Issues

This essay seeks to add a set of novellas written by Raphaël Confiant between 1994 and 1997 to the ongoing conversation surrounding the Éloge de la créolité and its controversial legacy. In the nearly thirty years since its publication, the Éloge and its authors have been dispraised for their monomaniacal concern for the past and their phallocentric disregard for women’s critical role in the transmission of Antillean culture. Far from suggesting that these accusations are ill-founded, this essay contends that Confiant responded to the critiques and confronted the Éloge’s blindspots in his Trilogie tropicale. These exuberant works, which think through the effects of modernity, globalization, and cultural domination on contemporary Martinique, have been largely ignored, perhaps because they do not follow the poetic principles outlined in the Éloge. Rather than treating them apart from other créoliste writings, this essay proposes that they constitute a self-reflexive moment in Confiant’s oeuvre.

This essay examines the second installment of Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau’s trilogy Une enfance créole, using Chemin-d’école to consider how writers from the Caribbean may deploy magic in their texts in alternative ways to the magical realist mode, which critics have argued often reinforces a false dichotomy between a rational “West” and its irrational “others.” Specifically, Chamoiseau’s memoir both portrays creole magical beliefs as a vehicle through which its school-aged protagonists resist the ideology of neocolonial pedagogies, and it consistently refers to aspects of French civilization through the lens of the magical or marvelous. Ultimately, this essay argues, Chemin-d’école looks beyond magical motifs as mere emblems of tradition or authenticity. Using them instead to portray the neocolonial “civilizing mission” as its own form of magical thinking, the narration destabilizes the very ideas of the essential difference of Caribbean cultures and of the purported rationality of the West.

This essay deals with issues of citizenship, artistic labor, and belonging in the context of the Dominican Republic. It examines the collaborative work of the Colectivo Quintapata to understand how artistic collaboration is used as a way for generating social transformation and reaching audiences beyond the artistic medium. Analyzing art installations, public interventions, and socially engaged art pieces produced by Quintapata between 2009 and 2014, this essay argues that artistic collaboration works in the case of Quintapata, not so much as a formula but rather as a flexible tool employed to face situations of economic and institutional precariousness, extending the outcomes of each project beyond its original temporality and audience.

The long 1950s in Jamaica encompassed the pivotal moments that set into motion the infrastructures of modern political, social, economic, and artistic activity. They also brought into relief struggles over the appropriate scales of interaction, whether national, regional, Pan-African, or diasporic. This essay lays out three of the experiential baselines that would have undergirded these processes—the beginnings of developmentalism, the normativity of migration, and the more explicit emergence of the United States as a significant actor within political and economic affairs. It argues that by the end of the long 1950s, the earlier-twentieth-century story of an emergent civil society in Jamaica was displaced by the story of political society. The result has been a formal decolonization that lacked some of the decolonial social and cultural visions of earlier moments.

In Jamaica in the 1940s and 1950s, prominent women and women’s organizations led a notorious campaign to promote mass weddings. The campaign targeted working-class black Jamaicans living together in long-term heterosexual relationships and was aimed at improving the status of women and children and readying working-class Jamaicans for citizenship. This essay explores mass weddings as a form of women’s activism in the mid-twentieth century, and it reflects on M. G. Smith’s trenchant critique of mass weddings in his introduction to Edith Clarke’s iconic study My Mother Who Fathered Me. Smith identifies a governor’s wife as the instigator of the campaign, not the black Jamaican middle-class nationalist feminists who were responsible, yet his account has ascended to a form of academic folk knowledge that is oft repeated and rarely probed. As a valued resource for understanding late colonialism in the Caribbean, it has caricatured Caribbean feminist interventions in nationalist projects, and it contributes to the feminization of an enduring Caribbean “coloniality.”

This essay examines discourses of homosexuality in late colonial Jamaica through an analysis of the 1951 Police Enquiry, which leveraged accusations of homosexuality among Jamaica’s foreign police officers as a key component of its investigative work. With information from Jamaican state records, news media, literature, and social science studies, the essay argues that the inquiry mobilized divergent discourses of homosexuality across the Atlantic to enact an anticolonial nationalist form of sexual regulation. The inquiry drew not only from Jamaican figurations of homosexuality as the preserve of wealthy white foreign men but also from the Wolfenden Committee proceedings that led to the decriminalization of homosexuality in England and from the “Lavender Scare” that purged homosexuals from federal government employment in the United States. Despite its failing to reform Jamaica’s police force, the inquiry nevertheless foregrounds how sexual regulation operates through the interconnected workings of race, class, gender, and nation.

This essay examines the political economy of Caribbean cultural capital and the formation of reggae in Jamaica in the 1950s. Through study of the Afro-Asian intimacies and tensions embedded in the sound of preindependence Jamaica, the essay traces the birth of the “sound-system” to the networks of local small-retail grocery shops, ubiquitous across Jamaica, that were owned and operated by Jamaican Chinese shopkeepers and examines how they formed material infrastructures. In charting the hardwiring of speakers and how the sociality of the shop housed the production of a new sound, the essay argues that sonic innovation was derived from Afro-Jamaican servicepeople who returned from World War II with military technological expertise, which they applied to sound engineering, and from entrepreneurial guilds of Jamaican merchants and shopkeepers of Chinese, Afro-Chinese, and Indo-Chinese descent, who helped form the conditions of possibility for the production and global distribution of reggae. Thus the networks of Jamaican Chinese diasporic capital and talent, producing and performing, helped to engineer the electrical flows of reggae to rural areas and urban dancehall parties.

