Issues

This essay explores the early work of Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain in Congo. Despite Comhaire-Sylvain being renowned as Haiti’s first woman anthropologist, her life and extensive scholarship in Africa have been largely overlooked. Given her unique positionality and formal training in Europe during a period when ethnology relied on empire to assert its utility to the state, Comhaire-Sylvain’s work unfolded along colonial fault lines, a dimension this essay seeks to tease out. The analysis focuses on a 1947 essay she published inLa Voix des Femmes, thenewspaper of Haiti’s first women’s rights organization. This piece, a literary sketch, provides valuable insights into Comhaire-Sylvain’s perspectives on working-class women, racial segregation, and the gendered division of labor. It explores the Zone neutre of Leopoldville (later Kinshasa) and reveals a Caribbean scholar’s observations of life in a racially divided African colonial city, offering a precursor to Frantz Fanon’s portrayal of the settler town and the colonized town in The Wretched of the Earth.

This essay situates women’s “spiritual literacy” within a Black feminist framework that privileges religious and ancestral epistemologies. Following scholars such as Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, M. Jacqui Alexander, and Karen McCarthy Brown, this essay decenters masculinist heroes such as Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines in C.L.R James’s 1967 dramatic adaptation of his 1938 The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. Instead, it examines a critical but often neglected character: a fictional woman named Celestine. In a play obsessed with cultural hierarchies, it is remarkable that the most literate, flexible, and skilled cultural translator of the play is not a storied hero of the Haitian Revolution; rather, it is a servant woman overlooked by traditional histories. Through his portrayal of Celestine, James demands modes of historical production that decenter both the written word and traditional masculine iconography and instead engages with the embodied, spiritual, and performed.

This essay explores fugitivity in Puerto Rican culinary practices, centering the cooks María Dolores “Lula” de Jesús and Viña “la Gran Pastelera” Hernández. By analyzing two visual texts—Eat, Drink, Share Puerto Rico’s episode “El Burén de Lula” and Hernández’s recipe video for pasteles dough—it examines how nostalgia and a longing for “lost” culinary traditions are shaped by notions of space, race, and gender. Drawing on Pedro Lebrón’s concept of cimarronería analéctica, this essay argues that these practices represent a fugitive relationship to food, escaping Eurocentric modernity and affirming a distinct world. The author also analyzes the possibility of conceiving food sovereign futures by approaching traditional culinary practices rooted in slave-based and subsistence economies in the Puerto Rican archipelago.

This essay examines Carolyn Cooper’s intellectual project as a practice of noisy disturbance that anchors her conceptualizing of Jamaican literary and cultural discourses within the concrete materiality and exteriority of the countries historical, cultural, socioeconomic, and linguistic realities. Using Edward Said’s notion of worldliness, the essay argues that Cooper articulates this via three related tropes—noises, border clashes, and the vulgar body—that address the politics of Jamaican linguistic and cultural hierarchies. Cooper’s two groundbreaking publications, Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (1993) and Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large (2004) are read schematically as strategic interventions that privilege a multifarious disturbing and transgressive orality. Cooper’s work is deliberately and self-consciously invested in disturbing and disrupting cultural and linguistic shibboleths that accord epistemological nullity and ontological invalidity to Jamaican vernacular discourses such as Jamaican Creole/Patwa and the musical genres of reggae and dancehall.

This essay gauges the significance, and legacy of Carolyn Cooper’s 1993 Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular Culture. It discusses the book’s impact across and against the “Black Atlantic” paradigm, the rise and limits of global feminisms, and shifts in Black popular and academic cultures in the 1990s. Just past its thirtieth anniversary, the book’s critical methodologies enabled much of contemporary thinking about race, gender, and popular cultures in the African diaspora. However, it also establishes some aesthetic and political refusals that are still necessary in an intellectual climate where the Caribbean continues to struggle against the hegemonizing demands of elite Pan-African solidarities.

This essay reflects on Carolyn Cooper’s research on Afro-Jamaican feminisms via literary history, literary criticism, and cultural studies and her use of that research in various pedagogical spaces. The author’s approach is personal and layered, working primarily through memories of being taught by Cooper in the mid- to late 1990s as a literature student at the University of the West Indies, Mona. These memories are lensed through a rereading of Cooper’s scholarship and also framed from the vantage point of being a university instructor now herself. Drawing from Cooper’s complex working out of the proverbial Jamaican woman “digging up” her own luck and thinking with her sophisticated verbal code-switching, with the materiality of her presence as a public intellectual, and with the closing of her 1993 Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular Culture, where she re-encodes “textuality” with its rippled weave as “textile,” the author arrives at the idea of texture as a way to think with and through the example of Cooper’s work.

