This essay argues for a comparative approach to studying and reading Black Caribbean women’s poetry. In particular, it focuses on the works of Cuban Soleida Ríos and Tobagonian Canadian M. NourbeSe Philip in their publications at the close of the 1980s. The essay asks, How does a recuperation of a poetics between Ríos and Philip enhance a study of the body? Through a close reading of two poems, it points to instances of absence and disappearance as generative signals that enable these women to transgress the silences that structure imaginative and lived experiences. In doing so, language, interiority, and grammar become critical spaces for readers to witness the transformative subjectivities that abound when journeying with these women’s poetry.
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Warren Harding is Deans’ Faculty Fellow and visiting assistant professor of Africana studies at Brown University, where he earned his PhD in Africana studies and AM in comparative literature. He studies twentieth-century Black Caribbean women writers and cultural producers. More broadly, he is interested in ways of reading African and Caribbean diasporic literary cultures that enhance comparative geographic, feminist, and humanistic inquiry and learning.
Recent texts in Latinx literature have ghosts that demonstrate new knowledge about history, culture, and subjectivity. In Song of the Water Saints and Soledad, the first novels of authors Nelly Rosario and Angie Cruz, respectively, the figure of the ghost is a trope that imaginatively reconnects communities of women that are fractured by the corruptive influence of the United States and other Western nations in the Latin Caribbean. The ghost of Graciela in Song of the Water Saints and the “living ghost” of Olivia in Soledad allow readers to see how matrilineal bonds in families can be restored. These ties are cut by the prolonged and detrimental exploitation of the Dominican Republic by the United States and more generally the West. With a focus on women, the use of ghosts in these novels attends to the material, historical, and cultural practices between people and the geographies they inhabit.
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Susan C. Méndez is professor in the Department of English and Theatre at the University of Scranton. Many of her courses support the women’s and gender studies and Latin American studies programs. Her publications have appeared in journals such as Centro: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Chicana/Latina Studies, Afro-Hispanic Review, MaComère: The Journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars, and Label Me Latina/o.
This essay analyzes the genre of mémoire produced by gens de couleur (free people of color) within the colonial and military bureaucracy of revolutionary Saint-Domingue. Building on recent scholarship on Toussaint Louverture’s 1802 “Mémoire du général Toussaint Louverture,” it situates the genre in broader conversation with the mass of bureaucratic and administrative writing in the colony by offering close readings of mémoires from Julien Raimond and André Rigaud. Though written for different purposes, these mémoires evince a shared formal and rhetorical strategy: they present textual evidence and employ forensic rhetoric to refute competing claims and vindicate their cause. By elucidating the generic conventions of the mémoire, this essay contributes to the growing body of scholarship on Black writing that has moved beyond the paradigm of the slave narrative toward other forms and genres of Black protest. In so doing, it refocuses vindicationism on these rhetorical evidentiary practices, rather than on the mythos of romance and romantic overcoming that has categorized vindicationist narratives of the Haitian Revolution.
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Chelsea Stieber is associate professor of French and francophone studies at Catholic University of America, Washington, DC. She is author of Haiti’s Paper War: Post-independence Writing, Civil War, and the Making of the Republic, 1804–1954 (2020), and coeditor, with Brandon Byrd, of the critical translation of Louis Joseph Janvier’s Haiti for the Haitians (forthcoming). Her scholarship and essays have appeared in academic journals, including Francosphères, French Studies, and Contemporary French
This essay concentrates on the relation between song and history in the lives of the enslaved and the afterlives of slavery, particularly by tracing the history of the song “Take Him to the Gulley,” which became known as “the famous slave song of Jamaica.” Thinking alongside Katherine McKittrick’s and Sylvia Wynter’s work on plantation geographies, the author argues that the gulley, a site of mass burial in the center of the song, was also a site of Black cultural expression and futurity—a place where death and life, torture and escape, enslavement and freedom collided and shaped each other. The essay traces the song as both a mode and a performance of history, in which, through the workings of reclamation, remembrance, and redress, an enslaver’s perverse punishment became a people’s history.
