Issues

Whereas the historical trauma of the Middle Passage and enslavement has been a prominent subject of Caribbeanist scholarship, there is surprisingly little sustained consideration of how poems and other imaginative works mourn this violent past, even though melancholic grief is a crucial component of the literary response. Building on the concepts of “postmemory”and “rememory,” this essay proposes the concepts of postmourning for the representation of transgenerational grief and remourning for its embodied enactment in creative work. Elegies exemplify the poetic response to both the historical losses of transatlantic slavery and to intimate, recent losses shadowed by this primordial, collective grief. Poets such as Dennis Scott and Lorna Goodison Caribbeanize elegy by drawing on rituals, songs, spiritual discourses, music, and other collective or “folk” vehicles of ancestral memory and shared ur-grief, combining them with the idiosyncrasy and aesthetic self-reflexivity of lyric, ars poetica, and writerly technique.

Frantz Fanon famously reacted to Jean-Paul Sartre’s appropriation of Negritude with the assertion that he would rebuild it with his hands, working intuitively to regrow Black subjectivity as if in the coiling form of the liana tree. Fanon’s reference to the “lianes intuitives” suggests at once a primary, sensory activity and a complicity with a plant form that symbolizes creative interweaving. This essay takes Fanon’s response to Negritude as a starting point for an analysis of the figure of the liana as a symbol of relationality and transformation in the work of Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, where the “homme-plante” embedded in the ecosystem represents a salutary environmental ethics.

This essay examines the discourse surrounding respectability politics and the French Guianese “bad gyal” Bamby’s performance of femininity in French Guiana and the wider French Caribbean. It argues that Bamby’s style of s’habiller sexy (dressing sexy) is more than just her way of dressing. In fact, it encompasses the topics of her songs, her choice to sing in French Guianese Creole and Jamaican Creole, and embodiment. In addition, the essay shows how the critiques of Bamby’s performance from the YouTube video “La Polémique BAMBY et l’imagede la Femme” highlight the restrictive gender ideologies that exist for women in the French Caribbean. In examining how Bamby’s performance of femininity differs from the ideal version of French Antillean-Guianese womanhood, the author shows how she re-envisions the trope of the femme ochan (promiscuous woman)⁠ or the ghetto feminist to embrace her femininity and sexuality and challenge cultural and national codes of respectability.

This essay highlights community murals as a potent tool in creative placemaking as they foreground overlooked narratives and weave them into the larger public discourse. While scholars have noted the importance of history and race in creative placemaking discourse, this essay’s contribution lies in its focus on murals. The author argues that the physical and cultural landscape of Bristol, England, has been transformed through the creation of seven large-scale commemorative murals featuring noted men and women of the Windrush generation. The street murals comprising the Seven Saints of St. Pauls Art and Heritage Trail serve as a visual narrative of a more comprehensive history while also contributing to the creation of the “Black spatial imaginary.”

This essay examines how memory and diasporic community formation serve as tools for Afro-Belizeans in the United States to preserve their histories amid colonial and postcolonial contexts and natural disasters. Utilizing autoethnography and testimonials from Belizean women, it explores the role of memory and placemaking within the broader context of Caribbean and Central American migration. Focusing on the Belizean exodus following Hurricane Hattie in 1961, this essay also highlights the displacement and exile of Black migrants and examines the visibility, erasure, and transnational presence of the Belizean community in Los Angeles shaped by environmental challenges. It underscores the critical role of oral histories in capturing Black Belizeans’ experiences, especially given the limited archival records owing to regional erasure. The author emphasizes the importance of centering and preserving counternarratives that challenge marginalization, offering insights into the ongoing exclusion and sociocultural challenges faced by the Belizean community.

