Issues

While globalization is often conceived of in terms of the transnational movement of capital, culture, people, and ideas, in his novel A Brief History of Seven Killings Marlon James draws attention to a less salubrious form of transnational flow that may also circulate through diasporic networks: that of violence in all of its different social registers, from means of social control to response to the traumas of past violence. This essay argues that while James’s text is concerned with unveiling the roots of Jamaica’s violence in late Cold War U.S. imperialism and the larger regional historical reproduction of structures of violence over time, as well as its relation to the patriarchal culture organizing Kingston’s gangs and the organization of its impoverished downtown communities, at the center of the novel is an attempt to give narrative form to how violence is a co-contributor to the formation of the Jamaican diaspora and a social force transmitted in mutable form across its geographic expanse. In other words, A Brief History of Seven Killings thematizes the reverberations across transnational Jamaican society of a violence born of neo-imperialism and perpetuated in a particularly masculinist manner, one that simultaneously serves to disperse and bind together the Jamaican diaspora.

Taken together, C.L.R. James’ 1933 political pamphlet The Case for West Indian Self-Governmentand 1936 novel Minty Alley reveal James’ competing visions of relations between Africans and Indians in the British West Indies. In The Case for West Indian Self-Government, James proclaims that West Indian societies are fit to govern their own affairs because they are modern and harmonious. However, James’ argument in The Case for West Indian Self-Governmentcontradicts his literary sketches of the barrack yard. Minty Alley features a fractious relationship between Benoit and Mrs. Rouse, the owners of the yard. Mrs. Rouse responds to Benoit’s infidelity by remarking, “my blood and coolie blood don’t take.” They fight over ownership of No. 2 Minty Alley. But, when Benoit dies, Mrs. Rouse buries him at the yard. Minty Alley portrays a barrack yard politics, made through the combined—if tense—efforts of African and Indian descendants.

Rodney Saint-Eloi is one of the most exciting contemporary writers of Haitian origin and yet his work is little studied in the academic world. Born in Haiti in 1963 and migrating to Montreal, Canada in 2005, Saint-Eloi has maintained a long and distinguished career as an author, publisher and academic. In Port-au-Prince, Haiti, he established the publishing house Editions Mémoire in 1991, which supported the dissemination of writers of Haitian origin to the wider world. In 2003, once resident in Montreal, he founded Mémoire d’encrier, a dynamic publisher which celebrated its 15^th anniversary in 2018 and is increasingly defining itself as a cultural centre for the production and celebration of diverse literary voices. Alongside his endeavours to foster the values of human dignity through literature, Saint-Eloi has forged his own literary career, primarily through poetry but also through reflective narrative and critical essay. Through these dual roles he occupies a unique position as both contributor to and disseminator of a thought-provoking and passionate body of work oriented towards cultural and racial inclusivity. This paper will explore how Saint-Eloi develops certain theoretical concepts made famous by Edouard Glissant, particularly that of ‘Tout-Monde’, or the ‘Whole-World’, as a way to understand his role as a Haitian writer and publisher in a contemporary globalized context.

This article serves as an introduction to a special issue on Caribbean in/securities. It begins by offering a threefold insight into the concept of in/securities: securities and insecurities are produced as spatially localised and historically contingent; the orthographic innovation of in/securities focuses on the relational production of security and insecurity; and creative practice is a means through which we can understand the many forms of agency required to negotiate between security and insecurity. The article goes on to illustrate this concept through a substantive analysis of Erna Brodber’s novel ‘Nothing’s Mat’ as a fractal narrative of gendered in/securities in the Caribbean.