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Kathleen Donegan is associate professor of English and Daniel E. Koshland Distinguished Chair in Writing at the University of California, Berkeley. She is author of Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early America(2014), which explores the relationship between suffering and violence in the early English colonial settlement period and argues that the first forms of colonial subjectivity and literature appeared out of this catastrophic relationship. She is currently working on a project titled “The Spectral Plantation: The Other Worlds of Slavery,” which traces the “other worlds”
This essay explores how Daniel Maximin constructs an imagined past in his novel Lone Sun by wrenching archival sources out of their domain and context and selectively situating them in a narrative replete with cultural and oral traditions. It examines how Maximin remembers those who go unaccounted for and counters the commodification of select heroes by giving voice to the voiceless and minimizing the iconization of Victor Schoelcher and sacrificial hero Louis Delgrès. Maximin’s novel proves a resistant act intended to fracture the continuity of French colonial power maintained through its archival system and selective memory commodification.
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Leanna Thomas is a White settler doctoral candidate at the University of New Brunswick, Canada. Prior to attending UNB, she studied at the University of Central Florida, where she examined Acadians’ resettlement in Louisiana following their deportation from Canada. She has published in Louisiana Historyand Acadiensis. The recipient of a Canadian federal Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council scholarship, she is currently comparing how twentieth-century literature has contributed to creating historical narratives of resilience
This interview with acclaimed Trinbagonian Canadian author M. NourbeSe Philip offers an insight into her creative process, particularly in relation to Zong! As Told to the Author by Setaey Adamu Boateng. It delves into the critical querying and ethical concerns guiding this work and others and features a unique and rare insight into Philip’s recordkeeping of her literary papers, as well as her long-time engagement with African diasporic histories and the archive of the slave trade. Philip also discusses the Black Lives Matter uprisings in the summer of 2020, following the killing of George Floyd, and the profitability of amnesia in our capitalist societies. In this interview, readers can also access a recent poem, “When the looting starts . . . ,” which Philip dedicates to African American activist Tamika D. Mallory.
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Marta Fernández Campa is a literary scholar whose research and writing focus on the creative processes of writers and visual artists, in particular, their critical inquiries into historical archives and notions of archiving. She is a former Fulbright and Leverhulme Fellow and has published her work in Caribbean Literature in Transition, volume 3, and in the journals Callaloo, Comma, Small Axe, and Anthurium, among others. She serves as special projects editor at Caribbean InTransit.
This introduction opens a special section featuring a series of tributes in homage to Kamau Brathwaite. The author’s generational perspective becomes the occasion for a reflection on Brathwaite’s legacy, creative voice, and sustained vision of the future of the Caribbean. The essay further presents an account of the author’s attempt to shelter and represent this legacy in the form of Kamau at Ninety, a university course in Brathwaite’s honor, offered in the surreal months of January to May 2020.
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Aaron Kamugisha is Ruth Simmons Professor of Africana Studies at Smith College. He is the editor of ten books and special issues of journals on Caribbean and Africana thought and author of Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition (2019).
This essay takes the form of a brief tribute to the life and work of Kamau Brathwaite and his first wife, Doris Brathwaite. It is written from the point of view of a writer who knew Kamau personally and who considers herself to be the beneficiary of his immense wisdom and iconoclasm. The essay provides anecdotal accounts of an awards ceremony in London, when Kamau delivered a powerful exhortation to Caribbean writers, and of a New Year’s Day party held at his house in Jamaica, at which Kamau and Doris demonstrated immense thoughtfulness to the assembled guests. It focuses briefly on X/Self, makes mention of the Zea Mexican Diary, and references Rex Nettleford and Philip Sherlock.
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Lorna Goodison is a major figure in world literature. She was Poet Laureate of Jamaica (2017–20) and was awarded the 2019 Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Other awards for her work include the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Poetry from Yale University, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Musgrave Gold Medal from Jamaica, and the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, one of Canada’s largest literary prizes, for From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People (2007). In addition to the memoir, she is the author of twelve books.
