Issues

This essay attempts to answer two main questions: What contemporary art from the Caribbean might look like? How does contemporaneity emerge when scrutinized from the point of view of the Caribbean? Assuming the concept of “contemporaneity” has critical value, the author seeks to expand on Terry Smith’s and David Scott’s musings with time and temporality.The essay’s main objective is therefore to reflect on what kinds of strategies and approaches may be instrumental in historicizing contemporary art from the Caribbean. The essay situates this objective in relation to recent debates on the role of culture as a regulating element of neoliberalism. It concludes by briefly examining the guiding principles of an art historiography of the Caribbean contemporaneity.

This essay is grounded in the unsolved early modern mathematical problem of “squaring the circle” to explore geometrical form as a force that undergirded colonial violence in the Caribbean. In the mid-eighteenth century, rectilinearity and circularity were projected onto the landscape to produce the illusion of absolute control across scale. The implementation of a unique cadastral measure on the Danish West Indian St. Croix promised to order the entire island as a grid. In French Saint-Domingue, representations of the urban grid abutted Afro-Caribbean practices of circularity. Considering these two imperial contexts with a formalist method elucidates moments of colonial spatial contestation when placed in the context of a diverse range of imaging practices from the region—including maps, drawings, prints, and paintings. Colonial violence abstracted as mathematical operation ultimately could not produce an incontrovertible solution against persistent forms of Black space, however marginalized, that challenged the results of this spatial geometry.

En 1971 Nancy Morejón (1944), poeta, traductora y ensayista cubana publicó un texto que ha pasado desapercibido: el relato testimonial Lengua de pájaro. Este ensayo aborda Lengua no solo porque, como afirma la misma autora “es un libro del cual se ha hablado poco”, sino que porque posibilita una aproximación a complejos procesos de inclusión y exclusión en el campo cultural cubano a finales de los sesenta. Los relatos que componen Lengua intervienen de forma solapada en la narrativa oficial cubana, que desde 1962 postulaba que se había “suprimido la discriminación por motivo de raza o sexo”. Propondremos una lectura de Lengua a la luz del género testimonial que se estaba gestionando durante estos mismos años como la forma escrituraria propia de las demandas simbólicas de la Revolución. Al acercarse al tema racial, extendiéndose sobre cuerpos y subjetividades no heroicas y no visibles, Morejón abre por medio del género testimonial vertientes silenciadas de su voz poética.

In 1971, Cuban poet, translator, and essayist Nancy Morejón (b. 1944) published Lengua depájaro (Bird’s Tongue), a testimonial text that has remained largely overlooked. This essay revisits Lengua not only because, as Morejón herself acknowledges, “it is a book of which little has been said” but also because it provides a compelling lens to examine the intricate dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in the Cuban cultural landscape of the late 1960s. The stories within Lengua subtly critique the official Cuban narrative, which since 1962 proclaimed the eradication of discrimination based on race or gender. This analysis proposes a reading of Lengua within the context of the testimonial genre, a form regarded during this period as uniquely suited to addressing the symbolic imperatives of the Revolution. By foregrounding issues of race and centering nonheroic, marginalized voices, Morejón employs the testimonial form to expose silenced dimensions of her poetic expression.

This essay explores the representation of same-sex eroticism and love between women in Ana-Maurine Lara’s Erzulie’s Skirt (2008). As a queer narrative about two women of Haitian Dominican and Afro-Dominican descent, Erzulie’s Skirt offers a decolonial poetics that counters the whitewashing, anti-Blackness, and Christian nationalism of Dominican normative identity. Refusing the segregation of Dominican and Haitian bodies and geographies, Lara creates anew narrative that transcends commonplace xenophobic and nationalist bordering practices dividing the island, contradicting the anti-Haitianism, Black erasure, and disciplinary violence of heteronormative patriarchy within the colonial Dominican nation-state. Lara’s creative vision draws on the island’s shared African diasporic spiritual and communal practices to imagine a future of Black queer belonging and kinship within Hispaniola.

For close to three months, the author lived with the Trinidad and Tobago Memorial Quilt: “I am tempted to say I possessed the quilt, but the truth is it possessed me.” This essay is offered as a response to that haunting, a way not only to write about a quilt—honoring and preserving in print some of the lives gathered within it—but also to approach quilting as methodology.The essay stitches together a few stories and a patchworked poem to question what it might mean to place bits of fabric and language in close enough proximity to each other to creates omething new: the challenge unfurled before the reader. It is an unearthing, grounded in the frailty of fabric, mortality and memory; it is a prayer of preservation, wrapped lovingly around a call to conscience and threaded through with a discomforting poem.

This essay examines the roles of history and futurity in shaping agricultural heritage in Martinique. Focusing on the island’s ongoing efforts to revive its legacy of coffee production, the author contrasts institutional initiatives aimed at aligning Martinican coffee with global luxury markets with the innovative approach of Jovani, a barista who prioritizes local identity and environmental realities. Through linguistic, historical, and ethnographic analysis of French Caribbean heritage projects, the essay conceptualizes heritage as an active negotiation between past and future. It argues for the transformative potential of heritage work to cultivate futures that embrace ecological and cultural resilience. Ultimately, the study positions heritage not as an archive but as fertile ground for reimagining possibilities through the intentional cultivation of narratives and practices that honor historical depth and tend to future aspirations.

