Issues

Given the importance of literature to various forms of social cohesion, it is not surprising that the European and US empires that have dominated the geopolitical existence of the insular Caribbean have not readily invested in literary infrastructure throughout the archipelago. The impact of empire on infrastructure for the production of Caribbean literature remains underexamined at large, however. Accounting for the political and economic dimensions of the literary power produced by empire would contribute to the denaturalization of such power, and, this essay argues, decolonize the terms of literary value. The author illuminates the centrality of literary infrastructure to Caribbean literary history through a reparative critique of Pascale Casanova’s theory of the world literary marketplace in dialogue with reflections by a contemporaneous set of highly influential authors from the francophone, hispanophone, and anglophone Caribbean: Aimé Césaire, Lino Novás Calvo, George Lamming, and V. S. Naipaul.

This essay weaves together translation and postcolonial literary studies to propose a translational model of reading for Caribbean literature. Translation and creolization provide the conceptual and aesthetic lens for reading Caribbean literary texts: If translation is an apt model, since it captures languages in transit toward other languages and other contexts, creolization embodies the points of contact among what Naoki Sakai calls the “uncountable languages within the literary texts,” unlocking novel ideas of language and literature. The essay offers “translational reading” of texts by Derek Walcott, Velma Pollard, and Dionne Brand as an alternative to the traditionally monolingual model of reading.

In 2017 the radical women’s rights group known as the Tambourine Army emerged in response to gender-based violence, sexual abuse, and structures of impunity in Jamaica. The group used hashtags, organized marches, and teach-ins to encourage women to speak out against their abusers, to break the silence surrounding sexual abuse, and to advocate for survivors. Situating the Tambourine Army within traditions of women’s protest and contemporary forms of cyberactivism in the Caribbean, this essay examines the ways the group enacted a sonic disruption to the public and cyber spheres. It chronicles the rise of the movement, explores the centrality of the digital in the members’ activism, and assesses the methods deployed in the group’s contestation of postcolonial ideals of respectability.

Sweden became a slaveholding nation when it acquired its only Caribbean colony, Saint-Barthélemy—a.k.a. St. Barths or St. Barts—from France in 1784. When the island was retroceded in 1878, the records created during ninety-four years of Swedish Caribbean rule were left behind and are now held in France. Examining the history of this archive that stands as a metaphor for Swedish colonial amnesia, this essay discusses the reluctance in Sweden to recognize a past that goes against a self-image untainted by slavery and colonialism. The essay also discusses a project that aims to open the archive to a larger audience through digitization.

This essay serves as an introduction to the special section “States of Crisis.” Principally a meditation on political and ecological crisis in the Caribbean, this introduction revisits two concurrent events—the devastation of The Bahamas by Hurricane Dorian, and the arrival of the first oil production vessel in Guyanese territorial waters—and probes the contradictions between the extractive imperative of economic nationalism and the existential threat of Caribbean extinction. Engaging “flags of convenience” as a practice of merchant ship registration and a metaphor for the ideal of postcolonial sovereignty, this essay considers how climate crisis demands a refusal of the state form as the limit to a regional political horizon and a rejection of nationalist historiography as a basis for the project of Caribbean criticism.

Set against the backdrop of soaring inflation, rolling blackouts, fuel riots, roadblocks, and antigovernment protests, this essay explores a new language of political crisis in Haiti that draws on the concept of unlivable life. In so doing, it seeks to directly connect political responses to crisis, such as protests over the high cost of living or government corruption, with ordinary or seemingly banal disasters, such as a capsized boat that led to the deaths of dozens of overseas migrants to show how the political crisis in Haiti appears in people’s lives in both ordinary and catastrophic ways. The essay aims to show how the Haitian concept of “the unlivable” can help us theorize the dialectical relationship between a general atmosphere of crisis and the particular effects, or ordinary disasters, to which it routinely gives rise.

Looking ethnographically at the 2018 flooding of Greenvale Park, Trinidad, and in conversation with disasters and their aftershocks throughout the region, this essay explores the entanglements of crisis, loss, and liberation. Drawing on the grassroot responses to recent not-so-natural crisis events as evidence, it shows that repetitive states of coconstituted ecological and political-economic devastation create vivid spaces of loss that make clear to the affected that repeating states of dystopia cannot be ruptured by the reiteration of the past political visions of nation-states. Finally, the essay suggests that our apocalyptic present makes the case for an abolitionist praxis to intentionally end this world that singularly values Man₂/homo oeconomicus to save ourselves as a species.

