Preface: Why Palestine Matters . . . for Caribbean Studies
David Scott
Abstract
This essay proposes a reading of Derek Walcott’s play The Sea at Dauphin (1954)as a sustained yet structurally unresolved imitation of J.M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea (1904),offering the term “asymptotic imitation” to describe their interrelation. Drawing on the mathematical concept of the asymptote—a curve that approaches a line without ever touching it—the essay theorizes a mode of postcolonial literary engagement marked by persistent resemblance without convergence. Walcott’s play shares Synge’s thematic concerns—death at sea, masculine bravado, Catholic fatalism—but reworks their aesthetic and ideological functions through moral and linguistic divergence. Central to this divergence is Walcott’s use of Kwéyòl-inflected English, which complicates the tragic form and challenges colonial language hierarchies. This linguistic texture parallels Synge’s use of the Gaelic-inflected English, while opening space for a Caribbean vernacular poetics grounded in opacity and tension. Rather than framing Walcott’s early work as derivative or oppositional, asymptotic imitation captures a close-but-unresolving relation between literatures of distinct colonial peripheries. Through sustained comparative analysis, the essay repositions The Sea at Dauphin as a critical site for theorizing postcolonial resemblance not through mimicry or disavowal but through a shared yet unresolvable proximity across peripheral modernisms.
Bio
Gavin Herbertson is a visiting research fellow at King’s College London, where he focuses on twentieth-century Caribbean literature. He completed his DPhil at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, with a thesis examining points of intersection between writing from the archipelago and Euro-American modernism, with a particular focus on the early poetry and drama of Derek Walcott. His essays on this subject have recently appeared in leading publications in the field of postcolonial studies, including the Journal of Postcolonial Writing and the Journal of West Indian Literature.
Abstract
This essay interrogates what counts as an economy in the Caribbean, challenging dominant metrics such as gross domestic product, tourism, and foreign investment that obscure the relational, ecological, and reproductive practices sustaining everyday life. Drawing on Caribbean political economy and Black feminist ecological and geographical thought, it develops Caribbean feminist ecological thought as an analytic for understanding how race, gender, sexuality, class, and environment are coconstituted through colonial and contemporary regimes of extraction. The essay situates Caribbean economic life across three historical periods—plantation colonialism, postcolonial development and neoliberal restructuring, and the intensification of climate crisis under conditions of debt and financialization—to argue that plantation logics persist, shaping external dependence, ecological vulnerability, and uneven access to power, while also generating practices through which Caribbean people sustain and remake life. Building on this, the essay introduces brackish economies, a framework inspired by brackish ecologies where instability produces dense, adaptive life. This framework foregrounds relational practices such as care, informal exchange, ecological stewardship, and collective survival as central to economic life. Brackish economies offer a Caribbean feminist intervention that reorients economic analysis toward interdependence and collective thriving.
Bio
Andrea N. Baldwin is the associate chair of and an associate professor in the Department of Ethnic, Gender, and Disability Studies at the University of Utah. She is an attorney-at-law and also holds a master’s degree in international trade policy, along with a PhD in gender and development studies from the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, Nita Barrow Unit, at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill campus. She is the founder of the Black Feminist Eco Lab at the University of Utah, where her work centers Black and Caribbean feminist thought, ecological justice, and community-engaged scholarship. She is also the host of Standpoints, a Black feminist podcast produced by Virginia Tech Publishing.
Abstract
This essay reflects on the irony of forgetting in Gisèle Pineau’s Exile According to Julia (2003; L’exil selon Julia, 1996). First, it reconceptualizes trauma, nostalgia, the embodied past, ontological questions, and the pull of ancestral origins as ironic voices of the past to argue that the past can reassert itself against, or independently of, human will. Second, it demonstrates that the more the past of slavery is suppressed, the more it rebounds in Caribbean consciousness, and that the renunciation of the past, instead of leading to forgetting, gives it an even stronger echo. Third, it shows that, rather than sticking to impossible forgetting, the irony of forgetting indicates how difficult forgetting can be. Finally, it concludes that forgetting is sufficiently ironical because it is subversive of the authority of those who desire it
Bio
Joel Akinwumi is an assistant professor of French and world literature at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia. His current research focuses on the depiction of forgetting in African and Caribbean novels. His essays have appeared in Nouvelles Etudes Francophones and Alternative Francophone. He is the winner of the 2021 François-Paré Award for the best paper presented by an emerging scholar at the international conference organized by the Association des Professeures des littératures acadienne et québécoise de l’Atlantique (APLAQA).
