Issues

When Christopher Columbus’s human remains were discovered in a lead box inside Santo Domingo’s Basilica Cathedral of Santa María la Menor in 1877, Santo Domingo City Hall proposed commissioning a statue and a mausoleum. The Columbus statue featured an india, or a Native woman, presumably Taino chieftain Anacaona, on the pedestal base, writing words of praise to the admiral, who stood atop the monument. This essay explores how Anacaona’s racialized and gendered body symbolically validated a public nationalist discourse, while arguably erasing the roles that Blacks and Indigenous peoples had played in shaping island life since 1492.

This essay extends and contributes to existing scholarship by uncovering instances of cooperation and collaboration that suggest alternative views of Hispaniola and complicate contemporary political and social realities in the Dominican Republic. It focuses on Manuel Rueda’s 1998 Las metamorfosis de Makandal, in which François Makandal is imagined as a protean god. The author argues that Rueda’s Makandal is best understood as the embodiment of the vanguard poetic movement, Pluralismo. The Maroon becomes a central figure in the island’s story, as well as a figure of aesthetic possibilities and boundless exploration, like a pluralema. Rueda imagines a cosmic Makandal who is unhindered by racial or gender constructs, by space or time. Ultimately, he is a figure whose metamorphosis rewrites Hispaniola’s story and challenges rigid binaries that limit the way we view the Dominican Republic as a nation, Dominican national identity, Dominican-Haitian relations, and—more broadly—the island of Hispaniola.

Whether emplotted as epic or as tragedy, the tales told about a nation’s revolutionary past do not tend to elicit laughter as much as awe and solemnity. This is the case with Cuba’s national epic, the story of its nineteenth-century wars for independence (1868–98)—the story of Cuba Libre. This essay analyzes how the animated cartoon shorts and film series Elpidio Valdés (1974–2003) comically inflects the story of Cuba Libre with ridiculing laughter and choteo (folk humor). The series puts forth both a hero more akin to a populist trickster than a Spartan and a revolutionary war more akin to carnivalesque drama than to the Homeric epic. In so doing, it subtly critiques the didactic and panegyric rhetoric that has shrouded the national (as well as the socialist) epic and, in its stead, offers a jocular and fallible revolutionary subject in a more participatory and less austere epic.

Inspired by the enigmatic phrase “Le poème tué” (the murdered poem) that the author saw written on the walls of Port-au-Prince, this essay explores street art in Port-au-Prince as staging a public debate about different ways of approaching a life of precarity and crisis. It analyzes “Le poème tué” graffiti by young Haitian poet Ricardo Boucher, along with murals by Jerry (Jerry Rosembert Moïse) and Francisco Silva, political graffiti about the PetroCaribe corruption scandal, and the writing and artwork on tap-tap buses, as emergent affects and ideologies about the art of flourishing “in spite of all.” In a succession of accidental encounters, the author claims, passersby find in the public city competing ideas about how to negotiate unlivable circumstances through moral character, the building of community, or revolution.

This essay is part of a special section on Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s 1975 essay “Caribbean Man in Space and Time” (reprinted in the issue), briefly tracing the dissemination history of Brathwaite’s essay, then focusing on two main lines of argument in it to explore their significance for current practices and possibilities in Caribbean studies. Using three contemporary digital projects as examples, the author elaborates on the potential affordances and limitations of digital platforms and technologies as (in Brathwaite’s terms) “agents of change,” while arguing the case for “how the digital allows us to think the Caribbean differently.”

archipelago: fragments: a geological plate being crushed by the pacific’s curve, cracking open yucatan; the arctic/north american monolith: hence cuba, hispaniola, puerto rico: continental outriders and the dust of the bahamas. atlantic africa pushing up the beaches of our eastern seawards

the history reflects the pressure and passage of lava, storm, stone, earthquake, crack, coral: their rise and fall of landscapes: destructions, lost memories: atlantis, atahualpa, ashanti: creations: fragments
it would be better to begin with caribbean man: crouched: legitimate bastard: against space: dwarf, clenched fist of time

the unity is submarine
breathing air, the societies were successively amerindian, european, creole. the amerindian several; the european various; the creole plural
subsistent plantation maroon
multilingual multi-ethnic many ancestored
fragments
the unity is submarine
breathing air, our problem is how to study the fragments/whole

This essay suggests that Caribbean studies and Black studies might be constituted as twins, arguing that Blackness and Black people are the foundational instituted terms of both studies. This argument is based in the author’s reading of the anglophone Caribbean and draws on Kamau Brathwaite’s insights of how a psycho-poetics of thought shapes Caribbeanness.

