Issues

Focusing on the Haitian author Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s novel Dance on the Volcano (1957), this essay examines representations of an anxious White minority on the eve of the Haitian Revolution. It argues that Vieux-Chauvet deploys theatrical conventions to suggest that White benevolence, a valence of White saviorism, is a performance designed to maintain the status quo of colonial Saint Domingue. The essay also considers the implications of examining global South critiques of Whiteness for the often US-centric field of critical Whiteness studies. Dance on the Volcano focuses on a uniquely formative moment: the last years of colonial rule punctuated by the raced tensions that gave way to a revolution that forever altered the global colonial order. Vieux-Chauvet’s use of dialogue, gestures, and eavesdropping illustrate the duplicity of White characters, while foregrounding the critical gaze of the protagonist, the first woman of color to perform in the theater of Saint Domingue.

This essay explores the visual cultural production of three twentieth-century Black Caribbean Central American women painters: June Beer and Judith Kain, both from the Miskitu Coast, and Iris Abrahams, from San Andrés and Providencia. Specifically, it contextualizes these artists’ landscape portraiture against the historical backdrops of colonialism, territorial dispossession, and autonomous struggle in the isthmus. Understanding the political and the cultural as inextricably intertwined, this essay reads their place-based visual art as a critical form of anticolonial critique and social organizing in a region that remains marginalized in the historiography and scholarship on Latin America and the Caribbean and radical Black diasporic politics.

This essay tells the story of a caldosa (both a stew and the gathering where it is served) hosted in 2016 by a network of Black lesbian activists in Havana, Cuba, that took place on the morning after the Pulse massacre in Orlando, Florida. The author explores the caldosa as both an example of and a metaphor for the transnational, coalitional, and space-making politics of Black lesbian activists in the island. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and a participatory mapping project, the author shows how the work of making caldosa connects the local practice of space-making to a hemispheric and anticipatory Black lesbian politic.The essay builds on previous work on Black lesbian feminism in Cuba and provides insight into the type of activism that was happening in the island in the mid-2010s, which laid the groundwork for the growth in Afro-feminist and Afro-queer activism in the following years.

Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) was written from the perspective that the history of Africa is necessary to understand the continent’s present and to envision its transformation in the future. This essay tracks Rodney’s positioning of the historian in the conjunction of past, present, and future through the registers of diagnostician and participant in political mobilization. The author argues that Rodney’s analogy of the historian as medical doctor generates a critique of Romantic depictions of the African past and draws on the language of Marxism to track the formation of African political power. At the same time, Rodney’s position as a participant in political mobilization compels an approach to history writing that exceeds the terms of diagnosis. Examining the interplay between diagnosis and mobilization, this essay reveals the range of ways Rodney approached the task of historicizing the present and generating usable African pasts.

This essay is assembled around four loosely interrelated questions concerning Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972). First, Why read this book now? Second, How should we read this book today? Third, What is the politics and poetics of the formal conceptual and argumentative apparatus that shapes How Europe Underdeveloped Africa? And finally, fourth, If How Europe Underdeveloped Africa was not meant to engage an academic protocol but a Marxist politics of revolutionary social transformation, what is the idiom in which we might translate the radical impetus of the critique embodied in it into a contemporary political project?

This essay explores the discourse produced in Water Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) as part of an intellectual genealogy at the University of Dar es Salaam and Rodney’s involvement in a political landscape that was global in nature. The author proposes that the book offers a methodology of writing history, both in terms of the extent of such a history and positing the historical problematic. He argues that Rodney produces a universal history insofar as universality is assumed in the social relations of exploitation and consequently solidarities of revolutionary praxis globally. This necessitates a further interrogation into the historical question that, the author posits, in Rodney’s work lies in deciphering the spaces of contradictions and crisis.

This essay reconsiders Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) via a discussion of Rodney’s pedagogy and his methodology. The essay inquires into the relevance of Rodney’s pedagogy and what it means to teach the book in the contemporary moment. To that end, the author first discusses Rodney’s engagements with the University of California, Los Angeles, as part of a longer history of Black intellectual and political activism and the geographies of Black radicalism on campus. The author then explores the question of methodology in Rodney’s book, especially as that methodology draws on the intellectual and political traditions of Pan-Africanism and Marxism.

Drawing on Walter Rodney’s lesser-known texts and speeches alongside his How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), this essay demonstrates how Rodney applied Marx’s dialectical materialism to the study of slavery and colonialism in relation to labor in Africa and the Americas in. It offers a critical response to the Brazilian theorist Denise Ferreira da Silva’s notion of the “racial dialectic,” which suggests that Marxism—and particularly the universal conception of human freedom embedded in Marx’s conception of the labor theory of value, primitive accumulation, and labor-time—is incapable of addressing the socioeconomic realities of slavery and colonialism. Rodney’s oeuvre provides an expansive engagement with Marx’s methodology applied to the realities of slavery and colonialism and contemporary political struggles on the African continent and in the Americas.

This essay addresses Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) in relation to three moments: the time of its writing and publication; that of the next major global political epoch, the neoliberal turn of the 1970s and 1990s; and our current moment, when compounded crises bound up with the afterlives of colonialism—coming to a head in the form of planetary climate catastrophe and its attendant sociopolitical degradations—have rightfully renewed demands for a decolonization of the contemporary world. The three orientations that guide the essay—the conflict between Indigenous spatio-temporalities of life and experience as they underwent forced conformity with an homogenous, “empty” time and space underpinning Eurocentric ideas of capitalist progress as well as the advancement of communism/socialism; a critique of unilinear Development models; and How Europe Underdeveloped Africa as a predecessor to contemporary decolonial theory—signal an approach to alternative modes of knowing for generating new possibilities for life.