This essay introduces a special section on Otto and Hermine Huiswoud, Black Caribbean internationalists whose anticolonial and Communist organizing spanned several decades and continents, from Suriname and the United States to the Netherlands, Belgium, and France, and to Russia. Otto and Hermine Huiswoud were born in Suriname and Guyana, respectively, and would later move to the United States, becoming active members of the Communist Party of the USA. Later they moved and worked in the Netherlands. Theirs were lives of international political activism, in a shared, if sometimes conflictual project with some of the leading anti-colonial radicals of the early to mid-twentieth century, figures like Marcus Garvey and George Padmore but also leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance such as Claude McKay and Langston Hughes. While the Huiswouds’ political activity is known among a small group of scholars and activists, their lives and work remain underexplored. For example, in the Netherlands, where the author writes, it was not until the founding of the Black Archives in Amsterdam in 2016 that the Huiswouds would become part of broad-scale discussions about anticolonial traditions in the Dutch Caribbean. This special section aligns with the author’s ongoing interest in Black anticolonial intellectual traditions of the Caribbean—in a project called Other Radicals—and the role of figures from the Dutch Caribbean in this project. More than an interest in the question of power and the production of silences of the archives, or of archival occlusion of Black anticolonial struggle, however, this introduction asks what it might mean to attend more rigorously to the question of secrecy. Afterall, the Huiswouds, like many other radicals who lived at the intersections of anticolonial and Marxist-Communist mobilization, lived lives shrouded by secrecy, doubly cautious of the colonial state apparatus as they were of the anti-Communist sentiments that circulated at the beginning of the twentieth century, and even today. Taking secrecy in the archives seriously, then, may enable better understanding of the freedom struggles of Black internationalists, for Blacks but also for the worker—for the Black worker.

While Otto and Hermina Huiswoud are often remembered as foot soldiers of the Communist International (Comintern), if not as doctrinarian Stalinists, this essay proposes that such depictions misunderstand the registers in which Black radicals speak. Before World War II, the infrastructure of the Comintern enabled the Huiswouds to champion anticolonial and anti-racist causes. Following the war, the Huiswouds championed anticolonial nationalist causes, though without abandoning international solidarity and the critique of economic exploitation. The shift from international Communism to anticolonial nationalism was therefore less a shift in substance and more a shift in register. Appreciating such shifts in registers requires placing the Huiswouds in context and in relation to the Black, Communist, and Caribbean diasporic networks of which they were part; for it is only by understanding to whom Black radicals speak that scholars can begin to understand the different and context-dependent registers in which Black radicals speak.

This essay focuses on the activities of Otto Huiswoud from 1934 to 1937, when he was secretary of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW) and closely operated within the circuits of the Red International of Labour Unions and the Third (Communist) International. During these years, Otto Huiswoud and his wife, Hermina, tried to reinvigorate the ITUCNW and its network in the African Atlantic. After the introduction of the “popular front” tactics by the Comintern, Huiswoud proposed in October 1935 a thorough reorganization of the ITUCNW, although his plan remained a mere blueprint. Huiswoud’s activities came to an end when the Comintern liquidated the ITUCNW in July 1937.

This essay proposes a reappraisal of Otto and Hermina Huiswoud’s engagement with the Caribbean. The Huiswouds do not fit neatly in the stories of British Caribbean revolt of the1930s, nor do they appear to be major figures shaping what was happening. They typically appear in tales of antagonism between two other major features of the decade: Garveyism and the Black Communist fellow travelers who departed the Comintern while they remained. Both instances of antagonism might instead be understood through what the author emphasizes are the intellectual points of convergence among overlapping—yet very distinctive—radical-isms. Via the Negro Worker, the organ of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, the Huiswouds participated in this intellectual ferment emanating from the Caribbean and crucially hooked into African continental and diasporic readings of colonial rule and economic exploitation.

This essay discusses the works and lives of Otto and Hermina Huiswoud in relation to their contributions to Pan-Africanism in particular and how this relates to Black thinkers in the Dutch orbit in general. While there is a lot of knowledge available of a range of European colonial trajectories and their legacies across the Americas and Africa, particularly for the colonies that were in the possession of Britain, France, Portugal, and Spain, there is far less information about the colonies of the smaller nations, such as the Netherlands. Engaging with the smaller territories extends knowledge of colonialism in all its variations and enables scholars to take up a wider range of Black thinkers, and as the author argues, they are all relevant to broadening knowledge with regard to a distinctive Africana intellectual tradition.

This afterword takes up some of the conceptual and historiographical concerns raised in the special section on Hermina and Otto Huiswoud. By examining the work of the Black Archives in Amsterdam, which holds the Huiswouds’ personal papers and book collection, the author argues that the continued study of the Huiswouds helps broaden the scope of Caribbean radical history by bringing into focus the history, politics, and ideas of a radical Black Dutch Caribbean tradition. The Black Archives sits within a longer history of Black radical thought that spans the Dutch Empire, from Surinam to the Netherlands, and offers some clues for grappling with the challenges that continue to frame and confront the study of Black radicals in organized Marxism.