In this essay, I use the concept of "maroon in/securities" to refer to a number of creative practices of survival and a range of experiences and feelings that converge in the maroon narrative. These two terms, when brought together, productively facilitate a dialogue between Maroon Studies and Security Studies which might lead to keen interventions in both fields. The concept firstly allows us to talk about military praxis (and in particular guerilla warfare) as a key part of the Maroon experience and narrative but also, at the same time, allows us to link this to strategies of survival. I also discuss maroon insecurity as a feeling forged in the unsettled intimacies of colonial relations. This feeling, in several ways, structured relations between Maroons and Plantations and impacted the organization of daily life across both frontiers as well as the deployment of a range of surveillance assemblages. But even more than a feeling, maroon insecurity might be said to describe an experience of precarity. My attention to these maroon in/securities revise the grand narratives of marronage in heroic terms that have often been dominant in the cultural and popular imagination across a range of sites of representation. In attending to these different registers, I suggest that the concept allows us to think not only across Maroon studies and security studies but also across a range of experiences and relations that converge in the maroon narrative and which resist and complicate easy categories and taxonomies.

This paper contributes to work on the contested racialized articulations of conjunctures by engaging with the spatial practices through which racialized in/securities became politicized in the period after the First World War. The paper explores the forms of opposition to riots against multi-ethnic communities in Cardiff and Liverpool in1919 through tracing the significant transnational connections and routes which shaped resistance to this violence. It does this by engaging with on disturbances aboard ships which were deporting Black seafarers from Cardiff and Liverpool to Barbados and Jamaica. The paper concludes that these events offer a key lens into the contested dynamics of racism and resistance in an imperial context and suggest how globalized ideas around racialized in/securities were shaped and negotiated through situated trajectories and relations.

This essay examines the likely impacts global change processes will have on the Caribbean agriculture sector, paying particular attention to the uneven socio-economic consequences for rural smallholder farmers within the context of an increasingly volatile global market place and a changing regional climate. The essay sheds light on some of the local-scale implications of these wider structural and ecological changes, and highlights that the impacts are likely to produce uneven vulnerability outcomes mediated largely around differences in the socio-economic landscapes in which farmers operate. Finally, the essay calls for a critical rethinking of the resilience framework, particularly related to its ontological and practical limitations and discrepancies, as well as its relation to the cross-cutting concept of vulnerability. Ultimately, I argue that farmers in the Caribbean are neither wholly vulnerable nor wholly resilient to the vagaries of global change. Instead, their livelihood in/securities oftentimes straddle both sides of the vulnerability-resilience spectrum.

In this brief essay, we analyze encounters between Tivoli Gardens residents and members of the Jamaican police and military during the West Kingston security operation of May 2010 (the so-called “Tivoli Incursion”). We understand these (often violent) interactions as extreme examples of “security encounters”, in which security professionals and citizens negotiate specific roles, rights and responsibilities. Such encounters are political performances: security professionals seek to assert their authority in particular ways, while citizens use various strategies to claim political belonging. Focusing on one case in particular, we suggest that police and soldiers, acting in part out of fear, performed a version of violent, arbitrary authority that perhaps sought to mirror and replace that of dons. Meanwhile, Tivoli Gardens residents sought to protect their own lives and those of their loved ones by mobilizing embodied and discursive performances of citizenship. Our analysis of this case draws from the records of the West Kingston Commission of Inquiry 2014-2016.

The Caribbean has figured prominently in narratives of security, mobility and transnational connections. Referred to as the 'Third Border' in US foreign policies, and inhabiting contradictory geopolitical spaces between North and South America, the region also negotiates narratives of in-betweenness and in/security in relation to more 'leisurely' pursuits, notably tourism. By revisting Stephanie Black's critically acclaimed documentary film, Life and Debt, and retheorising the concept of critical conversations, this paper analyses the ways in which representations of in/security have framed media images and policy discourses of Caribbean tourism. This retheorisation contributes to the development of interdisciplinary international debates on tourism promotion, inequality and policy decision-making. While geopolitics and tourism studies have largely tended to remain distinct areas of research, this particular film—and related conversations—illustrate the urgent need to exhume the interdependency of both. Antonio Benitez-Rojo’s concept of ‘repeating islands’ is drawn upon to illustrate the ways in which re-examining representations of Caribbean tourism and geopolitics as part of a series of interconnected and multi-layered conversations, opens up new possibilities for interrogating how tourism narratives have reinforced, produced, and stifled opportunities for diverse, secure, creative and inclusive social spaces.
 

