Issues

This essay is a response to calls in Black studies in the last decade, by Jafari Allen and others, to excavate Black queer histories and experiences, including in archives where we least expect them. The author does so by offering a queer reading of a foundational work in global Black literature often assumed to be irrelevant to such critical conversations: Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. He puts Césaire’s poem in dialogue with one of the three sketches produced by the Cuban painter Wifredo Lam for the 1943 Cuban translation of the Notebook—a drawing at once surrealist and decidedly queer. Using Lam’s multispecies interpretations as method and guide, the author teases out the few yet remarkable queer fragments that appear in Césaire’s subsequent revisions of the Notebook. What if in addition to an anticolonial Black poet, we also thought of Césaire as a queer poet?

In an era of deepening social and ecological calamity, artists from Puerto Rico currently address perennial questions of catastrophe in ways that foreground the island archipelago’s multispecies relationships: the dynamic assemblages of human and more-than-human organisms that confront the ongoing depredations of environmental colonialism. This essay takes a first step toward establishing a field of multispecies Caribbean studies by analyzing the work of the contemporary Puerto Rican artist Dhara Rivera. Rivera’s installations critically reimagine multispecies relations by crafting an aesthetics of ecological reinvention that neither harks back to a falsely harmonious ecological past nor foretells an entirely apocalyptic planetary future. Caribbean multispecies studies complicate commonplaces of ecocriticism by troubling the neat division between spectacular disaster and slow violence, questioning the mobilization of the assemblage as a straightforward and positive compositional attribute and bringing together environmental justice and environmental humanities scholarship with an eye to a livable present.

This meditation on diasporic belonging, the limits of light and vision, and the practices people enact to become one with the earth examines watercolors done by British artist William Berryman while he lived in Jamaica between 1808 and 1816. It focuses on depictions of the provision ground, small plots of land enslaved people and their families used to grow food and, ultimately, forge a connection with the land. The author peels back the layers of Berryman’s scenes, looking beyond what has been rendered visible, countering European representations of landscape that privilege vision and light. She contemplates what we cannot see in these images: buried entities that formed a network of power known to enslaved people, engaging Katherine McKittrick’s theory of Black geographies. Through these entities, people of African descent established blood ties with the earth of Jamaica, thus, to use Sylvia Wynter’s term,“transplanting” their culture to the island.

This essay serves as an introduction to a suite of essays exploring the significance and resonance of Charles V. Carnegie’s Postnationalism Prefigured (2002). The occasion for these reflections is the twentieth anniversary of the publication of the book. The authors’ discussion examines the place of Carnegie’s work in relation to questions of Caribbean intellectual genealogies. They locate him multiply: as a student of the 1960s generation and as a scholar in his own right among a cohort of critics writing at the turn of the century. They also examine and reflect on the ongoing importance of Carnegie’s scholarship.

On the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of Charles V. Carnegie’s Postnationalism Prefigured (2002), this essay extends Carnegie’s insights about the inadequacy of using concepts of race as the foundation for nationalism to explore the social exclusions that are enforced in such constructions along lines of not only race but gender and sexuality as well. Taking a cue from a personal anecdote Carnegie relates in the book about the problem he poses as a “dundus” (Jamaican with albinism) for systems of racial classification, the author relies on reminiscence and a similar anecdote about his own misrecognition as “chineyman” (Chinese Jamaican) and possible “battyman” (gay man) to uncover the heterosexual and patriarchal norms that also underwrite the race/nation imaginary.

This essay was originally drafted for a twenty-year retrospective on Charles Carnegie’s Postnationalism Prefigured (2002). Reflecting on her own ethnographic research, the author takes up two of the book’s insights. The first unsettles national sovereignty as an essentializing horizon of justice that defangs rebellious ancestors. Instead, Carnegie attends to the unsettled spatiotemporal logic of past struggle, as echoed by contemporary border transgressions of everyday archipelagic life. From this, the author reconsiders the spatiotemporality of land claims based on belonging “here” rather than on property. The second insight holds essentialism to account for the tropes through which Black nation-states are read. From this she asks, might it be that an enforcer who does not enforce is anticolonial, leveraging chinks in the plantation logic of the law?

