Issues

A discourse of care undergirded colonial political rationality during the era of Indian indenture-ship in the Caribbean. In this essay the voyage of the Salsette from Calcutta to Trinidad in 1858 serves as an entry point into a broader conversation on the repeated archival invocation of care toward coolies during their passage to the plantation colonies. Care, which is synonymous with neither affect nor benevolence, refers to a series of techniques aimed at managing bodies traded for profit. Analyzing the apparatuses through which care for indentured servants was administered, the essay illuminates the racialized and caste-based knowledge systems that were mobilized to “make live” the reserve of potential labor force aboard. Concomitantly, it reads the colonial archive for moments in which indentured servants register their presence through their responses to being or refusal to be cared for and considers the stakes of such refusal for the colonial capitalist project

So many Black revolutionaries lived with and died from cancer. How did they make sense of their vulnerability when confronted with this illness? How did they balance fighting for the world and for themselves? When modern medicine could neither ameliorate their pain nor eliminate the disease, to whom did they turn for support? This essay centers letters from 1989to 1990 that Andaiye sent to Audre Lorde shortly after they met at the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action conference in 1988. Drawing on these letters, a tribute titled “Sister Survivor” that Andaiye wrote for Lorde following her death, a copy of A Burst of Light that Lorde sent to Andaiye, and Black feminist scholarship on how listening constitutes care work, the author explores what Andaiye and Lorde taught each other about the possibilities for living with cancer and listening across differences.

This essay argues that George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin presents an aesthetic quest into an alternative Caribbean subjecthood built on the capacity of feeling. Studying various dimensions of affectivity along with what Raymond Williams called “structures of feeling,” it examines the feeling of “my people” in its “dominant,” “residual,” and “emergent” dimensions. The author considers first how the dominant image of “my people” as “the enemy” gains consent from the characters and supports the hegemony of the ruling class. He then explores the African past illustrated in the haunted dream of Pa as the residual aspect of “my people” and the characters’ negative feelings toward it. Finally, taking Trumper’s Pan-African vision of “my people” as an emergent cultural form, the author analyzes how the novel shows the ways in which the form falls short of what Lamming identifies as “the peasant sensibility,” a Caribbean tradition of feeling toward the land.

This essay is an introduction to a special section that focuses on the life and work of Antonde Kom, and especially on his seminal 1934 Wij slaven van Suriname. It forms part of a larger project that explores how a Caribbean intellectual tradition can be thought differently if greater attention is paid to the Dutch Caribbean. The essays included in the section demonstrate the shifting role that De Kom and his book have played—from the 1930s and the anxieties they created for the colonial state; to their international impact on other revolutionary movements, such as in Cuba; to their current mobilization by numerous young people of Surinamese descent in the Netherlands as part of an antiracist activism and politics of belonging. Almost ninety years after Wij slaven was first published, it has become a bestseller and De Kom has been named to the Dutch national historical canon. As more than political activism, the guest editors examine Anton de Kom in this Small Axe platform for Caribbean thought with the hope that these essays will stimulate even more scholarship on De Kom’s life and work and on the Dutch Caribbean more broadly, beyond the borders of the Dutch-speaking context.

How did Anton de Kom become national heritage? This essay argues that De Kom’s successful canonization is owed in significant part to his sacralization. It shows that in De Kom’s case, the sacralizing power of heritage has three dimensions: his narrative framing, his image, and his status as ancestor. Highlighting these processes of sacralization allows a critical rereading of how De Kom is inscribed in postcolonial politics of memory in the Netherlands. The focus by postcolonial historians on historical accuracy and reading archives against or “along the grain” is crucial, but a secular perspective does not fully answer what makes certain historical narratives persuasive to particular audiences. Paying closer attention to this sacralizing power of heritage can provide new insights into workings of postcolonial memory and heritage.

This essay seeks to speculate on the reception of de Anton de Kom’s Wij slaven van Suriname (1934) within a very different context of political debates on race; decolonization; the politics of solidarity; and internationalist and anticapitalist struggles—all themes that De Kom’s narrative tackles in unique ways—and on the question of time. The author attempts to displace De Kom’s book away from its entanglement of political and intellectual connections and toward the diverse temporalities of Suriname’s decolonial struggles, seeking to explore what could be called the“collateral effects” produced by the 1934 publication of Wij slaven by a Caribbean publisher and institution. The author then compares the 1981 Spanish translation of De Kom’s work, Nosotros, esclavos de Surinam, with a different set of debates and texts addressed to diverse audiences and subjects entangled in distinct networks of political engagements and projects.

