Examining the work of British-Guyanese artist Hew Locke in view of the 17th century aesthetic category of the baroque, this essay suggests that Walter Benjamin's conception of allegory provides the most fitting interpretive framework for understanding the dialogic agency of diasporic indirection that characterizes Locke's investigations into the crisis of sovereignty. What makes it post-colonial is the double-voiced strategy whereby questions of violence and mourning are inscribed beneath a dazzling masquerade of cross-cultural quotation.
Bio
Kobena Mercer writes and teaches on the visual arts of the black diaspora. He is author of Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (1994) and is series editor of Annotating Art's Histories, whose titles include Cosmopolitan Modernisms (2005), Discrepant Abstraction (2006), Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures (2007), and Exiles, Diasporas, and Strangers (2008).
This is the revised text of the 21st Elsa Goveia Lecture, given at Cave Hill, Barbados in March 2004. It examines, first, how Caribbean historiography, during and after the moment of constitutional decolonization, had had an important investment in the idea of the hero. This way of seeing and writing history through exceptional individuals was an unexamined legacy of the colonial experience, and has distorted our approach to the Caribbean past. It proposes that a new kind of Caribbean history might be based on a curiosity about why people choose `heroic' or un-'heroic' paths, and on a sensitivity to weakness, vulnerability, and the complexities of personality.
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Richard Drayton is Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King's College, University of London. He is the author of a number of influential articles and the book Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the "Improvement" of the World (2000) and is coeditor, with Megan Vaughan, of the scholarly book series Cambridge Imperial and Post-colonial Studies.
This essay investigates the critical reactions and receptions to the narrators of Michèle Lacrosil's two novels, Sapotille et le Serin d'Argile(Sapotille and the Clay Canary) (1960) and Cajou (1961). The former narrator has received universal sympathy while the latter has been often severely criticized and blamed for the identity crisis and racism she faces as a Caribbean immigrant in Paris. These reactions can partly be understood by the different narrative styles each novel employs and how those styles affect reader response. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, these reactions also reveal limitations in prevailing theories of Caribbean subjectivity and about the reception of the female identity quest in postcolonial literature, the tendency to silence female voices when these voices go against the grain.
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Cheryl Duffus is an assistant professor of English at Gardner-Webb University, Boiling Springs, North Carolina. She specializes in postcolonial literature and theory, with an emphasis on Caribbean women's literature.
The historical and metaphysical connection between humans and the soil seems to be of vital significance to the recuperative power associated with the provision grounds, a relationship I trace by turning to Erna Brodber's allegorical novel, The Rainmaker's Mistake (2007). Drawing upon the work of Sylvia Wynter and others about the differing plots of the plantation and the provision grounds, this essay explores how Brodber challenges the plot of plantation narratives and employs allegory to excavate the roots of the provision grounds, particularly the figure of the yam. While roots are a generative metaphor for cultural origins, Brodber demonstrates that decay is the material way in which we know history has passed and thus is key to the articulation of time and nature itself, a position with profound implications for the region's historiography.
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Elizabeth DeLoughrey is an associate professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (2007) and editor, with Renée Gosson and George Handley, of Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture (2005). She has published essays on Caribbean literature in Thamyris, Journal of Caribbean Literatures, Interventions, Ariel, PMLA, Routledge Companion to Caribbean Literatures in English, and Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature. She recently completed an edited collection with George Handley titled Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment(forthcoming, 2011).
It is not too much to claim that C.L.R. James is the individual who has exercised the most decisive influence on political ideas in the twentieth century Anglophone Caribbean. Central to any consideration of his lifework is his concept of the new society – a term recurrent in his post-World War II writings. This new society that James hoped to help usher in was dependent on a transformation in gender relations, and James's firm linkage of human freedom to the liberation of women, while a topic that appears and disappears across his texts, is a deeply poignant and, as of yet, a generally unacknowledged part of his legacy.
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Aaron Kamugisha is a lecturer in cultural studies at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill. His current work is a study of coloniality, cultural citizenship, and freedom in the contemporary anglophone Caribbean, mediated through the social and political thought of C. L. R. James and Sylvia Wynter. He is the coeditor, with Alissa Trotz, of a special issue of Race and Class, "Caribbean Trajectories: 200 Years On" (2007).
Attentive to the disjunctures of the Chinese diaspora in the Americas, Patricia Powell's The Pagoda intertextually reterritorializes the tropes of Asian American literature and cultural criticism in a Jamaican context in order to fashion what I call a queer utopian historical romance. The novel portrays a simultaneously pluralist and creolizing anticolonial nationalism emerging from queer intimacies that cut across the racial divisions of late nineteenth-century Jamaica. Not only does this displace the masculinist labor movements of the 1930s as the originary moment of anticolonial Jamaican nationalism, but The Pagoda also offers a Caribbean alternative to US-based models of ethnic literature, limning distinctive histories of racialization, creolization, and pluralism.
