Issues

This essay explores how the “epistemological deficiency” that characterizes the past becomes a necessary part of the historical imagination with which to portray it—that is, the problem of historical content becomes part of the narrative form through which Édouard Glissant envisions a past replete with uncertainty, based on the traces of a disastrous abolition process. His The Fourth Century (Le quatrième siècle) challenges the monological authority of French historiography and mobilizes instead a nonlinear dialogism replete with aporias and recursions. In this way, the novel stages a “search for duration” marked by a rhetoric of repetition, amplification, and juxtaposition that drives it increasingly toward a revelation of trauma. This duration, which also reveals the possibility for a divergent temporality of relation, helps to fashion the unique structure of Glissant’s “critical emplotment”: one that invites a rethinking of the present, in light of the past, to urge a divergent future.

Introduciendo las ideas de metamorfosis de género y la plantación como laboratorio de experimentación de género, este ensayo propone un nuevo abordaje sobre el género y la formación de las subjetividades sexo genéricas de la población negra esclavizada en la plantación caribeña, específicamente francesa y anglosajona, entre los siglos xvii y xix. Tomando como referencia la idea de “metamorfosis negra” de Sylvia Wynter en diálogo con la noción de “carne” y “pornotropo” de Hortense Spillers, muestra cómo los experimentos con las prácticas de género en la plantación redundarán en una sedimentación que genera una particular subjetivación sexo-genérica que María Lugones llama “versiones” de mujer y de varón. El dialogo entre el Feminismo descolonial latinoamericano, la Teoría crítica negra y el Pensamiento crítico caribeño sitúa la noción de sistema moderno/colonial de género en el contexto del Caribe, la plantación y la experiencia de esclavización de las personas negras.

Introducing the notions of a metamorphosis of gender and the plantation as a laboratory of gender experimentation, this essay proposes a new approach to gender and the formation of sex-gender subjectivities of the enslaved Black population on the Caribbean plantation, specifically French and Anglo-Saxon, throughout the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Drawing from Sylvia Wynter’s conception of a “black metamorphosis,” in dialogue with Hortense Spill-ers’s notions of “flesh” and “pornotrope,” the essay shows how experimentation with gender practices on the plantation resulted in a sedimentation that generates a particular sex-gender subjectivation that María Lugones calls “versions” of women and men. This dialogue between Latin American decolonial feminism, Black critical theory, and Caribbean critical thought places the notion of a modern/colonial gender system in the context of the Caribbean, the plantation, and the experience of enslavement of Black people.

This essay focuses on the Aruban literary-cultural magazine Watapana, which published poetry, criticism, fiction, and translations from the Dutch Caribbean between 1968 and 1972. The magazine hosted spirited debates about the politics of language in the Papiamento- and Dutch-speaking islands of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao. The author shows how the Watapana editor Henry Habibe’s internationalist ideals conflicted with Dutch Caribbean left-wing nationalism, which promoted Papiamento as a literary language. Papiamento’s obscurity outside of the Dutch Caribbean islands presented intellectuals like Henry Habibe with a literary and political problem. Their nationalist literature would be neglected in the wider Caribbean unless it could be translated into a widely understood regional language. This essay closely reads the two special issues of Watapana that Habibe published entirely in Spanish, instead of Dutch or Papiamento. Further, the author recovers archival evidence of the reception of Watapana in Cuba and Guyana to counter the widespread perception of the Dutch Caribbean’s neglect in the region

This essay intervenes in recent scholarly discussions of gender and masculinity in Dominican literary and cultural studies through an analysis of the music of Luis “Terror” Días (1952–2009), a composer recognized today as the most innovative in Dominican musical history. Días pioneered the transformation of bachata, vernacular rock, and fusion music into new genres whose form and content reflect the social changes taking place during the last quarter of the twentieth century in the Dominican Republic. Following the theorist Kaiama L. Glover’s notion of the “disorderly,” the author argues that Días’s music “disordered” community expectations of authenticity and fiercely denounced political corruption and repression, as well as social, racial, and gender injustices. As the first male composer to take on the cause of women and to write songs from their perspective, Días also addressed the condition of what the author calls “troubled men,” marginalized figures deeply affected by brutal socioeconomic dispossession who appear either broken or as devising strategies to “live the good life.” This essay also redresses the invisibility of Días, who was more than a composer; he was a researcher and a thinker with enormous influence on his generation and the ones that followed, and his aesthetic impact remains largely unexplored in Caribbean cultural studies.

Iris Kensmil is an artist whose practice spans painting, drawing, and installation. Pulling inspiration from different genres and archives—whether music or dance, novels, archival documents, or images—Kensmil’s work pushes against structures that would make the lived experience of Blackness invisible, with special attention to Black women. This interview explores recurring themes in Kensmil’s practice, such as Black feminist memory, histories of Black emancipation in the Netherlands, and the genre of portraiture as a practice of presencing.