This essay tracks Kamau Brathwaite’s life, his poetic and critical writing, and his travails and thinking, from youth and early career—in Barbados, England, Ghana, and the Caribbean, but mainly from his arrival at New York University in 1991—through his retirement in 2013 and return to Barbados, up to his death in 2020. It especially follows Kamau from his low “time of salt” of the late 1980s in Jamaica through the stunning critical and poetic burgeoning from the 1990s on, with such works as Barabajan Poems; the two-volume MR; the prize-winning Born to Slow Horses; and Elegguas and his unpublished third poetry trilogy, Missa Solemnis, Rwanda Poems, and Dead Man Witness, commemorating and trying to rise beyond what he called his “cultural lynching.” The essay looks at Brathwaite’s online/print Sycorax voice and the politico-philosophico-cultural concept of tidalectics that he developed over these years to create an ongoing Caribbean-based decolonizing of mind, spirit, and material life.
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Timothy J. Reiss is professor emeritus at New York University. Since his 2012 retirement, he has twice been a visiting professor at Stanford University, and for three years he was a visiting scholar at the University of Hawai’i-Manoa. He is editor most recently of Ngũgĩ in the American Imperium (2021) and is currently finishing books on Descartes in his age’s political practice and thought and on the Renaissance as a stage in long continental and oceanic intercultural exchanges.
This essay, an extract from a longer two-hundred-page manuscript, traces the author’s literary friendship with Kamau Brathwaite from their first meeting in 1968 to Brathwaite’s passing in 2020. It relies on correspondence over fifty years, memories of meetings, and critical responses to Brathwaite’s work to trace their mutual admiration and scuffles amid a comradeship that is stronger than time.
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Gordon Rohlehr is emeritus professor of West Indian literature at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, where he worked from 1968 to 2007. His main areas of research and publication include West Indian literature (poetry, the novel), oral tradition, the calypso, popular culture, West Indies cricket, postindependence Caribbean politics, and Trinidad carnival. His main publications are Pathfinder: Black Awakening in “The Arrivants” of Edward Kamau Brathwaite (1981); Calypso and Society in Pre-independence Trinidad(1990); My Strangled City and others.
Kamau Brathwaite left us just before COVID-19 changed our world. This memoriam essay explores the questions his work poses in his role as mentor/teacher/Griot to other writers, toward whom he was always very generous and encouraging. He asks us to embrace uncertainty, making it an aesthetic value from which transformative understanding may come. We learn to deeply explore the relation of languages of the voice, the musical instrument, and visual image; to be eclectic with regard to influences; to have the courage to face loss and trauma; and to be honest about history. Kamau made revision into an art form, from which we can learn about ways to embrace change, not only in creative work but in social and political thinking.
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Elaine Savory has published widely on African and Caribbean literatures and, in recent years, environmental humanities. She coedited, with Carole Boyce Davies, Out of the Kumbla: Women and Caribbean Literature (1990), celebrated at Cornell University in 2021. In 2019, she gave the Earl Warner Memorial Lecture in Barbados. Her recent work includes essays on the breadfruit; fiction by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Helon Habila; pedagogy for postcolonial environmental humanities; Caribbean theater and Earl Warner; Jean Rhys; and Kamau Brathwaite
Pretty Pretty 1 through Pretty Pretty 12, 2020–21. Cotton fabric and thread sewn onto canvas, 84 × 38 in. each. Photographs by Ian Rubenstein.
To the women in my life who have loved me unconditionally and supported me always—these works are in dedication to you.
To my mother and grandmother no longer here in the flesh—you will always carry on in my heart and through my work.
I am deeply honored to contribute to a movement of healing that has been cultivated through the immense and unwavering care of Black women globally. This work is how I express my gratitude for the networks of knowledge and support that we have created and maintained for one another. It is how I celebrate a journey of unlearning and relearning how to better love myself and those around me. I hope that when Black women and girls see my work, they see...