This essay examines in/securities through a centralfocus on strategies for securing livelihoods after emancipation. While the post-emancipation period was marked by clamorous debate about the region’s economic future, this piece is concerned with the quieter practices that shaped the texture of freedom. An engagement with travel narratives, specifically attentive to reading against the grain of elite mobilities, is proposed as a means through which to reveal the everyday negotiation of livelihoods. I offer the market as a case study, to argue that everyday negotiations of economic insecurity rested upon mobile strategies and that the mobilization of such strategies took on a new significance with the rise of tourism in the decades after emancipation.

This essay briefly describes the process of working with the author, Édouard Glissant, in translating his works, with a particular focus on the novel Mahogony. It explores the extent to which a personal relationship with the author provides both special insights and frustration. It treats the part played by the requirement that a translator "write" the work again after the author's first writing and how this relates to the expected readers of both the "original" and the translation. A solution is found in how words within a text can function to guide a translator to a satisfying transition of that work from one language to another.

The essay deals with the attempt to achieve fidelity in the translation of Antonio Benitez-Rojo's fiction: to find an English prose rhythm adequate to a rendition of his novel "El mar de las lentejas" as "Sea of Lentils". It includes some biography and criticism, anchored on an intimate 25-year friendship with the author.

In this essay I take two images of Haitian girls in Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being as a point of departure to reflect on the iconography of Haitian suffering. I argue that Sharpe’s claim that the Haitian girl in the photo taken in the aftermath of the earthquake “occupies the center of the work” is thrown into question when we juxtapose her work with literary narratives that feature Haitian girl protagonists such as Evelyne Trouillot’s The Infamous Rosalie and Laura Wagner’s Hold Tight, Don’t Let Go (2015). These narratives by Trouillot and Wagner actively center Haitian girls while recognizing the dynamics of the wake that Sharpe outlines throughout her study. As such they offer an example of what it means to imagine Haitian girlhood “otherwise.”

This paper suggests that Christina Sharpe’s In The Wake calls us to attend to the limits of what freedom means for Black people globally. By reading some recent conceptual claims in Black Studies along side Sharpe’s work I seek to demonstrate a certain theoretical cul de sac in contemporary Black Studies theorizations that requires further thought if we are to diligently contemplate the stakes of freedom for Black people globally

.

Drawing from Christina Sharpe's In the Wake, this essay uncovers the ontological eradication of “Black child” in institutions of school and juvenile justice. This eradication is rooted in sexualized violence and the ungenderings of Black children. Yet such institutions are ostensible forms of “care”. They hold Black children’s bodies. Their metrics hold Black children to standards of whiteness. They hold Black children as their representational property. Black children become the “meager” representations of school failure, and also the ghostly referent for inequalities facing non-Black children. Poor, disabled, English language learners, and students-of-color are, generally, more often talked about as suffering “like” Black children. Black children are both the spectacle and the specters of educational discourse and juvenile justice. In contrast to “care” and the “hold”, Sharpe positions Black people engaged in “wake work” as (be)holding relations, provoking us to consider how we (be)hold Black children in the wake of anti-Black juvenile institutions.

Christina Sharpe responds to Tezeru Teshome with K. Wayne Yang, Rinaldo Walcott, and Régine Jean-Charles’s engagements with In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. In her response to their questions and elaborations around voice, freedom, resistance, and subjectivity, Sharpe reprises her discussion of an ordinary note of care and her readings of some of the images of Black girls and women who appeared in In the Wake. Sharpe, then, expands her attention to questions of care as theory and practice both inIn the Wake and in her current book project Black. Still. Life.