This essay examines Mervyn Morris’s field-defining and groundbreaking contribution to Caribbean literary and cultural criticism, with particular emphasis on the decolonizing orientations of his work. The author emphasizes Morris’s devotion to amplifying the voices of writers and other creative artists who operated outside of mainstream literary and academic circles. The essay places Morris among the pioneering critical voices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, alongside other writers and critics such as Kamau Brathwaite, Edward Baugh, Sylvia Wynter, Édouard Glissant, and C.L.R. James.

Mervyn Morris is well known as a poet, mentor, and literary critic. This essay examines a lesser-known area of his activity as a theater reviewer, based on selected drafts over the most active decade of theater production in Jamaica. Picking up on the keyword in his seminal essay “On Reading Louise Bennett, Seriously,” the author discusses the place of humor in Bennett’s performance and onstage in Jamaica generally. Local language and sensibility also have a role to play in the theater’s rejection of solemnity. These samples of his review writing offer insight into his approach, interests, and objectives. The reviews are an invaluable record of the efforts of practitioners in a period when it was still difficult to imagine the performing arts as a profession.

This essay considers Mervyn Morris’s sustained efforts to decolonize practical criticism. It starts by revisiting the canonical references that play a central role in Morris’s early critical intervention, “On Reading Louise Bennett, Seriously.” These have often been misconstrued by critics who mistake the nature of critical polemic as conducted within the terms of mid-century anglophone criticism. The essay then considers the civic nature of Morris’s intervention by looking at the venue in which the essay was first published—the Sunday Gleaner—as well as the kinds of local, public-facing periodicals that Morris would prioritize throughout his critical career. It then turns to the crux of Morris’s critical project: not the polemical intervention in itself but its implications for aesthetic education. To this end, Morris’s study notes and questions that accompany Louise Bennett’s Selected Poems (published by Sangster’s Book Stores in1982), which Morris edited, are considered.

Invited to write an autobiographical essay on “Reading Louise Bennett, Seriously,” sixty years after its initial publication, the author questions some of the attitudes and opinions he expressed then, having learned from Bennett’s Jamaica Labrish (1966) and some responses to it to pay more attention to Bennett’s performance choices and her sociopolitical commentary. This present essay also (re)presents her as a writer whose craft will often reward a detailed focus on her texts—as in, for example, her poems “New Govannah,” “Pass fe White,” and “DuttyTough.” In Bennett’s Selected Poems (1982), edited by the author, the notes and teaching questions suggest more of her significance than he knew of in 1963.

This essay enters into critical dialogue with Nick Nesbitt’s The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean (2022). It explores the original insights but also the blind spots of the book’s interpretation of capitalist slavery, which hinges on a specific understanding of Karl Marx’s value-form analysis and his monetary labor theory of value. Drawing inspiration from Frantz Fanon as well as more contemporary voices, the author argues that the book’s Marxist analysis needs to be further stretched to fully grasp how processes of racialization under slavery have contributed and continue to contribute to capitalist accumulation. He then turns to Silvia Federici and Françoise Vergès to advocate for a further stretching of the book’s Marxism, this time with the aim of illuminating the fundamental role of social reproduction for capitalism in general and for capitalist slavery in particular.

Nick Nesbitt’s The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean (2022) argues for the theoretical insufficiency of mid-twentieth-century Marxist humanisms in the Caribbean,proposing a value-form theory approach to the relationship between slavery and capitalism. This essay, pace Nesbitt, discusses the political poignancy of Aimé Césaire’s Marxist humanism through a reading of his 1950 Discourse on Colonialism. It asserts the contemporary necessity of revisiting the category of the human and Caribbean anticolonial humanisms in light of the racialized militarism of imperial projects today. Drawing on links between Césaire and Sylvia Wynter, the essay suggests that the autopoietic transformation of our species relations requires the elaboration of an ethical matrix derived from past revolutionary experience and designates anticolonial Marxist humanism as the space for that elaboration.

In The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean (2022), Nick Nesbitt revisits the relation between Atlantic slavery and capitalism, questioning the paradoxical nature of the irrelation, and further engaging with critiques of the system in the Black Jacobin radical tradition. Taking exception with Nesbitt’s premise qua Marx—that only free labor can produce surplus value—this response argues that the polymorphic nature of slavery belies Marx’s absolutist correlation of free labor and surplus value, suggesting the essential relation between unfreedom in its many forms and capitalism. It is arguably in their very commitment to the nation state that the figures of the Black Jacobin radical tradition evoked in the book necessarily fall short in their radical critique of capitalism. In this regard, it is telling that Nesbitt finds only poetic texts adequately critical: feats of imagination seem necessary to challenge a total social form from within institutions designed to maintain it.

The essay responds to the critiques by Gavin Arnall, Jackqueline Frost, and Grégory Pierrot of the author’s The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean (2022), focusing on the problems of abstraction, Marxist humanism, and social reproduction theory in relation to capitalist slavery and Marx’s critique of political economy