This essay, part of a roundtable celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Charles V. Carnegie’s Postnationalism Prefigured (2002), explores the theoretical effects of Carnegie’s insistence that we release ourselves from the thrall of liberal Western sovereignty. It addresses Carnegie’s prescient interventions in relation to three canards of political philosophy—race-based notions of belonging, the centrality of secularism to modern notions of political community, and particular discourses of autonomy and self-determination. The author argues that what Carnegie shows us is that the modernity of control and containment is continually one or two steps behind the countermodernity of subalterns, and that autonomy is rooted not in the race-nation-territory triad but in the everyday movements within, across, and beyond it.

This contribution is an interview with the Jamaican anthropologist Charles “Val” Carnegie. It aims, in a brief span, to engage with Carnegie’s school and university years, his intellectual formation, and the direction of his current work.

This essay argues that a noncontingent, nonexclusionary notion of humanity’s oneness—constituted through difference rather than denying it—provides a principled foundation for social renewal and repair at all social scales. This foundation of human oneness is essential to overcoming the insecure conceptual foundations of modern social identities and their injurious, conflict-engendering effects, as well as addressing the urgent challenges confronting the planet. In effect, given our species and planetary interconnectedness, processes of social regeneration from the local to the global must be congruent, undertaken simultaneously, and grounded in our noncontingent humanness. Building on the author’s critique of the stultifying impact of racial and national modes of belonging in his Postnationalism Prefigured (2002), and in dialogue with the work of David Scott, Deborah Thomas, and other critics of the postcolonial Caribbean gathered for the symposium marking the book’s twentieth anniversary, the essay discusses other closely interconnected historical legacies in Jamaica and the Caribbean—relatively low levels of trust and weak social institutions—that, along with race-thinking, hinder the reconstitution of social life.

The images in this visual essay are collected from three series: Merely a Chimera (2015), Thousands of Thousands (2023), and Black Holes (2023). They intertwine the visual connection between the landscape and the artist’s emotions and imagination. What started as ink studies on paper developed into drawings of the land, sea, and sky; composition and color. They are representations of ways the artist visualizes wonder, mysteriousness, beauty, and strangeness.

Lewis R. Gordon investigates myriad questions in Fear of Black Consciousness (2022). He brings out the complexity of Black consciousness and the psychological, ontological, and epistemic upheavals that it provokes in a White world. Gordon examines contradictions, paradoxes, and aporias that find their coherence in his continual call to an emerging form of transcendence. Struck by Gordon’s analysis of denial, responsibility, bad faith, and the blues, the author does not explain or summarize Gordon’s thought but rather uses it as a base for an exploration of the psychic life of White power. Denial and bad faith are not mere features of this psychic life; rather, they are fundamental conditions for its continued refusal to acknowledge the epistemic and ontological dimensions of Black humanity. This discussion essay examines how Gordon allows us to see the blues as a musical genre whose relationship to suffering reflects a responsible and liberating way of existing in the world.

This discussion essay examines Lewis R. Gordon’s Fear of Black Consciousness (2022) and his analysis of ethics and politics within Black political philosophy. Gordon’s interdisciplinary book weaves together film, jazz, Judaism, and Egyptology (for instance) to interrogate the limits of political liberal concepts such as liberty, justice, and equality for analyzing and addressing anti-Black racism. A central concern facing Gordon is the degree to which bad faith is ignored or underexamined in political philosophy and public debates on social justice and freedom. Exploring how the racialization of the “Black” informs competing responses to anti-Blackness among Black and non-Black communities, this essay weighs the usefulness of Gordon’s metareflective framing for understanding the tension and significance of religion and moral claims in developing theories of freedom within Black political philosophy.

This discussion essay offers a Black digital perspective on Lewis R. Gordon’s Fear of BlackConsciousness (2022). Through a reading of Blackness as an informational and ratchet identity, the author contends that the typographic duality of a lowercase blackness and an uppercase Blackness offers a liminal, fleeting opportunity for Black digital agency between these two states.

This response essay addresses anti-Blackness and other fears of Black consciousness through discussing analyses and critiques of the author’s Fear of Black Consciousness (2022) offered by Nathalie Etoke, Terrence L. Johnson, and André Brock. Concepts under discussion include bad faith, b/Black consciousness, the blues and hip-hop, bridging the aesthetic and the ethical, colonization, decolonization, double-consciousness, embodied consciousness, epistemic closure, freedom, historical erasure, joy, language, liberalism, Negritude, neoliberalism, oppression, political life, and power.