Abstract
The colonial scrutiny of indentured women’s appearance was often justified as the burden of averting gendered violence in British Caribbean plantations, which in turn obscured the dynamic ways that indentured women used sartorial practices to negotiate, evade, and resist colonial power. Within the architecture of the plantation, colonial subjects’ dress and adornment was deeply intertwined with the construction of the figure of the coolie woman across visual and textual archives. This essay examines how contemporary Indo-Caribbean fiction and visual art troubles and textures these intricate connections to propose a new heuristic of reading fabric, cloth, and textiles within these archives. Positioning currency, mapping, and ornament as analytical frameworks, the author argues that reading fabric, cloth, and textiles in Peggy Mohan’s, Suchitra Mattai’s, and Renluka Maharaj’s creative work engages with historical control over indentured women’s appearance and dress, reimagines embodied autonomy within the landscape of the colonial plantation through sartorial self-fashioning, and presents new modes of decoding historical relations between materiality and visuality in archives of indenture.
Bio
Subhalakshmi Gooptu is an assistant professor of world literature at the Fashion Institute of Technology–SUNY. She specializes in postcolonial studies and global histories of labor. She is currently working on a manuscript, “Archives of Reproduction,” that studies literary, visual,and archival representations of indentured women’s labor, reproduction, and resistance.
Abstract
Slavery as condition of “social death” premised on “natal alienation,” as Orlando Patterson describes it in the much-quoted formulations in the introduction of his Slavery and Social Death (1982), does not stand as a monolithic tenet but generates tensions internal to the central arguments of the book—and most palpably so with respect to the relation between the natal and the social. This essay sets out to plumb those tensions by bringing Patterson and the French anthropologist Claude Meillassoux into dialogue with each other. This debate comes to focus on the relation between “social death” and “social reproduction.” At the crucible of this relation stands the issue of “female slavery,” which raises critical sociological, historical, political, and aesthetic questions about “freedom,” positively defined.
Bio
Ulrike Kistner is Professor Emerita in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Her teaching and research activities are focused on social theory, psychoanalytic theory, and political philosophy.
Abstract
This essay examines Afro-Curaçaoan spiritual beliefs and practices as dynamic sites of cultural resistance, epistemological contestation, and identity formation. Focusing on key terms such as awa di huramentu, kuradó, kurioso, Brua, and montamentu, it traces how these concepts have been historically constructed, stigmatized, and reinterpreted across colonial and postcolonial contexts. Drawing on archival sources, missionary accounts, and oral history research, the essay demonstrates how colonial regimes of knowledge sought to classify Afro-Caribbean spiritualities through binaries such as religion versus superstition and healing versus harm. At the same time, it highlights how practitioners actively negotiate, reinterpret, and reclaim these categories in lived practice. By foregrounding embodied knowledge, ritual actions, and vernacular language, the essay situates Afro-Curaçaoan spirituality within broader Caribbean discourses of Spirit/Spirituality, where the sacred is inseparable from everyday life, social relations, and political struggle. In doing so, it argues that these spiritual practices not only resist colonial epistemologies but also offer alternative frameworks for understanding knowledge, power, and belonging in the Afro-Caribbean world.
Bio
Rose Mary Allen has authored, coauthored, and edited numerous books and essays focusing on the cultural and social history of the Dutch Caribbean islands. In 2021, she assumed the role of Extraordinary Professor specializing in culture, community, and history at the University of Curaçao Dr. Moises da Costa Gomez. Most recently, she is a coeditor, with Esther Captain, Matthias van Rossum, and Urwin Vyent, of Slavery and the Dutch State: Dutch Colonial Slavery and Its Afterlives (2025) and, with Sruti Bala, of Handbook of Gender Studies in the Dutch Caribbean(2024).
