Issues

From the moment of its introduction into the Atlantic world, hereditary racial slavery depended upon an understanding that enslaved women's reproductive lives would be tethered to the institution of slavery.  At the same time, few colonial slave codes explicitly define the status of these children. This article explores English slave codes regarding reproduction under slavery alongside the experience of reproduction to suggest that legislative silences are not the final word on race and reproduction. The presumption that their children would also be enslaved produced a visceral understanding of early modern racial formations for enslaved women. Using a seventeenth-century Virginia slave code as its anchor, this article explores the explicit and implicit consequences of slaveowners' efforts to control enslaved women's reproductive lives.   

Surveyor, penkeeper, overseer, slave owner, and land holder Thomas Thistlewood (1721-1786) was a white English immigrant to British colonial Jamaica, who lived there from 1750 until his death. Canonical readings of Thistlewood’s archive quarantine his intellectual pursuits from his brutal plantation oversight, which included serial rapes of enslaved women. Taking a necessarily integrative approach, this essay analyzes Thistlewood’s diaries in conjunction with his reading notes, identifying the literary-scientific valences of his perpetration and documentation of rape. It argues that violence against enslaved women was central to Thistlewood’s Enlightenment thought and plantation management, in addition to considering the political stakes of choosing a language to describe his interactions with enslaved women. I propose that anti-racist feminist theory and art have the potential to critically disrupt analyses of slavery’s archives that threaten to reproduce or even exacerbate their violence. 

This article explores the relationship between a radical politics and the institution of the archive through a history of the George Padmore Institute (GPI), a community archive attached to New Beacon Books in London, UK. Focusing on the life and thought of John La Rose (1927-2006) – Trinidadian poet, publisher, activist and founder of the GPI – the essay explores how a politics of hope is articulated in relation to competing priorities of ‘foundation’ and ‘movement’. It assesses the GPI’s radical potential as an archive designed to subvert its own authority, functioning in the spirit of a ‘beacon’ – that is, something stable and reliable but which does not function as a destination, which is successful only if it is left behind, providing ‘foundation for movement’. This vision for the GPI is contextualized with regard to recent debates around archive-building in the Caribbean as well as in the age of digital technology. 

In 2012, reggaetón artist Tego Calderón released his music video for the song “Robin Hood.” The video told the story of a man who aids a group of undocumented Dominican immigrants to Puerto Rico. Through a close reading of “Robin Hood,” I argue that Calderón establishes connections between Puerto Ricans and Dominicans through an understanding of their shared marginalization as black subjects. This has important implications for African diaspora theory, which has typically neglected Puerto Rican and Dominican engagements with blackness. Calderón disrupts two common assumptions about Puerto Rican and Dominican racial politics: first, that Puerto Ricans and Dominicans are always in conflict, and, second, that Puerto Ricans and Dominicans shy away from identifying as black. An analysis of the music video provides one example of how diasporic blackness operates in the Spanish Caribbean, and calls for a better integration of the Spanish Caribbean into theories of the African diaspora. 

This article is a preliminary investigation of the historical and contemporary presence of same-sex desiring and gender non-conforming practitioners in the Spiritual Baptist faith, a spiritual child of the syncretizing contact between black religious communities of the U.S. South and the Southern Caribbean. After offering a brief history of the faith, the piece focuses on the spiritual moorings of one particularly prominent queer Caribbean artist and religious elder. This work is committed to the belief that one of the richest territories of black queer experience has long been our spiritual grounding despite the fetishization of faithlessness in queer life. 

This article considers the Eloge de la créolité's relationship with time, specifically the idea that it was before its time, or that it was published in advance of the existence of an appropriately prepared reading public. Referring to some recent global events, and drawing on a largely neglected pamphlet by Edouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau, the article wonders if the time for the Eloge and the broader, related Caribbean theories of history and culture may have arrived, and argues that Caribbean thought needs to rediscover and re-engage with its radical foundations.

L’intertextualité avec l’œuvre d’Aimé Césaire révèle combien Mûr à creverde Frankétienne se démarque de la vision culturalisante qui prévaut dans l’Éloge de la Créolité de Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant et Jean Bernabé.  En comparant la relation entre esthétique et politique dans Mûrà crever, l’Éloge, et Cahier d’un retour au pays natalde Césaire, et en analysant le mouvement entre isolement et révolution, ainsi que la répétition de l’histoire, j’entends démontrer que cette œuvre est beaucoup plus près des perspectives anticolonialistes et anticapitalistes, voire révolutionnaires, que ne l’ont laissé paraître les études centrées sur ses innovations formelles. De plus, cette lecture permettra d’envisager les possibilités que renferme une poétique et une politique du recentrement dans le démantèlement des structures de l’impérialisme.