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Gio Swaby (whose images appear on the cover of this issue) is a Bahamian mixed-media artist whose practice encompasses installation, textiles, collage, performance, and video. Her work revolves around an exploration of identity, more specifically, the intersections of Blackness and womanhood, with attention to the ways this physical identity can serve as a positive force of connection and closeness, while also examining its imposed relationship to otherness.
In a discussion of Jovan Scott Lewis’s Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica (2020), the book is considered as ethnography written from “inside the circle” (Sadiya Hartman) of a generation of young Black men brought up in Jamaica. Nonetheless, Lewis shows genuine appreciation of the profound differences between himself and his respondents. However, the response ends by proposing that Lewis needed to widen the circle to include those who died in the terrible violence that was a consequence of the scamming practices that he describes, and that his arguments about Black repair might have been all the more convincing had he been able to do so.
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Patricia Noxolo teaches in the School of Geography at the University of Birmingham. Her research brings together the study of international development, culture, and in/security, and uses postcolonial, discursive, and literary approaches to explore the spatialities of a range of Caribbean and British cultural practices. Her recent work focuses on retheorizing Caribbean in/ securities, theorizations of space in Caribbean, [...]
This essay considers how the historical production of the Caribbean as a space of relative surplus populations is implicated in contemporary efforts to criminalize and contain flows of finance across its borders. Extending a key theme in Jovan Scott Lewis’s Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica (2020)—the crime of poverty—the essay explores how emerging anti–money laundering / combating the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) regulatory policies are changing the terrain of struggle to recuperate and repudiate the devaluation of Black life in the Caribbean. It argues that difficult conversations about the processes that continue to produce the Caribbean as a racialized space of devalued surplus labor are needed nationally, regionally, and internationally before the region can truly embark on the road toward Black repair.
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Beverley Mullings is professor of feminist political economy in the Department of Geography and Planning at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. Her research interests include the transforming nature of work within racial capitalist regimes, the financialization of remittance economies, and the place of diaspora in the remaking of Caribbean radical traditions. Her publications have appeared in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers; Gender, Place, and Culture; the Journal of Economic
This essay draws on Jovan Scott Lewis’s Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica (2020), a rich ethnographic study of lottery scammers in Jamaica and the ethical logic they use to justify scamming as a form of reparations, to think about the limits of Black reparative claims. Specifically, it draws on various theorizings of Black insurgent life to explore the inherent challenges in engendering a radical politics of change premised around principles of repair, alterity, and fugitivity. The author argues that theorizing Blackness and, by extension, Black repair necessitates exploring questions of the unimaginable, the liminal, and the otherwise.
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Kevon Rhiney is assistant professor in the Department of Geography, Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Prior to joining the faculty at Rutgers, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford and taught for several years at the University of the West Indies, Mona. His research is situated at the nexus of critical development studies, decolonial thought, and human-environment geography.
In this response essay, the author returns to his arguments in Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica (2020) to further consider the limits of repair as advanced by the book’s crew of Jamaican lottery scammers. The author reconsiders some of the arguments to examine more deeply the issues of respectability, violence, and refusal, doing so in conversation with Patricia Noxolo, Beverley Mullings, and Kevon Rhiney—Caribbean and Caribbeanist geographers who help explore the scam as representative of repair within Jamaica’s violent, impoverished, and seemingly inescapable circumstances. Further analyzing the possibility of repair as advanced by the scammers, the essay identifies and contests the normative terms of politics that complicate those reparative claims, arguing that the scam moves past the politics of social incorporation and resistance in Jamaica and instead represents a form of political suspension that avoids the reconciliation of respectability and refusal typical of Caribbean postcolonial social production.
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Jovan Scott Lewis is an associate professor in and chair of the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. His research examines the questions of racial capitalism, underdevelopment, and repair. He is author of Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica(2020). His book on the consequences of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Restoration in Tulsa, is forthcoming.