Abstract
The study of Vodou exists within a dynamic discursive space—a shifting terrain shaped by language, power, and institutional authority where meanings are produced, negotiated, and contested. The discursive space of Vodou is neither fixed nor neutral; it is historically constructed and deeply entangled with colonial, anthropological, religious, and spiritual vocabularies that have framed Vodou through various, and often conflicting, lenses. Even today, scholarship on Vodou remains haunted by early missionary accounts that cast it as demonic or primitive. From these early exoticizations, through anthropological attempts at cultural relativism to more recent interventions by Africana, feminist, and decolonial scholars, the discursive space has evolved in ways that reflect broader shifts in epistemology and power. As such, the authors specify their deployment of the signifier Vodou by delineating their intended readership. They address scholars across Abya Yala, the Caribbean, and Central and West Africa who claim affinity with Haitian Vodou and seek rigorous engagement with its scholarship, alongside those less familiar with Haitian intellectual traditions and allied writings centering Haitian ways of being.
Bio
Yanique Hume is a senior lecturer and the head of the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus. Her research spans Caribbean cultural thought, Afro-Atlantic spiritualities and mortuary, and Caribbean dance and performance cultures. A priestess in Kongo and Yoruba-based Africana traditions, her scholarship is grounded in embodied knowledge and critical artistic practice. She is the current president of KOSANBA, the Scholarly Association for the Study of Haitian Vodou and African Diaspora Religions. She is a coeditor, with Aaron Kamugisha, of Caribbean Cultural Thought: From Plantation to Diaspora (2013) and Caribbean Popular Culture: Power, Politics, and Performance (2016); and, with Maarit Forde, of Passages and Afterworlds: Anthropological Perspectives on Death in the Caribbean(2018)
Claudine Michel is a scholar of Haitian Vodou who, although not formally initiated, considers herself a Vodouizan à part-entière. She is a founding member of the Congress of Santa Barbara (KOSANBA, the Scholarly Association for the Study of Haitian Vodou and African Diaspora Religions), housed since 1997 at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is Professor Emerita of Black studies. For over thirty years, she has served as the editor in chief of the Journal of Haitian Studies. She is a coeditor, with Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, of Vodou in Haitian Life and Culture: Invisible Powers (2006) and Haitian Vodou: Spirit, Myth, and Reality (2006).
Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken is a university docent at the University of Amsterdam’s Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis in literary and cultural analysis, where she teaches Vodou in academic disciplines attached to a still uncritical notion of the “secular.” She also maintains an affiliation with the City College of New York’s Center for Worker Education. She is the author of Spirit Possession in French, Haitian, and Vodou Thought: An Intellectual History (2015), a coeditor of the Journal of Haitian Studies book review section, a former board member of theHaitian Studies Association, and a member of the Albertine Translation.
Cécile Accilien is a scholar of French and francophone studies whose primary research centers on former French, speaking colonies of Africa and the Caribbean, especially Haiti. She considers herself a cultural vodouyizan. She is currently a professor at University of Maryland, College Park, and is the associate editor of the Journal of Haitian Studies. She is a coeditor, with Valérie K. Orlando, of Teaching Haiti: Strategies for Creating New Narratives (2021), and most recently the author of Bay Lodyans: Haitian Popular Film Culture (2025). She is a former president ofthe Haitian Studies Association.
Abstract
This essay approaches the question “What does considering the Spirit of Carnival tell us about Spirit in the Caribbean?” through an examination of the Spirit of Carnival as offering a glimpse into different faces of Spirit’s relationality. As an entry into thinking with, and about, Spirit, the author explores four soca songs on the 2023 soca riddim Spirit of Carnival by the soca artistes Skinny Fabulous, Kes, Machel Montano, and Bunji Garlin. In pursuing this analysis, the author muses on a Caribbean genealogy of Spirit to touch on the entwined histories of African diasporic religions and carnival, then argues that the dynamics of other/wise are central in religious and cultural practices in the Caribbean, particularly visible in carnival. Finally, the essay explores each song for its reflection on different facets of Spirit, and relation, including themes of experience, license, break ,and calling. In closing the author reflects on what it means when (in carnival) you answer the call of Spirit to play in the otherwise.