Presented here are three chapters from Marie Léticée’s Camille’s Lakou, translated from her 2016 novel Moun Lakou. The book presents a double-protagonist coming-of-age story in which the narrator relates her autobiographical tale to a younger character facing crises similar to those of the narrator and the narrator’s single-parent mother. The excerpted chapters all come from the narrator Camille’s embedded tale and describe scenes of the impoverished, urban, Guadeloupean 1960s milieu from which the narrator emerged. One reads about water management, public transportation, the bustle of outdoor markets, and the slapstick modernity of an imported French department store, as well as an endearing but doomed communal use of toilets known as caca à deux. The chapters are followed by a translator’s note offering biographical and literary historical context for both the author and text, with a particular focus on the lakou, or yard, as a Guadeloupean and region-wide social formation. The note also examines the language spectrum employed in the original and explores decisions about how to render the original in English.

Régine Jean-Charles’s Looking for Other Worlds: Black Feminism and Haitian Fiction (2022) is part of a refreshing trend in Haitian studies of books that center a Haitian perspective. This review essay takes the liberty of offering reflections toward an alternate coda. What kind of texts are uniquely possible in the twenty-first century written by authors inspired by a tradition that includes feminist foremothers like Kettly Mars, Yanick Lahens, and Évelyne Trouillot? For as much as Looking for Other Worlds looks backward and horizontally, it does not really look forward. Jean-Charles enriches her readings by evoking earlier works like those by Poujol Oriol, highlighting the continuities between twentieth-century works by Haitian women and those produced by the authors of her corpus. The nonliterary cultural productions included by Jean-Charles—songs, paintings, photographs—are contemporary to the novels being analyzed and make an important point about these literary works being in conversation with pop music and visual arts. The author expected the book to end with a look forward into the work currently being created and published by younger women writers. It did not; this essay attempts to provide such a glimpse.

Looking for Other Worlds: Black Feminism and Haitian Fiction (2022) by Régine Jean-Charles engages scholarship across multiple disciplines and fields—Haitian studies, Caribbean studies,Black feminist studies, media studies, ecofeminism, anthropology, geography, and history—and employs diverse methods that include archival research, social media and artwork analysis, and literary critique. This review essay posits that Jean-Charles uses Black feminism rather than Haitian feminism, arguing for a Black feminist project that is transnational and global and that allows for both/and. Jean-Charles’s analyses of the works of Évelyne Trouillot, Yanick Lahens, and Kettly Mars focus on the ways these writers creatively deal with issues of gender, race, color, class, sexuality, Vodou, and nature. Yet despite her recognition of the impact of political crises on their novels’ characters, Jean-Charles emphasizes the ordinariness of the characters’ lives. She identifies joy, care, and the erotic as central to the other worlds the writers invite readers to imagine.

In Looking for Other Worlds: Black Feminism and Haitian Fiction (2022), Régine Jean-Charles evokes revolutionary figures such as Sanité Bélair and Victoria Montou, who fought in the Haitian Revolution. She also revisits the legacy of Marie-Jeanne Lamartinière, who was said to have fought back a siege by the French army during the Revolution. Remembering these women is critical, not only because of the ideals they represented—liberation, justice, and power—but also because of their embrace of armed self-defense. Remembering them serves to locate the scope, ethics, and praxis of revolutionary Haitian feminism and lays the groundwork for solidarity with other decolonial movements, from Turtle Island to Palestine. This review essay asks, What might it mean to extend Jean-Charles’s celebration of revolutionary fighters Bélair, Montou, and Lamartinière into the present?

In response to the various review essays, this essay ponders the afterlives of Looking for OtherWorlds: Black Feminism and Haitian Fiction (2022) by reflecting on the presence and absence in Caribbean literature of Haitian girls’ dreams for the future. The author examines the Haitian girl characters in novels by Kettly Mars, Yanick Lahens, and Évelyne Trouillot, as well as in a poem by Claudine Michel. The essay builds on this work in search of Haitian feminist futures by exploring girl characters in Saika Césu’s novel Tifi and Shirley Bruno’s short film Tezen as examples of centering Haitian girlhood.