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Jason Frydman is an assistant professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. With a specialty in Caribbean literature, his teaching and research explores comparative diasporas and multiculturalisms. He is currently working on a book project about world literature and the African diaspora.
This article argues that Césaire's essay, Toussaint Louverture: La Révolution française et le problème colonial brings the Haitian Revolution into contact with the departmentalization of the French Caribbean. Situated between the epic Cahier d'un retour au pays natal and the play,La Tragédie du Roi Christophe, Toussaint is an important transitional work in Césaire's oeuvre, one that has only recently received the attention it deserves. The historiographical and literary modes of the essay allow Césaire to work through the Haitian Revolution in order to nuance the political and cultural assimilation that he negotiated with the French during and after departmentalization.
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John Patrick Walsh is an assistant professor of French and francophone studies at the College of Charleston, South Carolina. He has published articles on Ahmadou Kourouma (in Research in African Literatures) and Alain Mabanckou (in Transition Magazine and French Review). He is currently at work on a book project titled "From Toussaint to Césaire: Narratives of the Haitian Revolution in the French Caribbean."
Sheryl Byfield was born in Kingston, Jamaica. She graduated from the Creative Writing Program at New York University and currently works as an English teacher in New York City.
John Goto is currently a professor of fine art at the University of Derby, UK. As a narrative artist he considers himself variously a contemporary history painter and a folk artist. Recent subjects include jazz migrants to London from 1919 to 1974 and the Iraq War, and he is currentlyworking on a series about Jelly Roll Morton, which will be shown in the Freud Museum, London, in 2012. He has shown widely in Europe and is represented by galleries in Paris, Munich, and Seoul, and has had solo exhibitions in London at Tate Britain, the National Portrait Gallery, the British Academy, and the Photographers' Gallery. See www.johngoto.org.uk.
This article focuses on the origins, nature and demise of what Diana Paton has called the “era of rehabilitative punishment” in Jamaica – that brief period of progressive penal reform which might be seen to have begun with the end of apprenticeship and the passing of the West India Prisons Act in 1838. This reform program, however, was rapidly abandoned amidst expressions of almost universal condemnation only a few years later. The essay discusses some of the reasons for this abrupt volte-faceand suggests that it might usefully be interpreted not only in the context of international trends in penal policy but also against the backdrop of two apparently unrelated phenomena: the sudden and prodigious increase in the prosecution of sex offences from the late 1840s, and the cholera epidemic which killed up to forty thousand Jamaicans in 1850-51
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Jonathan Dalby teaches at the University of the West Indies, Mona. His research interests began with the French Revolution and moved from there to French rural and social history, then to the history of crime. His current project concerns crime, justice, and society in Jamaica since the mid-eighteenth century. He is the author of several articles on provincial aspects of the French Revolution and has published two books, Les paysans cantaliens et la Révolution Française, 1789-1794 (1989) and Crime and Punishment in Jamaica: A Quantitative Analysis of the Assize Court Records, 1756-1856 (2000).
This article is a conversation with Diana Paton's study No Bond but the Law, which examines incarceration in emancipation era Jamaica. The analysis in this article focuses first on how Paton situates the Jamaican prison system within social transformations taking place across the late 18th and 19th century Atlantic World. The discussion then moves to Paton's engagement with Foucault, highlighting the vital importance of rethinking Foucault critically in the contexts of empire, race and gender. Finally, the article argues that the practice of imprisonment was a key aspect of imperial responses to slave trade abolition and slave emancipation. Even as slavery unraveled, imperial governments drew on slavery and slave imprisonment as bases for regulating black movement around the Atlantic World. In the process, incarceration was entrenched as a key feature of modern state responses to refugees, asylum seekers and the migration of the politically and economically dispossessed.
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Melanie J. Newton is an associate professor of history at the University of Toronto. She is the author of The Children of Africa in the Colonies: Free People of Color in Emancipation Era Barbados (2008) and several other articles on slave emancipation in the British Caribbean. Her current research is a historical examination of indigeneity in the Caribbean.
A response to Jonathan Dalby's and Melanie Newton's discussion of No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780-1870.
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Diana Paton is a reader in Caribbean history at Newcastle University. She is the author of No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780-1870 (2004) and coeditor of Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World (2005) and Obeah and Other Powers: The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing (forthcoming from Duke University Press).