This essay offers a critical perspective on the role technology plays in the Caribbean formation of climate adaptation. It locates this critical perspective in “the embodiment of technology,” a concept in the writings of the late political economist Norman Girvan that helped him describe how Caribbean states acquire technology and related infrastructures despite at times not having resources to maintain them. The embodiment of technology is still important today for mapping the possibilities of climate adaptation—that is, if technology transfer is a historically embodied process, then climate adaptation is a measure of how people recognize the political failures and the potentials of technology over time. The essay suggests that attention to Girvan’s writings is central to critical Caribbean scholarship on climate change for two reasons: his writings reflect the forms of intergenerational responsibility that shape climate adaptation, and they examine the shifting meaning of technology to regional identity.

This essay addresses the epistemic limits of crisis as a trope for thinking about the future of Puerto Rico in the context of fiscal austerity programs and the combined effects of multiple disasters. Small-scale agriculture and mutual aid offer models of resistance to US colonialism as the underlying power structure reinforcing debt and political subservience. What can be perceived or accomplished outside the self-perpetuating frame of crisis? This essay sketches the contours of a different approach, one that considers what Puerto Ricans owe to each other as well as accounts for those debts owed to Puerto Ricans that will likely never be paid.

The crisis unleashed in Barbuda by Hurricane Irma in 2017 followed centuries of neglect by the British colonial state and then by the postcolonial government of its sister island, Antigua. Barbuda developed customary communal-land tenure as a result of its peculiarities in slavery and freedom, and this survival strategy has doubled as political and economic resistance to encroachment by Antigua, where private land ownership and uneven opportunity abound because of the unstable, cyclical nature of its main industry—tourism. Although Barbudans have long delimited tourism development and refused private land ownership, citing communal land as their shield, these issues have resurfaced in the rebuilding process after Hurricane Irma. Barbudans’ desires to maintain their previous way of life remain hampered by the Antiguan government’s disaster capitalist desires to reconstruct Barbuda as a resort paradise. This essay reveals how climate change, economic fragility, and uncertain sovereignty have collectively undermined Barbuda’s customary forms of independence, leaving dispossession in their wake.

Yarimar Bonilla is a professor in the Department of Africana, Puerto Rican, and Latino Studies at Hunter College and in the PhD Program in Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment (2015); a coeditor of Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm (2019); and a founder of the Puerto Rico Syllabus Project.

This essay offers a critical engagement with historian Peter James Hudson’s groundbreaking text Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean. It begins with an analysis of Hudson’s detailed account of the entanglements of the internationalization of US banking, imperialism, and (neo)colonialism in the epoch of US-led finance capitalism. Then it builds on Hudson’s concept of “racial capitalism,” which the author defines and explicates as a war-driven racially hierarchical global system constituting white supremacist accumulation, dependent extraction, imperial expropriation, labor superexploitation, and (neo)colonial absorption of financial risk. Next, it analyzes antiblackness—understood as legitimating architecture that devalues, distorts, criminalizes, and abjects those racialized as black—as a constitutive feature of racial capitalism. Finally, the essay illuminates the latter’s inextricable link to antiradicalism, defined as the disciplining of communists, socialists, and other radicals whose ideas, politics, or practices are deemed subversive of or threatening to the perpetuation of the capitalist world-economy.

This discussion of Peter James Hudson’s Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean focuses on the way transnational banks are revealed to be players of multiple roles in the development of past and present Caribbean economies. The banks were hardly mere stalking horses for imperialism, and their considerable autonomy and self-interest were sometimes at odds with the objectives of both host governments and metropoles. They acquired a cosmopolitan character that allowed them to bypass particular national identities when convenient. Caribbean markets lay at the epicenter of their financial projects, which employed racism as a technology to banking interests, and racial capitalism grafted itself onto existing hierarchical systems. Hudson has shown the banks to be heirs to a long history of Caribbean commerce that tracks the shadowy line between the legal and the illicit and the piracy and smuggling of the past to the money laundering, tax evasion, and drug smuggling of the present.

This essay offers a response to two critical commentaries—from diplomatic historian Brenda Gayle Plummer and political theorist Clarisse Burden-Stelly—on the author’s Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean. While locating both commentaries under the epistemological and political purview of the radical wing of black studies, the essay focuses on four topics that appear in Plummer’s and Burden-Stelly’s comments: (1) the question of class, and in particular the role of the Caribbean middle classes, in the history of finance, banking, imperial expansion, and Caribbean sovereignty; (2) the particular status and nature of the Caribbean region within the history of capitalism; (3) the nature and the meaning of the well-worn term racial capitalism; and (4) the idea of “war” as a fundamental aspect of the modes of regulation and accumulation of said racial capitalism.