Carolyn Cooper’s influence as an academic converges with her important work as tastemaker and trendsetter for Jamaica and the wider Caribbean. In this personal homage to Cooper, charted through their meetings in Haiti, Jamaica, and London, the author proposes that we see this convergence in historical continuity with the resistive potential of swag as manifested in Caribbean expressive performative traditions, including Jamaica’s Junkanoo. The same subversive style ties together the Junkanoo reveler captured by Isaac Belisario and Carolyn Cooper’s verbal wit and sartorial elegance. Her embodied wor(l)ds convey a powerful message that coolly brushes aside middle-class timidity and conformism to inspire postcolonial people not just in the Caribbean but across the global South, empowering us to wield the beauty of creolized language, music, and movement as decolonial weapons infused with pride and joy.

This essay pays homage to the influential scholarship and activism of the Jamaican literary and cultural critic Carolyn Cooper. In form, it imitates Cooper’s code-switching newspaper columns and analysis of Sistren Theater Collective’s Lionheart Gal, traversing the borderline between scholarship and autobiography, between Patwa (Jamaican/Jumiekan) and English. Cooper’s legacy in championing the native tongue of Jamaica—not as bad English or noise but as a capacious language for both academic discourse and creative work—is to offer multiple ways to sound authentically Jamaican on the page. For creative writers navigating a global publishing market of anglophone editors and readers, this ongoing quest for a truer yet accessible orthography has both creative and market risk. But it also holds out rewards in reclaiming Jamaicans’ repressed voices and mother tongues and in developing an unapologetically Jamaican literature on the global stage.

This essay traces the author’s intellectual trajectory as a Road Scholar translating academic discourse into the language of the street. Cooper acknowledges the trademarks by which she has come to be known: cultural critic, language-rights activist, feminist scholar, incisive newspaper columnist, television talk show host. These trademarks represent the interwoven strands of the ideas she elaborates in her academic work and her interventions in the media, both local and international. Her brand is an assemblage of identities sharing a common ideological core: contesting many of the “givens” she inherited as a Black girl growing up in the1950s when institutional racism and class prejudice defined the appropriate place for African Jamaicans. On the periphery! As a public intellectual, Cooper interrogates the fictive national motto—“Out of many, one people”—that reinscribes the diminution of the “many.” She locates the culture of the African Jamaican majority at the very center of national consciousness.

Patería is a Puerto Rican Spanish-language vernacular synonym for “queerness” as a sign of gender and sexual transgression. It invokes stigmatized LGBTQIA+ local language practices that coexist in tension with the modernity, paradoxes, and challenges of other words such as mariconería, locura, and faggotology. Patería signals a universe associated with the condition of being a pato (duck, faggot) or pata (female duck, lesbian, dyke) or even loca (effeminate homosexual, madwoman) and of moving through the codes of gender nonconformity, of inhabiting the realm of other Spanish-language words like maricón (Mary), its diminutive mariquita (ladybug), mariposa (butterfly), and marimacha (a macho Mary). In this keyword essay, the author engages a SPIT! (Sodomites, Perverts, Inverts Together!) manifesto, a column by Karla Claudio-Betancourt, and scholarly pieces on queer language. He also analyzes Macha Colón’s song “Jayá” (2012), Eduardo Alegría’s song “Farifo” (2004), and Villano Antillano’s song “Pájara” (2020).

This keyword essay traces the historical trajectory of the term kambrada. It argues for a broader understanding of Caribbean sexual dynamics, utilizing sources ranging from travelogs and novels to modern activist interviews. Kambrada, which is akin to mati in Suriname, represents a spectrum of women’s relationships. This essay compares kambrada and mati, exploring their sociosexual meanings within the Dutch Caribbean. It traces the usage of kambrada through four historical periods, beginning with its negative portrayal in the late nineteenth century and subsequent reassessment through mid-twentieth-century social sciences during demographic and industrial changes. Employing a nuanced analysis, the essay challenges historical biases to reveal the complexities of kambrada and further charts kambradanan (plural) role during the women’s liberation movement. The essay concludes with the 2021 Kambrada collective in Curaçao, which represents a movement toward autonomy and decolonization. It underscores the dynamic nature of the Dutch Caribbean sexual vernacular while questioning Western labels imposed on the region’s sexual cultures.

