Issues

In 1935, while visiting his friend Petar Guberina in Dalmatia, Aimé Césaire saw an island by the name of Martinska (the equivalent of Martinique). Shocked by this discovery, he began writing his Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. While acknowledged, this Yugoslav connection tends to be mentioned as merely anecdotal. This essay argues that Yugoslavia represented an important detour for Césaire. Césaire’s friendship with Guberina and his discovery of Martinska allowed him to see how the particularity of his historical experience as a member of the African diaspora could also serve as the basis for solidarity with other oppressed people. Whereas the accusation of racial essentialism has long followed the founders of the Negritude movement, the Yugoslav connection invites a more layered and nuanced reading of the Notebook, whose unusual origins resonate throughout its verses, positioning it as a text always already in Relation.

In Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere (2011), Raphael Daello draws on the concept of the field to note that Caribbean writers often “operate within a constrained set of possibilities governed by certain historically determined rules ... from accommodation to opposition to more conflicted positions in-between.” Throughout her essays and fiction, the Jamaican writer, sociologist, and activist Erna Brodber recuperates discarded, illegible, or negative elements in the literary field of Caribbean literature. This essay argues that Brodber uses a mode of self-negation in her short novel Nothing’s Mat (2011) to open discursive space for individual and collective identities illegible within dominant theories of Caribbean literature such as pluralism or creolization: supernatural elements more readily identifiable in Latin American magical realism, a Pan-African vision decades after Negritude, and a commitment to the experiences of Afro-Caribbean womanhood.

This essay reflects on the sources of Stuart Hall’s sensibility, in particular the sense of displacement that pervaded much of his work.

The transformation of Maureen-Warner Lewis’s intellectual career from colonial to postcolonial shaping was gradual and sometimes fortuitous. It involved a bifurcation in disciplines, evolving from English literary developments into Afro-Caribbean social and linguistic history. Linguistic fieldwork further led into concerns with religious, culinary, and musical folkways, as well as biographical investigation. Outlines of Warner-Lewis’s writings on the Caribbean and on Caribbean cultures inspired by Yoruba, Igbo, and Kongo matrices are presented.

This essay is a brief personal tribute to Maureen Warner-Lewis, a committed scholar, a passionate researcher, and the author’s longtime friend.

Maureen Warner-Lewis’s extraordinary body of cultural criticism proposes a new temporal engagement with the place of the African continent in the Caribbean. Her work and career suggest some of the dispositions of the Mona Generation (UWI) of the mid-1960s to early1970s. Read against some of the debates of the era, her work veers from an expected ideological path; or the path she takes, read as ideological in a particular way, shines an unexpected light on an adjacent path. Inevitably, the demands and desires of subsequent generations are highlighted as well, as is the realization that the assessment of Africa’s entanglement with the region is ongoing.

Framed by the author’s three encounters with Maureen Warner-Lewis’s voice, this essay evaluates three aspects of her work: her commitment to pedagogical approaches that privilege orature; her commitment to research methodologies that privilege the language and history of Caribbean community members who have preserved explicit connections to African cultural institutions; and the decolonial theoretical orientation of her scholarship, which raises questions about the role of “indigenous” epistemologies in Caribbean literary theory.

This essay moves between the author’s autobiographical reflections and a close reading of Maureen Warner-Lewis’s Guinea’s Other Suns (1991/2015) in order to unpack the ways Warner-Lewis’s research on Africa in the Caribbean has challenged the split between them around questions of ethnicities and racialization. It further attends to the significance of this work on and in Trinidad, given the refusal of Africanness at the time the book first appeared.

This essay examines three historical moments in the signification of the term cimarrón across the hispanophone Caribbean. It explores its origin during the conquest, simultaneously naming runaway livestock and Native and Black enslaved peoples who challenged colonization. In the twentieth century, the cimarrón became attached to masculinist nationalist tropes key to postwar anticolonial movements. In the new millennium, Black and Brown women and LBTQ+ folks use the term to convey an ethos of antipatriarchal, community-centered activism. The essay argues that the origins of the term demand a close consideration of the relationship between conquest, othering, racialization, commodification, and the reordering of the animal world with human animals as supreme beings. The contemporary reappropriation of the term alludes to a decolonial reframing, a unique opportunity to reject Western ontologies grounded on the violent practices of othering while also pointing us toward new conditions of possibility based on relationality.

