty in Postcolonial Jamaican Literature was published by the Ohio State University Press in 2014. She is also currently working on a manuscript tentatively titled After the Beginning Ends: Contemporary Fiction and Iconoclasm.
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.
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Obika Gray has taught at the University of Michigan (Flint), Vassar College, the University of the West Indies (Mona), where he was a Professorial Fellow; and the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, where he was professor in comparative politics. His publications include Radicalism and Social Change in Jamaica, 1960-1972 and Demeaned But Empowered: The Social Power of the Urban Poor in Jamaica.
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.
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Maziki Thame teaches in political science at Clark Atlanta University. Her research interests and publications focus on the postcolonial Caribbean, the place of race, class, violence, radicalism, identity and gender in political life. Her work asks questions about how race shapes experiences of citizenship, how liberation is pursued in the Caribbean modern and how marginalized groups, such as women and blacks factor in the politics of the region.
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.
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Faith Smith teaches at Brandeis University. She is completing a cultural history of the first decade and a half of the twentieth century, showing how the “Spanish American” and “Boer” Wars are filtered through the fiction and photography of Trinidad and Jamaica; and a study of violence and intimacy in 21st-century Caribbean fiction.
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.
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Charles Carnegie is a professor of Anthropology at Bates College and has been associated with the Small Axe Project for almost two decades. He is the author of Postnationalism Prefigured: Caribbean Borderlands (2002), and is presently working on a collection of essays, “Kingston Space, Kingston Time,” that explores aspects of the city’s contemporary cultural politics. Over the past year portions of the manuscript have been presented at St. Andrews University, Scotland, and at the annual meetings of the West Indian Literature conference, and the American Anthropological Association.
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.
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Clinton Hutton lectures in political philosophy and culture at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, Jamaica. He has published extensively on the Haitian Revolution, the Morant Bay uprising, the culture and philosophy of enslaved Africans, Rastafari, Revival, Caribbean art and aesthetics and Jamaican popular music. His latest book is Colour for Colour Skin for Skin Marching with the Ancestral Spirits into War Oh at Morant Bay. Hutton is a noted painter and photographer.
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.
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Rebeca L. Hey-Colón is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Colby College, where she teaches Caribbean and Latinx Studies. Her current book project, Rippling Borders in Latina Literature, explores the relationship between water, borders, bodies, and spirituality in Chicana and Caribbean Latina authors. In 2017-2018 Hey-Colón will be the Carlos E. Castañeda postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Mexican American and Latino Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
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.
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Dr. Edna Acosta-Belén is a Distinguished Professor Emerita of Latin American, Caribbean, and US Latino Studies, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, at the University at Albany, SUNY. She has published nine books and over fifty articles in journals, including the award-winning, Puerto Ricans in the United States: A Contemporary Portrait (with C.E. Santiago). She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University and has been a Visiting Professor at Cornell University, and a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton and Yale Universities.
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.
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Jossianna Arroyo-Martínez is Professor and Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and the Department of African and African Diaspora at The University of Texas, Austin. She specializes in Caribbean literatures and cultures, Afro-Diaspora Studies, racial critical theory and queer studies. She is the author of Travestismos culturales: literatura y etnografía en Cuba y Brasil (Iberoamericana, 2003) and Writing Secrecy in Caribbean Freemasonry (Palgrave,2013); and several essays on the work of Julia de Burgos and Manuel Ramos Otero. She is completing a new project on race and body in contemporary media and new media entitled, “Caribbean Mediascapes.”
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.
Bio
Vanessa Pérez-Rosario is managing editor of Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism. She is associate professor of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Pérez-Rosario is author of Becoming Julia de Burgos: The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon and editor of Hispanic Caribbean Literature of Migration: Narratives of Displacement. She is currently editing a bilingual anthology titled I Am My Own Path: The Writings of Julia de Burgos.
