Issues

This essay traces the evolution of Katherine Dunham’s relationship with Haiti through archival research and a consideration of her 1969 ethnographic memoir, Island Possessed. It argues that primitivist discourses framing Vodou as an instinctive capacity latent in all people of African origins provided interwar black artists such as Dunham with a tantalizing possibility of Pan-African solidarity through which they could mobilize their desire for connection with an obscured past and an imagined community in the present. When Dunham found her 1930s fieldwork inevitably run aground on the wall of cultural difference, however, her initial feelings of discomfort in Haiti transformed her writing into an interrogation of the supposedly innate and homogeneous nature of blackness. The language and praxis of Vodou proved flexible enough to provide her with the vocabulary to articulate a more nuanced version of diasporic blackness beyond her preconceived notions of an easy or automatic alliance between all black people.

Building on black and indigenous feminist scholarship, this essay examines the mutually constitutive processes of racial gendered violence and colonial dispossession undergirding Guyanese statecraft. Through an analysis of the colonial construction of the racial-sexual bodies of Amerindian and Afro-and Indo-creole women, it argues that these imbricated violences may better be understood through a feminist analytic and praxis of relational difference. A departure point that brings the scaffold histories and legacies of colonialism, dispossession, slavery, and indentureship into stark relief, relational difference troubles the overdetermined rhetoric of impending racial disturbance and chaos that haunt the political landscape. Tracing the specificity of indigenous and black dispossession and antiblackness as integral to Guyanese nation formation and the Caribbean more broadly, it ultimately calls for an expansive Caribbean feminist politics that reckons with indigenous political subjectivities and creates awareness of black belonging beyond statist framings toward mutual liberation.

This essay decodes how Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings uses the history of Jamaican music, culminating in the conflict between roots reggae and dancehall, to chart the Cold War’s temporality, futurity, and ideological conflicts over time, temporality, and futurity. A Brief History of Seven Killings points readers to a jaded, subaltern temporality encoded in a dancehall music that rejects the revolutionary utopianism woven into postindependence Jamaican music. The novel stages this temporal conflict at the center of Jamaican popular music through the status of revolutionary Cuba and the riddim-based technique of dancehall song composition, both of which converge in the itinerary of the “Death in the Arena” riddim. The novel thus invites readers to process the Cold War’s conflict over time and space through the lens of Jamaican music, attuned both to how geopolitics inflected that music and to how that music inflected geopolitics. Reading the evolution of Jamaican music since independence, this essay reveals how the form of James’s novel replicates the spectral and shattered assemblages of dancehall music in order to borrow some of its fugitive, subaltern autonomy.

Drawing from Earl Browder’s papers, this essay examines the Communist-sponsored, New York Spanish-language newspaper Pueblos Hispanos (1943–44), arguing that the publication staged an uneasy alliance between the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and the US Communist Party by positioning Puerto Rican independence as central to a wider decolonial Caribbean and postwar world order. By analyzing Pueblos Hispanos’s practice of “inter-nationalism”—a term the author proposes to denote the flexible strategy used to mediate between competing political interests and which can serve as a model for understanding the compromised collaborations between Communist and nationalist leaders in the Caribbean—this essay expands our understanding of Communist influence in Caribbean liberation movements and begins to reinsert the contributions of early-and mid-twentieth-century Puerto Ricans, and more widely, Spanish caribeños, within a Marxist-inflected Caribbean radical tradition.

In recent reinterpretations of the Caribbean dictatorial past, Caribbean American writers living in the United States challenge the Latin American dictator novel genre as a discursive tradition that reduces Caribbean culture to specific representations of power, oppression, and identity anchored in the political upheavals of the Cold War. This essay examines how the contemporary Caribbean writers Julia Álvarez, Junot Díaz, and Edwidge Danticat use familial dynamics to bring forth the multifaceted and complex realities of transnational communities, dispel ideas of cultural legitimacy based on exclusionary practices, disrupt everyday practices of cultural consumption, and empower Caribbean subjects to claim agency over their own stories and experiences.