Bio
N. Fadeke Castor is an associate professor of religion and Africana studies at Northeastern University. She is a Black feminist ethnographer and African diaspora studies scholar, with interests in religion, race, and performance. Her first book, Spiritual Citizenship: Transnational Pathways from Black Power to Ifá in Trinidad (2017), won the 2018 Clifford Geertz Prize from the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. Their work has been published in Cultural Anthropology, The Black Scholar, the Journal of World Popular Music, and Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, among other publications. Her current research focusing on the power of Black sacred ontologies and epistemologies to shape a better world has been supported by a Wenner-Gren Fellowship in Anthropology and Black Experiences at the School for Advanced Research (Santa Fe, NM).
Abstract
Over the course of three decades, the Haiti-based contemporary textile artist Myrlande Constant has created a body of work that has achieved international recognition. In this special section, the guest editors bring together scholars, curators, and artists who share the goal of exploring the breadth and depth of Constant’s oeuvre and recognizing her impact on contemporary Haitian art and arts of the African diaspora. Previously, the authors curated and edited the exhibition and book Myrlande Constant: The Work of Radiance at the Fowler Museum of UCLA. As part of that exhibition, they organized a symposium in the spring of 2023, which served as a springboard for the essays gathered in this collection.
Bio
Jerry Philogene is an associate professor in and the director of the Black Studies Program at Middlebury College. She specializes in interdisciplinary American cultural history, art history, and visual arts of the Caribbean and the African diaspora, with an emphasis on the francophone Caribbean. Her publications have appeared in edited collections, peer-reviewed journals, and exhibition catalogues. She received her PhD in American studies at New York University. She is also an independent curator. In 2023, she coorganized, with Katherine Smith, Myrlande Constant: The Work of Radiance, an exhibition and accompanying catalogue on the contemporary textile works of the Haitian artist Myrlande Constant at the UCLA Fowler Museum. In 2025, she curated Living in Brilliant Suspension (Viv pandye nan briyans): Didier William at Art Yard, Frenchtown, NJ. She is the recipient of a 2020 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her current manuscript, “The Socially Dead and Improbable Citizen: Visualizing Haitian Humanity and Visual Aesthetics.” She is also writing a monograph on the Haitian modernist painter Luce Turnier.
Katherine Smith has held fellowships at Brown University in the History of Art and Architecture Department, and at New York University in the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. She was a curatorial and research associate of Haitian arts at the UCLA Fowler Museum and a lecturer in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance. She has played a curatorial role in exhibitions of Haitian art at Brown University and UCLA. At the UCLA Fowler Museum, she and Jerry Philogene cocurated the retrospective and co-edited the book Myrlande Constant: The Work of Radiance (2023), the first major solo exhibition and manuscript devoted to a Haitian woman artist. She publishes regularly in academic journals, edited volumes, and art catalogues on Haitian and Caribbean art and religion. Her work draws on her extensive field-work in Haiti carried out intermittently between 2005 and 2018. She is a coeditor, with Leah Gordon, of Freemasonry and the Haitian Imaginary (2026), and is revising a manuscript on death and religious transformation in urban Haiti.
Abstract
This essay examines Myrlande Constant’s Rasanbleman Soupe Tout Eskòt Yo (2019) as a work that redefines the formal and ritual possibilities of the drapo Vodou. Expanding beyond the emblematic scale of the genre, Constant’s mural-sized beaded panel assembles a ceremonial field in which human, nonhuman, and more-than-human presences coexist. The author argues that the work operates as a rasanblaj, a gathering that is visual, material, and epistemic and structured through relation. Situating Constant within a renewed lineage of Haitian and Caribbean spiritual image making, the essay shows how her use of the tambour stitch and large-scale narrative beadwork transforms the medium itself. In dialogue with figures such as Hector Hyppolite, André Pierre, Mallica “Kapo” Reynolds, Everald Brown, and the novelist Jacques Stephen Alexis, Constant’s work remains distinct in its material logic: the beaded surface becomes both image and environment, where ritual presence is represented but more importantly activated.