This essay reads Kamau Brathwaite’s seminal 1975 essay “Caribbean Man in Space and Time” in terms of its rhetorical politics. Conceptually, the essay’s hybrid and heterogeneous discourses and registers are theorized in terms drawn from Clifford Geertz, Leah Rosenberg, and Mandy Bloomfield. Brathwaite’s style effectively instantiates “Caribbean Man” as an exemplary model of the practice of Caribbean studies. The essay is posited as a palimpsestic text, haunted by Brathwaite’s prior creative and critical texts as well as the work of other Caribbean writers and intellectuals and animated by metaphors of creolization that derive from the archipelago’s geology, geography, and history. Ultimately, “Caribbean Man,” while immured in the nationalist sensibility of the 1970s, eschews a reductive nationalist politics for a more expansive notion of nation and community akin to Wilson Harris’s shamanic espousal of Indigenous and ancestral presences in the Caribbean imaginary.

This essay uses Kamau Brathwaite’s conceptualizations of the “inner plantation” and “neglected Maroons” in his field-making 1975 essay “Caribbean Man in Space and Time” to meditate on the multiple meanings of home within Garifuna political subjectivity. St. Vincent holds epistemological status as the Garifuna homeland associated with ancestral marronage. The author looks at how public performances of Garifuna Settlement Day in Central America and the United States (New York City is home to the largest Garifuna communities outside Central America’s Caribbean coasts) open an alternative—ancestral—terrain within the interior geographies of Indigenous Blackness. By framing ethnographic vignettes of Garifuna ancestral memory throughout the diaspora as an embodied archive of knowledge production, this essay demonstrates how Brathwaite’s mapping of an intellectual genealogy creates space for reimagining the geographies of marronage, resistance, and survival within the interior landscapes of Caribbean expressive culture and life.

A la Gloria del Gran Arquitecto del Universo.

Tomo la palabra para agradecer al Maestro de la Logia y a los diligentes súbditos de este augusto templo por haberme acogido. Y aquí estoy, dentro de la familia masónica. He llegado aquí bajo la dirección de hermanos, verdaderos hermanos; quisiera llamarlos hijos de la misma Patria, porque, al vernos, a nosotros los extranjeros, nos pudieron haber dejado pasar, diciendo: “He aquí hombres que deambulan sin asilo, he aquí niños huérfanos de madre”.⁴ Al contrario, ustedes han optado por decir: “He aquí extranjeros que han sido alejados de su ruta; he aquí ciudadanos del mundo que vagan; he aquí hijos desheredados de la libertad”. Ustedes, hombres de amor y buena voluntad, nos han abierto los brazos y hoy nos llaman: Hermanos.

This review essay enters into conversation with Greg Beckett’s 2019 There Is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince to think through the geographies and temporalities of how crisis is known. Focusing on the urban Caribbean, it interrogates broadly circulating understandings of the city-as-crisis, asking how the “where” of crisis connects to a geographical imagination that sites Caribbean cultural authenticity in the countryside. Next, it reflects on the temporalities of crisis, in relation to Beckett’s conceptualization of crisis as a chronic condition, as the routinized anticipation of rupture. Despite a rich tradition of Caribbean scholarship on temporalities, there has been limited engagement with the region’s urban time-spaces. The author suggests that a more thorough consideration of Caribbean urban futures in particular might allow us to read an anticipatory attunement to insecurity and instability as an urban mode of temporal experience, in which future making in and through uncertainty can be not a source of despair but of hope.

Examining Greg Beckett’s 2019 There Is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince, this critical essay explores the notion of radical hope in the midst of tragedy and crisis in Haiti. It attempts to reframe the idea of hope from the perspective of a Haitian American who studies Haiti through the lens of literary texts and within a global analysis, arguing that Beckett’s book is more than an anthropological study of crisis; it is an act of memorializing the various ways a generation reflects on the idea of hope. The author’s reading of There Is No More Haiti calls for more critical studies on what Haitians can teach us about the importance of hope in times of disaster, about the understanding of hope as a pervasive feeling.

La nation est au coeur des débats de l’école haïtienne d’anthropologie/ethnologie. Malgré les désaccords autour de la question nationale animant les tenants de cette école, une certaine historiographie, inspirée par les lectures des postcolonial studies et des Africana studies, reprenant à leur compte le corpus de la négritude, met en avant, en son sein, une communauté de vue sur l’Afrique. Partant de ce constat et pour illustrer les changements intervenus, en Haïti, dans les représentations de l’Afrique, cet cet essai critique de There Is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince (2019) par Greg Beckett revient sur le hiatus entre les pensées de Joseph Anténor Firmin et de Jean Price-Mars, deux grandes figures de l’école haïtienne d’anthropologie/ethnologie. Se dévoilent ainsi l’évolution lente puis la brusque mutation qui, des années 1910 aux années 1950, accompagnent l’image d’une « Afrique » articulée à différents paradigmes.

In this essay, anthropologist Greg Beckett responds to Rivke Jaffe’s, Nadège T. Clitandre’s, and Jhon Picard Byron’s critical engagements with his 2019 ethnography, There Is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince. Beckett discusses issues of representation and form, how gender and age shape people’s experience of crisis, the discourse of Haitian exceptionalism, and the need to rethink crisis in Haiti from the standpoint of the conceptual categories and lived experiences of those who most directly feel the brunt of the destructive forces of predatory capitalism, political instability, and foreign intervention.