This essay proposes the historical term simarrona (used in colonial Louisiana archives) as a heuristic for unlearning certain reading practices of the term maroon and its persistent “etymology plot.” Simarrona not only troubles the neat linguistic geographies of the term maroon; it foregrounds the instability of colonial grammars and their attendant binaries. The author pairs the poetic resistance with the colonial grammars of Sylvia Wynter, Aimé Césaire, and fahima ife, with the instability of simarrona in the archival record to propose a way of reading archives of marronage that leaves space for that which was withheld.

The memory and language of colonial marronage shapes the zeitgeist and the wider history of Haiti as nation. This essay takes as its point of departure the recent use of small boats by armed gangs in Haiti to revisit the shipboard dimensions of marronage and the country’s history of “picaroon” warfare. Attempting to consider the condition of instability and ungovernability and the current crises of Haiti in light of maroon histories poses the question of whether the concept of “social banditry” has any value when generalized banditry comes to permeate an entire country amid the widespread breakdown of society itself.

This essay features discussions with and among Suriname Maroons engaged in cultural work about the names they choose in self-reference. Maroon is just one choice of many; others include Fiiman (free person) and Busikondeesama (hinterland person). Each name differently configures their relationships to various people, places, and ideas across time and space.These reflections question and challenge what communicative work Maroon does in figuring and prioritizing specific components of a broader cultural and historical nexus. The authors deliberately center contemporary Suriname Maroons—not only as cultural stewards but also as individuals actively involved in theorizing Maroon legacies and futures.

On 9 April 2021, La Soufrière, the volcano in the main island in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, began to erupt explosively, forcing approximately 22,440 people in the north of the island to evacuate to the south. As the ash rained down, the landscape typically known for its lush greens and blues became muted and desaturated. The images selected for this photo essay were taken from a powerboat, with friends on board, during the first series of explosive eruptions that occurred that day. They are merely a snapshot of the larger project—The Beginning is the End and the End is the Beginning—which is an attempt to unlearn the aesthetics of photography and the politics of the image in the midst of catastrophe. The entire series focuses on exploring intimacy in physical spaces during catastrophes, and in the case of La Soufrière, the photographer’s relationships with kin and friends during the crisis. Further, the series hopes to examine the impact of ashfall on the terrestrial, coastal, and submarine environments, as well as the built environment.

This essay on Andil Gosine’s Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex, and Law in the Caribbean (2021) reflects on the author’s application of animal studies as a productive analytic of the enduring anxieties around respectable citizenship in the Caribbean as expressed by contemporary regulations governing, sex, marriage, and public dress. The pairing of antisodomy laws and bestiality codes during the early colonial era, Gosine contends, underwrites contemporary attitudes that marginalize a variety of nonheteronormative expressions and continues to influence a collective and compulsion to constantly affirm the respectability of the region’s inhabitants. Gosine’s investment in understanding and dismantling the historical hold of needing to prove one’s humanity, the author argues, falls in line with a movement among a multidisciplinary field of queer artists and scholars who embrace animality as a form of radical postcolonial thinking.

This essay is a reading of Andil Gosine’s Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex, and Law in the Caribbean (2021) that thinks through the author’s contributions on LGBTQ+ history, art, and activism in the Caribbean. It begins with a look at how the animal is wielded discursively to deride queerness and thinks through the constructions of animality. Central to much of the essay is the framing of how for queer people Gosine’s ideas of either rejecting the animal or reclaiming it can be read in Colin Robinson’s poetry, and how liberation for the queer subject comes at a fraught cost. The essay concludes by looking at Gosine’s notions of “wrecking work” and uses them to read the history of Indian indenture in the literary arts.

Taking Andil Gosine’s invitation in Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex, and Law in the Caribbean (2021) to consider the possibilities of animality, this essay sits with the two valences that are potentially inherent in his framing—first, that we reassess the generative possibilities of animality, and second, that we consider how in refusing the demarcating line between humanity and animality they potentially remake each other. Centering “animality” as an analytic, the author considers the kinds of relations that animality allows us to imagine with ourselves and each other. The essay frames Gosine’s questions as ones that pursue the decolonial possibilities of animality and suggests that Nature’s Wild offers us a blueprint for a Caribbean queer decolonial politic. Its primary inquiry resides in asking how animality adapts and signifies in potentially intersectional ways and whether this framing makes room for us to envision the ways “gender” also holds generative possibilities in relation to ideas of animality.

Through three short meditations that range from border crossing between the United States and Canada to a Beyoncé song, this essay considers responses from Kedon Willis, Rajiv Mohabir, and Michelle V. Rowley to his 2021 book Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex, and Law in the Caribbean. The author revisits and further advances the central thesis of Nature’s Wild, which recalls the work and multiple legacies of racialized animalization during and after European colonization of the Caribbean, and weighs the possibilities of embracing animality.