Bio
Carine Schermann is a PhD candidate in francophone and Caribbean studies at Florida State University. Her current research focuses on Haitian and Dominican shared imaginaries of shapeshifting and transformation in the common folklore of the island, its literatures, and its visual arts. Her broader intellectual interests encompass Afro-diasporic literatures and visual cultures, racial capitalism, and Black ecologies. She was awarded the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship for the academic year 2023–24, which allowed her to pursue ethnographic work at the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, as well as professional training in visual anthropology and documentary filmmaking. For 2025–26, she is the Boston College African and African Diaspora Studies Dissertation Fellow. Her writing is featured in Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: SITES, and is forthcoming in the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, L’esprit créateur, the Journal of Latino / Latin American Studies, and AWARE: Archives of Women Artists Research and Exhibitions.
Abstract
This essay examines Myrlande Constant’s Nègre Danbala Wedo (1994–2019) as a drapo (Vodou flag) that visualizes sacred space as a site of knowledge production in Haitian cultural life. Drawing on the concept of bitasyon as an inherited, spiritually maintained landscape sustained through ongoing ritual labor, the essay argues that Constant’s work reconfigures race and gender through Vodou practice rather than through biologically deterministic or Western secular frameworks. Situating the artwork within Haitian sacred life, the author demonstrates how it renders legible alternative formations of Blackness, embodiment, and spiritual authority that exceed dominant epistemic paradigms. The essay ultimately argues that Vodou-informed visual practice offers an alternative framework for interpreting Black diasporic life, where sacred space becomes a mode of thought as well as a lived practice of transformation.
Bio
Gabrielle Mary Jean-Louis is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Miami. Her research and teaching draw on Black feminist theory, Caribbean literature, and digital humanities to foreground the intellectual traditions of women across the Black diaspora. Her dissertation, “Black Feminist Cosmologies: Sacred Grounds in Haitian American Women’s Literature and Visual Culture,” demonstrates how Haitian American creatives theorize spiritual healing and cultural survival through literature, visual art, and digital platforms. Extending methods from visual culture studies and digital humanities, the project highlights how Haitian American women’s cultural production challenges colonial epistemologies while offering a transferable framework for understanding Black feminist survival across the Caribbean and its diaspora. Her scholarship appears in the Journal of Haitian Studies and the Journal of West Indian Literature, and she has digitally published work with the Pérez Art Museum Miami’s Caribbean Cultural Institute. She is also the graduate assistant to the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective and the assistant director of the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Summer Institute.
Abstract
In Haitian Vodou, Marasa are recognized as the divinities of youth—sacred patrons of twins, triplets, and special children born with otherworldly qualities. Expansively defined, the sacred category of twins designates the mystic power of people identified with supernatural qualities due to unique birth experiences or differently abled nature. Haitian artist Myrlande Constant’s magnificent Vodou drapo (ritual flags) often depict twins, triplets, and trios of divinity. Specifically, her visual emphasis on Marasa 3 as triplets or divine trinities reveals the exponential power of mystic mathematics because as Vodou philosophy signifies, 1 + 1 = 3. Employing an Africana religious studies and sacred art analysis, the author examines several Constant flags featuring the Marasa 3 principle that exemplify metaphysical realities beyond human comprehension. Further, these three Marasa portraits also demonstrate an evolution in Constant’s artistic style, since her later works reveal greater sophistication in beadwork variety and technique, as well as more imaginative and innovative portrayals of the lwa. Ultimately, Constant’s Marasa drapo remind us that in a world of twins, triplets, and individuals with mystic births, we all walk in the presence of spirits.