This keyword essay discusses how the terms friend and family are used by same-sex-desiring women in Trinidad to mask and facilitate queer becoming. For many, friends can be like family; for some, those words might be synonymous. The paper questions how cultures of exclusion within Trinidadian society and its queer communities facilitate the women’s formation of kin and kin-like bonds. In Trinidad, the term friend has multivalence, suggesting a sexual relationship, an inevitable betrayal, a confidante, or a go-between. Finally, the essay draws on other models of female homosociality, cooperation, and desire, such as zami and mati, as well as sakhi, Indo-Caribbean traditions of ritual friendship, to help contextualize women’s passionate friendships.

The French Creole term makoumè does not belong to the political and cultural discussions by French Caribbean LGBT communities seeking protection against abuse using the laws sanctioned by the French government. One would also be hard-pressed to find local and Caribbean theorizations of the term makoumè that reclaim the word defiantly, like the fathers of negritude such as Aimé Césaire have done with the word nègre, to conceptualize liberatory practices or set of principles. In this keyword essay, the author asks, Could theorizing makoumè as a marker of difference, of lack, of excess, of gender disturbance—namely, queerness—rather than as only a sign of masculine homosexuality in the Caribbean expose a very French malaise around questions of genre and issues destabilizing heterosexual norms? This French Creole word could thus help us examine and (re)imagine queerness in the French Caribbean, even if queerness is not explicitly named.

This review essay of Rocío Zambrana’s Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico (2021) illustrates Zambrana’s own intervention into “race/gender/class” hierarchies as carrying their own relations of power within her re writing of the “plantation complex,” using the colony of Puerto Rico as case study. This intervention, the author speculates, moves the book’s analysis into a more intramural critique where Zambrana centers an interrogation of the “vitality” of the “laboratory” that is the factory, or of the plantation economy as the materialized prefiguration for financialized capital on the colony. Zambrana’s move here, the author asserts, then provokes her to name anti-Blackness as the foundation for the structural mechanisms (racial order) that sediment the ability to be an indebted subject, or at least experience an enclosure within the structural comfort of national belonging.

This review essay analyzes the problem of subjectivity in Rocío Zambrana’s Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico (2021) from a phenomenological perspective. The essay argues that despite the absence of an explicit formulation, Colonial Debts relies on a theory of subjectivity, which the essay articulates through a characterization of Zambrana’s concept of “unbinding”as a process of desubjectivation enacted by decolonial practices in the context of material conditions of oppression. The essay also argues for the critical usefulness of phenomenological descriptions to theorize both the logics of subjection that coloniality instantiates, and the“prefiguring” of a potential interruption in their operativity. Finally, it studies the experience of waiting as a particularly revealing determination of the temporality of colonial existence that is especially recurrent in Puerto Rican intellectual production.

This review essay of Rocio Zambrana’s Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico (2021) argues that it is a book about contemporary Puerto Rico and its world-historical significance that engages this endeavor with depth and breath, carefully crafting its own argument, through the lens of Puerto Rico’s colonial crisis as symptomatic of a global crisis of neoliberal capitalism, by means of an analytics of debt as a central feature of capitalist modernity. Rather than simply presenting the book, the essay critically addresses several interwoven questions that are key to its argument. The author introduces the general theoretical framework and presents specific historical and social accounts, then pursues a path from the laying-out of the analytical gaze to specifying the political posture. It discusses the book’s contributions to decolonial critique, Marxism, the analytics of debt, and the dialectics of life and death in capitalist modernity and moves on to assessing its radical politics of decolonization and decoloniality.

Engaging the important discussions of Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico (2021) in the review essays from Judy Rodríguez, Ernesto Blanes, and Agustín Laó-Montes, this reply essay from the book’s author recounts and situates the main theses of Colonial Debts in light of her current work in Caribbean political economy, particularly concerning figures of speculation that perpetuate the logic of the trade-plantation complex in contemporary financialized capitalism. The essay moves from the forms of economic violence generated by the link between debt and austerity at the core of the book to the intensification of forms of despojo through the consolidation of the Puerto Rican archipelago as a tax haven; a space of speculation with land, coasts, and housing; and a space of rest, pleasure, and impunity for the “other” crystalized in the tourist economy.