This essay discusses Éloge de la créolité and Patrick Chamoiseau’s novels and later texts, arguing that créolité, or creoleness, is far more complex and ambiguous than its critics have hitherto assumed. It is not confined to the Creole language but can be expressed in French, as in Chamoiseau’s writing. More important, it is not a straightforward identitarian movement: it both claims a creole identity and simultaneously questions that claim. The characterizations in Chamoiseau’s novels demonstrate that cultural alienation is not the opposite of creoleness but an inevitable part of it. Chamoiseau identifies as much with the alienated figures—often but not solely mulattoes—as he does with the others. Also, his later writings reject his earlier militant stance for an amoral complexity and find beauty in the imaginary and the marvelous.

Arguing that it is time to move beyond the question of language as the key instrument for articulating identity, this article offers an examination of the visual mode of representation in the aesthetics of the creolist movement. Taking Jacques Rancière’s idea of different regimes of writing, the analysis starts by analyzing what I call the regime of visibility and its ontological implications in the 1989 manifesto Éloge de la Créolité. This then serves as a basis for a close reading of Patrick Chamoiseau’s 2009 novel Les Neufs consciences du Malfini, narrated from the perspective of a bird circling above Martinique. I claim that the regime of visibility is closely connected to the real while carrying an almost mythic coefficient. It is precisely this double, paradoxical, capacity of the visual that will appear in full force in the novel, taking identity politics in another direction.

Négritude et créolité ont une dimension politique indéniable. D’abord parce surgissant  à des moments historiques singuliers du développement politique des territoires français de la Caraïbe, ils contestent d’un point de vue culturel, le pouvoir métropolitain. Ensuite parce que ceux qui portent ces mouvements culturels sont engagés dans l’action politique. Concernant le second mouvement, il convient de distinguer la démarche collective contenue dans l’ouvrage à trois voix, l’Eloge de la créolité, des écrits politiques ultérieurs de chaque auteur. L’ouvrage a une forte dimension politique mais ne constitue pas pour autant un projet politique créole alternatif. De ce point de vue le politique est un impensé de la créolité. L’idée d’un regroupement des territoires de la Caraïbe, les notions de souveraineté, de domination et de méta-nation posent plus de questions qu’elles n’apportent de réponses proprement créoles.

This essay develops an anthropological genealogy of the créolité literary project. Examining work by Edouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, I study how the créolistes read ethnography and the social sciences into a revitalized Creole literary history, generating a vision of Creole fiction as ethnographic fiction. More specifically, I demonstrate how the human sciences perform three interrelated tasks in the history the créolistes create of their own literary production: first, they serve as disciplinary frameworks for Creole fiction; second, they index and reflect empiricist desires in literature, gesturing toward a fictional form that would connect with the Real in ways that earlier modes of Caribbean writing could not. And finally, they become figural modes in fictional texts, informing the créolistes' senses of narrative and characterology. 

This article takes its cue from Louis Chude-Sokei’s The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics.Chude-Sokei’s specific Caribbean matrix of technologically-oriented poetics of the human is extended to African and African American texts, illustrating how Blackness registers across distinctive histories. Following Chude-Sokei’s engagement with Sylvia Wynter, the article begins with the centrality of women’s engagements with technologies for mobility featured in African popular print magazines in the era of independence. Turning to a contemporaneous publication, Langston Hughes’s Ask Your Mama,the essay examines media and transportation technologies as vehicles for transnational Black solidarity and its attendant static, a form of Glissantian opacity. The essay closes with a comparative reading of Césaire and Gwendolyn Brooks, proposing parallels in the way their poetics of Blackness formed a “miraculous weapon”. The article demonstrates that solidarity and dissent need not be mutual exclusive, and that poetics maintains space for complexity.

This essay responds to Louis Chude-Sokei's The Sound of Culture by highlighting the book's crucial musical threads in order to examine how it reorients specific histories of black music, offers new openings for musicology and sound studies, and makes the case that the power of an audible, creole technopoetics, as best embodied by dub reggae, can remake our very conception of the human. In addition to dub, the author brings minstrelsy, blues, jazz, and the like into his broader discussion of black engagements with sound technologies, arguing that such popular engagements stand as "the primary space of direct black interaction with technology." Chude-Sokei's intricately nested account is at turns provocative and profound, the response contends, but could go further in explicating precisely how such a technopoetics becomes audible.

In the African Diaspora Jamaica is one of the primary spaces where the discourse of racial or cultural roots become sutured to technology and where the political legacies of race, slavery and imperialism become enshrined in the public sphere of popular music alongside dreams of sex, escape and concordant notions of transformation. This is at the core of what I’ve called a “Black Technopoetics,” central to the long history of interactions between race and technology, from industrialism and slavery to Afrofuturism and Artificial Intelligence. This essay in response to the generous and generative prodding of Wayne Marshall and Tsitsi Ella Jaji, allows me to further explicate its roots in response to traditional notions of “roots” and emergent discourses of black futurity.