Bio
Kyrah Malika Daniels is an assistant professor of African American studies at Emory University. She completed her BA in Africana studies at Stanford University and received her MA in religion and her PhD in African and African American studies at Harvard University. Her first book, Art of the Healing Gods (2026), is a comparative religion project that examines sacred art objects used in healing ceremonies of Haiti and Congo-Kinshasa. Deeply invested in the digital humanities, she curates a student-led research platform called Africana Art Scholars and participates in initiatives such as the UCLA Fowler Museum’s Vital Matters series. Her work has been published in the Journal for the American Academy of Religion, the Journal of Africana Religions, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, and the Journal of Haitian Studies. She currently serves as a Leadership Council Member for the African and Diasporic Religious Studies Association (ADRSA) and as vice president for KOSANBA, the Scholarly Association for the Study of Haitian Vodou.
Abstract
Myrlande Constant’s large scale drapo have been compared by art historian Jerry Philogene as belonging to a long tradition of tapestry making worldwide practices that move in and out of transnational geographies to create a sense of a tactile narrative tradition that can move us from one geography to another, with signs of intelligibility as well as of humanity. Constant’s memorialization of Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake works from this long history of utilizing tapestry/weaving to tell the entwined realities that followed 12 January through cultural depictions—such as the collapsing of the space/time continuum through spiralism and invocations of Legba, god of the crossroads—to create a pathway between the spirit and human world, all the time invoking the travails of the everyday through humble yet powerful figures such as that of street merchants. This intimate reflection on Constant’s work weaves between particular focal points along the above lines and within the author’s novel What Storm,What Thunder, from the former’s multivocality and its parallel invocations of vodou figures, as well as it’s centralizing madan sara, as a means to demonstrate how both works activate mourning while remaining part of continuums of art-making that reveals Haitian humanity.
Bio
Myriam J. A. Chancy is the author most recently of the novel Village Weavers (2024), a TIME Best Book of April 2024. Her work has received multiple awards, including an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, the Guyana Prize in Literature, a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award Gold Prize, and the Isis Duarte Book Prize. Her previous novel, What Storm, What Thunder (2021), was named a “Best Book of 2021” by National Public Radio, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, The Boston Globe, and The Globe and Mail, and was shortlisted for the Caliba Golden Poppy Award and the Aspen Words Literary Prize and longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize and the OCM Bocas Prize. Her past novels include Spirit of Haiti (2003), The Scorpion’s Claw (2004), and The Loneliness of Angels (2010). She is also the author of several academic books, including Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women (1997) and Harvesting Haiti: Reflections on Unnatural Disasters (2023). Recent writings have appeared in Whetstone.com Journal, Electric Literature, and Lit Hub. She is a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and HBA Chair of the Humanities at Scripps College in California.
Abstract
This surrealist stream-of-consciousness performance text meditates on Myrlande Constant’s oeuvre in the Fowler Museum of UCLA (Myrlande Constant: The Work of Radiance, 2023) through absences, ancestor’s cosmos, nature, and spaciousness.
Bio
Gina Athena Ulysse is an artist and a scholar. She is a professor of humanities and the founding director of the Rasanblaj Lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is concerned with the visceral in the structural, and her research questions engage geopolitics, aesthetics, ephemerality, and the spiritual in the dailyness of Black diasporic conditions. For three decades, her rasanblaj approach to her multidisciplinary practice entails ongoing crossings and dialogues in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. She is the author of Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post Quake Chronicle (2015) and A Call to Rasanblaj: Black Feminist Futures and Ethnographic Aesthetics (2023). Her art and writing have appeared in Feminist Studies, Feminist Formations, the Journal of Haitian Studies, Meridians, Souls, Transition, and Third Text, and elsewhere, and she has performed at the Gorki Theatre, LaMama, the Marcus Garvey Liberty Hall, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, among other venues. She was an invited artist to the Biennale of Sydney in Australia (2020) and the Biennale of Dakar in Senegal (2024).
