Issues

This essay examines contests over Haitian history between Haitian state actors and British observers—such as diplomats, travel writers, and “journalists”—around the time of Haiti’s commemorations of the centenary of independence in 1904. This was a time for the Haitian people to reflect on the great achievement of Haitian independence and the exploits of Haiti’s past heroes, and for the Haitian state to remind its people of the commitment to remaining independent in the face of mounting imperialist intervention. British observers reacted to Haitian memories of the Wars of Independence and the calls to maintain that independence in accordance with their imperialistic ambitions in the Caribbean. The contest over Haitian history thus became a means through which to discuss the nature of imperial control and black independence in the Atlantic world. In the creation of each of these narratives of Haitian history, this essay argues, were “bundles” of silences.

This essay argues that M. NourbeSe Philip’s 2008 book-length poem Zong! offers aesthetic experience as an undetermined exposure toward communality. As readers, we are not merely consuming the poem, which emerges from Philip’s reading of a 1781 court decision regarding a slave massacre; instead, the poem dislocates us and redirects us toward others. In Zong! this means a relation with the dead that does not require their representation but instead puts readers into community with them; we do not ventriloquize their voices but put our voices alongside theirs. The essay’s argument moves through Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment to contend that aesthetic experience as such requires this kind of ecstatic movement. The sociality assembled by aesthetic judgment is an ecstatic, de-structured collectivity. Zong!’s sensus communis is not an a priori universality but a radically undetermined collectivity posited nevertheless.

This essay examines interpretations of the fragmentation of the Island of Hispaniola into the Dominican Republic and Haiti as a point of departure into the process by which national difference is constructed and reproduced as both a site of difference/alterity and as a co-constitutive counterpoint to identity formation and national founding. While the early historiography of Hispaniola offered a social constructivist revisionist account of fragmentation and nation state formation, it simultaneously sustained the notion of exceptionalism, reified elitist nationalist discourses of difference, and characterized Haitian-Dominican relations as an eternal antagonistic “cockfight” over the island. Drawing on a recent turn in the scholarship, the author argues that a transnational lens of polyrhythmic intra-action and tension has emerged—rather than a “cockfight”—that focus on entanglements, culture, and exchange within and beyond the two nations, providing opportunity to think about how Hispaniola is being (re)conceptualized and the political-intellectual labor that it performs.

This essay argues that the Jamaican 1970s is perhaps the most contested decade in Jamaican historiography. While there remains a contest over the positions and the stakes of narrating this period, there is consensus of the traumatic hold of the Jamaican 1970s that was at once violent, heady, exhilarating, and creative. There endures nonetheless an often-takenfor-grantedness that we narrate this decade through the singular framework of revolutionary time—a time that challenges the stagnation of the existing state of affairs and brings a new cultural-political order into being. As an alternative to revolutionary time, the author proposes interim time, which by contrast is marked by a self-conscious awareness of the unsustainability of a period’s momentum—a sense of the inevitable return to the status quo. Juxtaposing revolutionary time with interim time usefully frames the period to underscore that both temporalities were simultaneously at play—even among those who viewed themselves as sympathetic to transformations occurring in the then national culture.

Despite burgeoning interest in the cultural politics of the Jamaican 1970s, little critical attention has been paid to texts engaging that era in a popular-fiction mode. Starting from the conviction that popular-fiction texts potentially offer new ways of construing and understanding moments of crisis, this essay attempts to redress that oversight. Its discussion of three novels of the Jamaican 1970s by Perry Henzell, Lee R. Duffus, and Tony Sewell reveals how the novels’ imaginative reworkings of the 1970s in a counterfactual mode constitute ruminations on historiography and suggest the symbolic resources and epistemological limitations that will characterize future representations of the era in multiple genres. The essay closes with a brief discussion of Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings, sketching its alignments and discontinuities with the earlier texts and proposing that it offers a fertile opportunity to rethink the ultimately untenable division between the literary and the popular.

True emancipation from mental slavery is still a work in progress in Jamaica. The People’s National Party swept into power in 1972 with an agenda of socioeconomic and cultural empowerment for the poor black majority. That agenda, however, was executed imperfectly. Considering a selection of (semi)autobiographical 1970s-based literary works such as Anthony C. Winkler’s Going Home to Teach, Brian Meeks’s Paint the Town Red, and Margaret Cezair-Thompson’s The True History of Paradise (and interweaving Shara McCallum’s This Strange Land), this essay examines some shortcomings of the PNP’s execution of its vision and, critically, of the Jamaican population itself, from these literary perspectives. With the PNP’s defeat in 1980, race and class relations quickly reverted to the status quo position of white (light) economic power/black subservience. The year would signify not only the abortion of “black man time now” but also a loss of idealism and a growth of a cynical self-serving pragmatism, disturbing features that still scar the Jamaican psychosocial landscape today.