This essay offers a modest attempt to read Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) alongside the political tragedy that was unfolding in 1960s Guyana, which Rodney was thinking and writing about before and during his Dar es Salaam years. The authors suggest that this historical conjuncture and such a relational reading—in contrast to one that considers Rodney’s Caribbean, African, and Guyanese years separately or with little attention to the dynamic overlap of context—provide important insights into Rodney’s radical historical praxis as a model for transnational liberation.

Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) examined, of course, how European imperialism turned Africa into a subordinate zone of the world economy. But beyond that, this essay seeks to show how Rodney explored, with Marxist and Caribbean tools, the complex problem of temporality in world history: how events in one conjuncture form enduring structures; how imperial power orders and is reproduced by ways of living in and thinking about time; and revolutionary time, in particular the Tricontinental moment. Rodney’s time conjuring was anchored both in that heroic 1960s emergency and in a tradition of challenging the constrictions of modern (imperial) time, alive in both elite and popular currents of the Caribbean intellectual tradition

The works collected here are made up of individual parts of debris found in the artist’s studio and through his daily movings in the Bahamian landscape. The artist keeps a sketchbook, but in recent years has also depended more heavily on the juxtapositions of these very simple found elements that make up both his public and personal environments. The works are musings, experimentation, and play, used to consider not only the spaces he is in but also the influences these spaces have on him and, in turn, he on them. This is a defining partnership in Schmid’s works, works that he calls “a hymn to home.”

The cantankerous public discourse generated by the author’s bilingual newspaper columns published in the Jamaica Observer (May 1993 to January 1998) and the Jamaica Gleaner (March 2013 to the present) illustrates the conservative, neocolonial language ideology that still prevails in Jamaica. The essay demonstrates how contestations around national identity are articulated in a repressive language of moral authority. Speakers of “good” (English) and“bad” (Jamaican) language varieties become embattled in a struggle for the control of public terrain. The essay concludes that the “bilingual” model of Jamaican/English language identity has very little currency in a society that still privileges the “command” of English as a sign of the intellectual abilities of its habitual speakers/writers and that disparages competence in Jamaican as a marker of intellectual deficiency. Nevertheless, the author sees hopeful signs that the Jamaican language is gradually gaining national prominence.

This essay discusses Belinda Edmonsdon’s Creole Noise: Early Caribbean Dialect Literature and Performance (2022). The author shows how Edmondson challenges Standard English dismissals of anglophone Caribbean vernaculars as an inferior form of English and reorients the historical legacy of Anglo-Creoles by pushing against the assumption that these Creoles are a lingua-franca restricted to Black folk cultures in the Caribbean. Beginning with European migration to the Caribbean, Creole Noise charts the colonial and postcolonial emergence of robust, creative vernaculars in the anglophone context. The lively, well-written book reveals how multiple constituencies have contributed culturally to the unique Caribbean language variants that refashioned the English language and enriched global literature.

This essay is a response to Belinda Edmondson’s Creole Noise: Early Caribbean Dialect Literature and Performance (2022), which is an excellent history of literary and performative Creole in the anglophone Caribbean, tracing its roots back to the work songs of enslaved African laborers, to the transcriptions and parodies of White Caribbean elites, and to the increasing use in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of Creole by Brown and Black Caribbean writers and performers. Slowly, the language shifted from being a marker of cultural inferiority to a medium for signaling cultural authenticity. Edmondson shows how the everyday language of the anglophone Caribbean haltingly, ambivalently, but in the end decisively elbowed its way into the rooms where print culture was produced, consumed, and evaluated.

This essay reviews Belinda Edmondson’s literary yet cross-disciplinary study Creole Noise: Early Caribbean Dialect Literature and Performance (2022), which questions the Blackness of orality versus the Whiteness of narrative in the growth of Caribbean literature. Caribbean language history and discourse analysis have much to contribute to the exploration of ventriloquist beginnings of the regional narrative as well as to the nuancing of interpretation, and the review calls for such exchange across the relevant disciplines. The review also welcomes comparisons between literary developments of Black American and Caribbean literature that highlight the cross-cultural relevance of Edmondson’s analysis. Creole Noise is timely and useful in contributing positively to such matters as border disputes on Caribbeanness, with regard to regional and diasporic writing, and to challenges that face writers who are native speakers of Caribbean Creole as they convey local voices to foreign readers.

In response to three discussions of the author’s Creole Noise: Early Caribbean Dialect Literature and Performance (2022), this essay raises questions about the meaning of authenticity in the production of literary Creole in the anglophone Caribbean from the eighteenth century to the present. It puts into conversation related progressive concepts of Creole, such as Kamau Brathwaite’s formulation of nation language, with early racist ventriloquist Creole narratives by White creoles in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It does so as a way of disentangling what we mean when we identify an authentic Creole voice. This essay also examines the role of linguistics in affirming or disproving the authenticity of historical Creole narratives; distinguishes spoken Creole from written; and considers the importance, or lack of importance, in identifying authors when constructing a history of literary Creole. Authors discussed include Henry Garland Murray, Kamau Brathwaite, V.S. Naipaul, Cynric Williams, and Samuel Augustus Mathews.