Abstract
This essay by the translator of We Slaves of Suriname (2022), an early twentieth-century political manifesto originally written in Dutch by the Surinamese author and activist Anton de Kom (Wij slaven van Suriname, 1934), introduces the book and its author and describes the events leading to its translation. The essay explores the significance of De Kom’s work, emphasizing that We Slaves of Suriname is primarily a literary and political project, as opposed to a work of academic research. After discussing the translation challenges and the conception of the translation project, the essay explores the stylistic diversity within the book, arguing that De Kom drew on the style of two well-known earlier critics of Dutch colonialism: Multatuli and Albert Helman. This suggests one potential direction for further research on We Slaves of Suriname.
Bio
David McKay is a prize-winning translator of fiction, nonfiction, plays, and poetry, who can be heard reading his work on the YouTube channel Translators Aloud. He is the translator of The Remembered Soldier, by Anjet Daanje (2025), and a co-translator, with Lucy Scott, of Off-White, by the Surinamese Dutch author Astrid Roemer (2024), and, with David Colmer, of Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World, by David Van Reybrouck (2024). His translation of Anton de Kom’s We Slaves of Suriname (2022) received an ICM Global South Award. He enjoys collaborating with fellow translators, authors, and other creative professionals such as the Foreign Affairs theater company, and is proud to have mentored a number of exceptional emerging translators for the American Literary Translators Association and other organizations.
Abstract
This essay describes some of the issues involved in translating the Dutch-language poetry collection Habitus by the Curaçaoan poet Radna Fabias for the US publisher Deep Vellum.
Bio
David Colmer is an Australian writer, translator, and editor who lives in Amsterdam. He translates novels, poetry, and children’s literature from Dutch and occasionally Frisian and has won several major prizes, including the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (both with novelist Gerbrand Bakker) and Australian and Dutch awards for his body of work. In 2022 he was awarded the James Brockway Prize for his translations of Dutch poetry. His most recent published translations include A Guardian Angel Recalls (2021) by Willem Frederik Hermans and the poetry of Cees Nooteboom, Nachoem M. Wijnberg, and Radna Fabias.
Bio
Dhiradj Ramsamoedj (whose work also appears on the covers of this issue) is a contemporary Surinamese artist known for his distinctive paintings, sculptures, installations, and performances. He graduated with honors from the Nola Hatterman Art Institute in 2004. His early work focused on ordinary Surinamese people and their daily lives, while later his themes developed around exploring memory, identity, and the complexities of human nature through vibrant colors and expressive techniques. He gained international recognition with his Flexible Man Project, introduced in 2010, featuring colorful textile sculptures symbolizing Suriname’s and Caribbean multicultural society. This artwork has been exhibited in Suriname, the Netherlands, Washington, DC, Martinique, Aruba, and Trinidad and Tobago, and has appeared in ARC Magazine. He has participated in artist residencies at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy (2009), Alice Yard (2011), Cité Internationale des Arts (2016), and DVCAI Studio in Miami (2026). His 2.8–meter sculpture Anansi is part of the permanent collection of the Suriname Museum.
Abstract
This essay engages the following texts as a way of thinking about what is at stake in elaborating a Caribbean queer criticism: Erotic Cartographies: Decolonization and the Queer Caribbean Imagination (2022), by Krystal Nandini Ghisyawan; Defiant Bodies: Making Queer Community in the Anglophone Caribbean (2023), by Nikoli A. Attai; An Ordinary Landscape of Violence: Women Loving Women in Guyana (2024), by Preity R. Kumar; and the author’s Fractal Repair: Queer Histories of Modern Jamaica (2024).
Bio
Matthew Chin an assistant professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Emory University. He is an anthropologist whose interdisciplinary research engages feminist and queer histories of race across the Caribbean and Asia. His book Fractal Repair: Making Queer Histories of Modern Jamaica (2024) was a cowinner of the John Boswell Prize by the LGBTQ History Association and received a Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award and an honorable mention for the Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Book Prize by the CaribbeanStudies Association. His work has been published in journals such as Globalizations, Interventions, and Public Culture.