This essay examines the ideological and political circumstances in Jamaica and the anglophone Caribbean that led to the emergence of the Workers Party of Jamaica in 1978. It explores the ways Jamaican radicals in the 1970s appropriated and applied the ideas of Marx and Lenin to Jamaican conditions. Among stumbling blocks to this application was a social structure that, consequent on centuries of racial slavery and colonialism, could not be adequately understood or challenged through class analyses. Moreover, the terrain of party politics had been staked out between the Jamaica Labour Party and the People’s National Party. WPJ ideologists were sharply critical of Michael Manley’s democratic socialism that the PNP had declared in 1974, but they eventually modified this to one of critical support for Manley’s policies. The WPJ disbanded in 1990, after internal dissension over the viability of a Marxist-Leninist party and the implosion of the New Jewel Movement in Grenada in 1983.

The 1970s was the decade that witnessed the definitive creation of black Britain. This essay chronicles the influence of the belief system of Rastafari, originating as it did in Jamaica and having an intense appeal to sections of black Britain in the 1970s that led to the creation of a charged, explicit, and heightened sense of racial identity among young black Britons. This essay seeks to reflect on the influence of Jamaican 1970s on the creation of a second diaspora. In so doing, it utilizes examples of British reggae music, a photograph by Vanley Burke, and the poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson (with a citation from the poet Frederick Williams). Several occurrences and episodes, from postwar immigration itself through to “the New Cross Massacre” and incidents of rioting, are also considered.

This essay discusses decolonization, performance, and education in the 1970s in Jamaica and argues that embodied performances of humans existing at the margins of power are both compelling as and productive of new forms of knowledge because they teach us to challenge enduring colonial representations and create community in profound ways. Drawing on Sylvia Wynter’s work on colonial epistemologies and representation in relation to questions of race and decolonization and on Rex Nettleford’s discussion of embodiment and marronage, the author lays out a method of decolonial knowledge production and embodied performance and then reads the devising practice of Sistren Theatre Collective between 1977 and 1987 through these ideas.

This essay offers a reconsideration of Michael Manley’s first book, The Politics of Change(1974), and uses it as the basis for a reconsideration of Manley’s conception of the role of political will in postcolonial political change.

I was a final-year student at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, Kingston, in 2003, when one of the most troubling incidents in Jamaica’s recent history separated our opinions on our nation’s spiraling crime rate. Seven young men between the ages of fifteen and twenty were killed in a police/military raid in my hometown. The entire country was divided by this act of cruelty. Reports were that their bodies were in positions of what forensics experts called “an execution” killing. The pathological reports filled our newspapers, and every detail was covered in our nightly news.

At the time, I felt I had a great grasp on things. I was sure that the officers were the criminals, and because of the victims’ ages, they were of course innocent. So, with my understanding of the information, I decided I was going...

This essay addresses the role of informed speculation as a methodology for engaging the vital intellectual tradition of probing black interiority. It takes interiority to cover a spectrum of thought—from calculated analysis, intention, and motivation, to the more affective realm. Ada Ferrer’s Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution uses extensive primary source documentation alongside an evocative prose style that allows for speculative possibilities. Despite silences in the historical record, how might free and enslaved blacks in Saint-Domingue and Cuba have evaluated their circumstances and what might they have been thinking? The essay also examines the paratexts that have evolved from Freedom’s Mirror, specifically those that expand Ferrer’s research on the free black artist José Antonio Aponte. The Digital Aponte and Visionary Aponte projects explore the work of both early-nineteenthcentury and present-day Caribbean artists who have engaged Aponte’s missing libro de pinturas as part of a continuing struggle to imagine black freedom.

This essay uses Ada Ferrer’s book Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolutionas a starting point for revisiting the intellectual project of comparative slavery within the Caribbean. Freedom’s Mirror focuses on neighboring territories—Cuba and Hispaniola—during a time of revolutionary upheaval, when people of varying classes traveled regularly between the two islands, and when even those who did not travel mutually observed the progress of ideas and political and social alliances in multiple places. The author argues that the variety and intensity of the interactions explored in Freedom’s Mirror points to the possibility that, even in more ordinary times, stakeholders in Caribbean slave societies paid substantial attention to political and social developments among their regional neighbors. New studies in Caribbean comparative slavery might well focus more on such themes of mutual observation and interconnection as experienced by slavery-era Caribbean populations, free and enslaved.

This essay serves as a response to two essays, by Sara E. Johnson and Laura Rosanne Adderley, written in response to the author’s 2014 book Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution. The essay is a reflection on historical and archival method that argues for the value of informed speculation in scholarly work on slavery and black revolution.