This essay explores the renewed attention for Anton de Kom and the ways this engagement revisits older questions about his life and work and opens new avenues for inquiry. This renewed interest has led to new forms of appropriation: the use of his likeness and his name by institutions to communicate a connection between the meanings attached to De Kom and the institution. These societal uses of De Kom in turn shape the meanings ascribed to him, resulting in an increasingly stylized and abstract understandings of his life and work. This piece hopes to serve as a corrective and an aid to further reflection.

Anton de Kom was an anticolonial thinker, resistance fighter, father, author, and poet—a renaissance man par excellance born in the Dutch colony Suriname. In his Wij slaven van Suriname (1934), De Kom, as a descendant of enslaved peoples in Suriname, described with razor-sharpness the oppression and exploitation of people on the basis of “race” and class, both during the period of slavery and after its abolition. Although he became known as a national hero in Suriname, in the former colonial metropole of the Netherlands his name, work, and life story were relatively unknown. In 2020, however, Wij slaven became a bestseller, eighty-six years after its original publication, and De Kom became part of the Dutch canon. This essay explores this new, even unexpected, “success” of Wij slaven, and indeed of Anton de Kom, within the Dutch public and political spheres.

Through a close reading of Anton de Kom’s Wij slaven van Suriname (We Slaves of Suriname), this essay explores the complex legal, symbolic, social, and political lives of differentially positioned humans in the Dutch colonial and postindependent context. Firstly, De Kom’s 1934 book reveals the fundamental dualism between legal subjects and rightless bodies in the Dutch colonial context and how European law and the rights of citizens enabled the maximum exploitation of colonized and enslaved bodies. Contrary to universalist-inclusive and progressive notions of legal citizenship and the law, the concept of what the author terms “citizenship violence” seems appropriate to appreciate the dynamics revealed in Wij slaven. However, as De Kom demonstrates, the colonized were not passive subjects; they resisted citizenship violence in multiple ways. Secondly, in discussing the racialization of citizenship and belonging in contemporary Dutch society as part of broader European patterns, the essay highlights some ominous colonial afterlives.

This visual essay explores a fragment of the journey to know our ancestors in their absence.The pregnant silences of archives, skewed by years of historical erasure and the remnants of colonial legacy, so often obscure our walk toward collective belonging and a deeper under-standing of self as Caribbean people. Washerwoman (2018), the sculpture featured in the essay, is the product of an attempt to know our progenitors through the labor of our hands, silently working alongside theirs, across temporalities. We mourn the blurred edges of their photographs and pay homage to the mundane moments of their existence, so densely knitted together to create our own reality.

This conversation piece celebrates Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel’s inspiring study Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire (2020) throughthe parallel histories of the Martinican theorist Suzanne Césaire and the Haitian intellectual Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain. Thinking about Suzanne’s and Suzanne’s respective and overlap-ping relationships to Haiti, this essay is an exercise in implementing the decolonial methods and reimagining of national belonging that Joseph-Gabriel presents.

This essay explores the decolonial future imagined by the Black women who make up Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel’s Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire (2020). A much-needed project of historical redress, Joseph-Gabriel’s study proposes the concept “decolonial citizenship” as a framework to tackle the archival and scholarly invisibility of Black women’s contributions to decolonial movements and their espousing new ways of belonging that are grounded in practices, geographies, epistemologies, and communities that persist despite the French colonial orb. This essay argues that the contemporary Afrofeminist movement in France’s fight for Black liberation and articulations of new forms of belonging point to the continued discontents of the country’s Black population with the universalist pretenses of the French republic.

Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel’s Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire (2020) models the critical possibilities of attending to the overlooked records of Black women’s political imaginations. This discussion essay explores what happens if we extend Joseph-Gabriel’s recuperative method past the 1960s and into the early independence era. No one would call the Senegalese novelist Mariama Bâ overlooked, and yet Bâ herself has often been absent from her own reception history. One understudied archive for Bâ is a biography of the novelist written by her daughter Mame Coumba Ndiaye. Harmonizing with Joseph-Gabriel’s notion of decolonial citizenship, this essay asks how the stakes of Bâ’s work shift if we read her alongside Ndiaye’s overlooked text. While Black women of Bâ’s generation may have been more likely to be widely recognized than those explored in Reimagining Liberation, their political imaginations have sometimes been misconstrued as nationalist in ways that obscure their articulation through the transnational feminist networks that sustained them.

This response essay engages the three book discussion essays by Shanna Jean-Baptiste, Grace Sanders Johnson, and Tobias Warner on the author’s Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire (2020). Building on the speculative and archival methods undertaken by the three respondents, Joseph-Gabriel returns to underexplored primary sources to stage an encounter between the Haitian writer Marie Vieux Chauvet and the Martinican writer Suzanne Césaire. The resulting conversation considers alternate possibilities for reading disorder, defiance, and imagined new worlds in Black women’s literary production and political thought.