This essay explores how and with what effect Amy Bailey, a teacher, women’s rights activist, and public intellectual, cofounded the Housecraft Training Centre to educate working-class Jamaican women in cooking, cleaning, childcare, and other “domestic sciences.” Newspaper articles, unpublished interviews, and other texts reveal that Bailey used the center to articulate a vision of working-class black ladyhood that advanced black women’s sense of racial dignity by valorizing elitist, patriarchal narratives at work in 1950s Jamaica. In doing so, Bailey ultimately fostered, as well as stymied, the possibility that Jamaica would come to realize what its national ethos professed—that it was an increasingly plural, prosperous, and egalitarian state well positioned for political independence from Britain.

The “creation” of Jamaican national identity owed much to the artistic movement that preceded and followed independence in 1962. While depictions of the peasantry, particularly male laborers, have become iconic representations of “true” Jamaicans, the scholarship surrounding these works has conspicuously ignored any erotic potential inherent in them. Using the contemporaneous, mostly private homoerotic photographic archive of Archie Lindo as a point of entry, this essay questions and complicates the narrative surrounding nationalist-era art in Jamaica, particularly the ways the black male body was mobilized in the development of Jamaican art and visual culture.

This essay utilizes an alternative politics of directionality as a way of reentering the mid-twentieth-century Caribbean literary archive. Rather than focusing on Windrush as the main orienting point, this discussion examines and regrounds what events and institutions in Jamaica might tell us about the literary 1950s. Beginning by rethinking the historiographical gaze toward London, the author then raises key questions about what the narrative of the founding of the English department at the University College of the West Indies and the work of Focus magazine in Jamaica might tell us about the development of literary culture in the Caribbean. The author ends by thinking about how a focus on returns might also help us to rethink the decade. The essay examines instances of migrant returns, through which people recrossed the waters, and explores literary remittances that saw the role and function of the London scene being debated and contested within the region.

This essay argues that three lessons have emerged from the Jamaican Cultural-Political Modern Project convenings that clarify its productive methodological stakes: living with disagreements, seeing interconnected inquiries, and creating embodied archives of critical re-memories. The essay foregrounds the backstory to make visible the intellectual care work that attends this practice.

Held at Montreal’s McGill University from 11 to 14 October 1968, the “Congress of Black Writers: Toward the Second Emancipation—the Dynamics of Black Liberation” was dubbed the largest Black Power conference ever held outside the United States. In Moving Against the System: The 1968 Congress of Black Writers and the Making of Global Consciousness, David Austin has compiled the surviving transcripts of this historic gathering, including the speeches by Walter Rodney, C. L. R. James, Stokely Carmichael, and Richard B. Moore, and he provides an extended introduction locating Montreal within the global politics of the late 1960s. This essay considers Moving Against the System as an archive of black and Caribbean history, examining both the debates that occurred among the participants of the conference and Austin’s role as an archivist and interpreter of Montreal’s radical past.

In Moving Against the System: The 1968 Congress of Black Writers and the Making of Global Consciousness, David Austin continues his important work as the leading historian of 1960s black Montreal. Moving Against the System illuminates histories that are critical to an understanding of black radicalism in Canada, the Caribbean, and the African diaspora, more broadly. This work decenters the United States as the nexus of Black Power, allowing readers to think about Canada as an understudied site of black radical organizing. While the congress viewed Black Nationalism as a serious political framework for defeating both racism and colonialism, all the speakers were male. This essay critiques the masculinist politics of Black Power at the congress and analyzes how Austin navigates the absence of women’s voices among the congress’s speakers.

This essay views David Austin’s Moving Against the System: The 1968 Congress of Black Writers and the Making of Global Consciousness through the prism of dread history as a way of considering how this text can be understood as a chronicling of the congress while also acting as a harbinger of the radical methodological impulses of dread history. Drawing on the speeches and proceedings detailed in the anthology, while also surveying the broader moment of the “global 1968,” the essay explores some of the antagonisms that underpinned the congress to examine the broader antagonisms of this moment, which include the “absented presence” of black women radicals. The essay ends with a meditation on the stakes of such a project for black Canada and its often veiled (but no less insurgent) dread-historical contributions to the global 1968 and current struggles for liberation.

Rounding out a discussion of Moving Against the System: The 1968 Congress of Black Writers and the Making of Global Consciousness, the author engages in a dialogue with his respondents about the significance of the congress. This essay assesses the legacy of the 1968 congress as a manifestation of the black radical tradition and a critical involvement with socialism. Drawing on C. L. R. James and Sylvia Wynter, it argues that black freedom struggles in the Americas and Europe, including slave revolts, have been an essential part of the history of labor and freedom struggles. It also contends that race has been overdetermined in ways that have historically understated the centrality of black labor to the emergence of modern capitalism, to anticapitalist struggle, and to the movement for universal freedom and a more broadly defined socialism. The essay concludes by asserting that black radical politics pose a challenge to the color- and colonial-blindness of the conventional Left while at the same time reimaging what freedom can mean in the present.