This essay approaches the stage versions of Toussaint Louverture (1934) and The Black Jacobins (1967), first, to emphasize the role of C. L. R. James’s collaborations in the creation of the plays, and second, to argue that the latter version of the play presents a radical feminism that emerges precisely from these collaborations. One of the play’s most radical revisions is the centrality of the militant mulatta Marie-Jeanne, whose centrality challenges scholarly interpretations of James’s relationships with women and with feminism. This scholarship depicts James, at worst, as a paragon of patriarchy and, at best, as a man caught between the feminist politics of the women in his life and the constraints of a male-centered Caribbean revolutionary and anticolonial tradition. By contrast, this essay argues that the feminism in the play must be read beyond James the man and instead in the context of his collaborations, particularly with radical women thinkers.

This interview provides a rich account of Frank Birbalsingh’s experiences from his early life in colonial British Guiana in the early part of the twentieth century to his continuing work as a literary scholar and critic in diaspora. What is also revealed is a thoughtful critical reflection on the Caribbean, its multiplicity, and its course of change over a lifetime. The discussion also traces Birbalsingh’s migrations to India, Canada, New Zealand, and Nigeria and examines how these journeys have shaped his critical work within the fields of Commonwealth literature, postcolonial literature, and Caribbean studies, situating these shifts and movements within and against the backdrop of histories of decolonization. Birbalsingh’s early years in a plantation colony become prologue to his experience of education as a pathway to migration (a brain drain that still marks Guyanese and Caribbean experience to this day). The interviewers focus on the scholar’s career highlights and finally turn to the space that all wide-ranging departures and journeys beyond the nation encounter (regardless of emotional investments)—the place of exile and diaspora.

In 1941, a young José Lezama Lima, the Cuban poet, essayist, and novelist—who would go on to author the polemically erotic neobaroque masterwork Paradiso (1966) and essays on cultural expression in the Americas, such as “La expresión americana” (1957)—published an article in a Havana newspaper on the late-nineteenth-century queer Cuban modernista poet Julián del Casal that advocated for a decolonial poetics of reception and failure and a creative use of the artist’s archive. This is the first published English translation of Lezama Lima’s “Julián del Casal.”

This examination of José Lezama Lima’s groundbreaking essay on the controversial late-nineteenth-century Cuban poet Julián del Casal situates the essay in the postrevolutionary context in which it first appeared in a Havana newspaper in 1941, a year after the ratification of the Constitution of 1940 and the publication of Fernando Ortiz’s celebrated Cuban Counterpoint. It explores Lezama Lima’s essay as a response to this moment in Cuban history as one that sought to forge, according to Rafael Rojas, a new “pact of national reconciliation,” and was characterized by anxieties over Cubans’ ability to produce. It argues that Lezama Lima’s essay responded by turning from questions of production and proposing instead an urban aesthetic practice of reception and failure that foregrounds—in a manner not unlike contemporary queer critics—the racial and sexual spectral and ephemeral as sources for alternative forms of productivity and agency.

This review essay situates Christopher Taylor’s Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism (2018) in the context of the two-decade-long debate about the emergence of a liberal imperialism during the nineteenth century. Through an examination of the political economy of emancipation in the British West Indies, Taylor recasts the problem of liberal imperialism by decentering its justificatory discourses in the metropole to examine its practical effects in the colonies. In this turn, he provides an important and missing “materialization” of liberal empire that makes the deep connections between free trade and freeing slaves legible. The practical and theoretical coincidence of these nineteenth-century developments as well as Taylor’s reconstruction of a West Indian tradition of political economy provide a new way of conceptualizing colonial economic violence elaborated as the product of a neglectful empire. It is in this tradition of critiquing and resisting a neglectful empire that we find critical and normative resources to think beyond the terms of our own entrapments within the terms of liberal political economy.

This review essay explores the extent to which the phenomenon of imperial “neglect” proposed in Christopher Taylor’s Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism (2018) maintains saliency in the wake of national independence throughout the British Caribbean. Through a reading of Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, the essay highlights how the market logics of mid-nineteenth-century imperial liberalization continued to animate new forms of West Indian erasure well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. While Kincaid deploys arguments of imperial neglect, she refuses the aspirations for repair that neglect implies. By stressing the impossibility of repairing the violence of British colonial rule, her work instead asks, What new forms of thought become possible beyond argumentative frames of repair?

This essay serves as a response to the review essays by Adom Getachew and Petal Samuel on the author’s 2018 Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism. Exploring how the history of liberal capitalism that Empire of Neglect tells might afford critical and political purchase on the epoch of postcolonial neoliberalism, this essay reflects on modes of archival attunement and Caribbean philosophies of history.