Abstract
This essay places the author’s An Ordinary Landscape of Violence: Women Loving Women in Guyana (2024) in dialogue with three other recent works in queer Caribbean studies—Nikoli A. Attai’s Defiant Bodies: Making Queer Community in the Anglophone Caribbean (2023), Matthew Chin’s Fractal Repair: Queer Histories of Modern Jamaica (2024), and Krystal Nandini Ghisyawan’s Erotic Cartographies: Decolonization and the Queer Caribbean Imagination (2022)—to argue that violence is not exceptional or episodic but an ordinary condition shaping queer life. Shifting from visibility and resistance, the essay then turns toward survival, tracing how queer life unfolds through constraint, negotiation, and endurance within structures of harm.
Bio
Preity R. Kumar is an assistant professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Rhode Island. She is the author of An Ordinary Landscape of Violence: Women Loving Women in Guyana (2024), which introduces “affective violence” as a key concept, reconceptualizing violence beyond physical harm to encompass the emotional, psychological, and embodied ways queer women navigate and reproduce harm within a heteropatriarchal society. Through this framework, she reveals how violence operates not only as an external force but as an intimate and affective structure shaping queer existence, desire, and survival. Her research has been published in international journals and volumes across the United Kingdom, the Caribbean, and Poland, including the Journal of Indentureship and Its Legacies, the Journal of Lesbian Studies, InterAlia: A Journal of Queer Studies, the Middle Atlantic Review of Latin American Studies, and the Routledge Companion to Applied Qualitative Research in the Caribbean (2025).
Abstract
The years 2018 to 2026 have been important and instructive for the field of Caribbean sexuality studies with the publication of many books and essays on queer and trans experiences in the anglophone Caribbean. Four notable publications are the focus of this reflection: Krystal Nandini Ghisyawan’s Erotic Cartographies: Decolonization and the Queer Caribbean Imagination (2022), Preity R. Kumar’s An Ordinary Landscape of Violence: Women LovingWomen in Guyana (2024), Matthew Chin’s Fractal Repair: Queer Histories of Modern Jamaica (2024), and the author’s Defiant Bodies: Making Queer Community in the Anglophone Caribbean (2023). Reflecting first on Defiant Bodies, the essay then focuses on how each author is expanding the field and what it means to be doing this work amid ongoing contentions about nonnormative gender and sexuality in the region.
Bio
Nikoli A. Attai received his PhD in women’s and gender studies from the University of Toronto and an M Phil in cultural studies and a BA in media and communication from the University of the West Indies. He is most recently the author of Defiant Bodies: Making Queer Community in the Anglophone Caribbean (2023) and a coeditor, with Sue Ann Barratt, of Free Up Yuhself: Transgressive Bodies and Contestations in the Carnivalesque (2026). His broader research focuses on queer experiences in the anglophone Caribbean beyond notions of disease and violence, and the need to flee the region. He also investigates international queer asylum interventions in Canada and the Netherlands, and decolonial cultural formations in Trinidad and Tobago and the anglophone Caribbean.
Abstract
The author’s Erotic Cartographies: Decolonization and Queer Caribbean Imagination (2022) approaches cartographies as a process of mapping spaces, navigating the maps we are given and creating maps for ourselves. In this essay, she reads three texts—An Ordinary Landscape of Violence: Women Loving Women in Guyana (2024), by Preity R. Kumar; Defiant Bodies: Making Queer Community in the Anglophone Caribbean (2023), by Nikoli Attai; and Fractal Repair: Queer Histories of Modern Jamaica (2024), by Matthew Chin—through the lens of queer Caribbean cartographies. All four books engage in social mapping by recording the identities, territories, liming places, and socioeconomic challenges experienced by people who“queer” normative sexual and gender ideals—namely, same-sex/gender–desiring and gender-nonconforming people—and situate them in relation to local and transnational power dynamics and discourses. While the authors detail many aspects of coloniality, this essay focuses on the postcolonial framing of homosexuality as foreign to the region, “homoimperialism” within global sexual-rights frameworks, and how the violence of heteronormativity diffuses throughout the society. In these texts, the authors also offer homegrown solutions and adaptations to coloniality, hence this essay situates both sides within the appropriate “spaces”: the tourist space, the activist space, and the localities of queer thrivance.
Bio
Krystal Nandini Ghisyawan