This essay delves into the intricate politics of heritage in St.Croix, one of the three islands constituting the former Danish West Indies—alongside St.Thomas and St.John—now collectively known as the US Virgin Islands. The recent designation of St.Croix as a National Heritage Area in December 2022 has ignited a fresh exploration of the politics of USVI heritage, both visible on the island’s surface and submerged underground and underwater. This designation, specific to lived-in landscapes with significant US national narratives, necessitates examining how specific histories become hypervisible across heritage sites in the island while others face marginalization. In St.Croix, public heritage sites stewarded by federal institutions tend to marginalize the resilient histories of Afro-Caribbean communities. They often emphasize historical narratives that valorize the era of Danish colonial rule (1743 through 1917) or perpetuate the romanticized narrative of the island as solely “America’s Paradise.” Both narratives overlook St.Croix’s rich history of resilient Afro-Caribbean communities. Caught in the nexus of the afterlife of Danish colonial rule and a US imperialist present, this essay explores how “heritage” is operationalized in St.Croix by various actors, including federal, island officials, and community organizers, to make claims about the power of place.

Generally conceptualized as objects, places, and practices passed on to subsequent generations, heritage in these terms lends itself well to forms of appropriation by the state acting on behalf of the interests of an exploitative tourism industry. This essay traces the preoccupations of heritage work in parts of the English-speaking Caribbean, specifically Dominica, and consider how practitioners often ignore forms of heritage that have been, and continue to be, enacted by the working class. In doing so, it takes up the yard and the higgler to show, through their centrality to everyday life from slavery through freedom, how a more substantive picture of heritage emerges—one that challenges the state as designers and beneficiaries of the business of heritage. This essay instead underscores the economic and political priorities that frame the emergence and survival of the yard and the higgler, and how they are mobilized in the present.

Afro-Venezuelans find different ways to articulate ideas of heritage; Afro-Cuban spiritual practices are one of the pathways. This essay sketches the possibilities opened by the concept of Abolengo, or spiritual lineage, invoked in Afro-Cuban Santería and Palo practices as it is appropriated by Afro-Venezuelans interested in rebuilding an Afro-diasporic consciousness. It suggests that such articulations are underwritten in transnational alliances jumpstarted between Cuba and Venezuela in the early 2000s. These exchanges introduced Afro-Venezuelan activists to Afro-Cuban frameworks for reinterpreting an African heritage. The essay concludes by suggesting that Afro-Venezuelan political/cultural activists navigate competing understandings of heritage and Blackness to find the lost strands of their African heritage via Cuban African-inspired spiritual/healing systems.

Based on the author’s correspondence with Gordon Rohlehr, the essay reveals Rohlehr’s emotional responses to his period of graduate study in England. Contact between the two correspondents had begun in their undergraduate years at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. Also indicated are Rohlehr’s musical tastes, his literary references, his reactions to political events in the anglophone Caribbean of the 1960s and 1970s, his assessment of the cultural tenor of his native Guyana, his responses to the literary oeuvres of Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott, and his struggle between optimism and pessimism regarding Caribbean social and political developments.

This essay explores the intellectual and cultural contributions of Gordon Rohlehr, a preeminent figure in Caribbean literary and cultural criticism. Through meticulous analysis, it interrogates Rohlehr’s dual identity as a rigorous craftsman and an inspired thinker, emphasizing his ability to bridge art and intellect in a quest to uncover the deepest insights into Caribbean identity, culture, and the universal human condition. Central to this investigation is the interface between context—the confluence of personal, historical, and social forces shaping this vision—and commitment, which Rohlehr defines as an unrelenting engagement with one’s culture, even amid its most challenging and disorienting realities. His major works exemplify a unique capacity to reconcile the fragmentation engendered by colonialism through a deep engagement with the region’s vernacular and cultural forms, thus emphasizing the potential of a plurivocal discourse that bridges the microcosm of individual experience with the macrocosm of the collective.

This discussion essay engages critically with Lorgia García-Peña’s Translating Blackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective (2022). It anchors reflection on a series of key, provocative statements, which offers a springboard to think with García-Peña about the important issues she raises in her book. The discussion engages with some of the main ideas that Translating Blackness puts forth regarding the topics of Black humanity, US imperialism, and Latinx studies. The book is grounded on radical hope; it is a book that imagines the possibilities of a Black futurity that erradicates the dehumanization of Black people globally. García-Peña is deeply aware that to bring about meaningful social change, it is imperative—as Michel-Rolph Trouillot posited—to address the silences in the archives.

This discussion essay explores the overlooked contributions of early twentieth-century women anthropologists to the field of Caribbean studies, situating their work within broader discourses of race, empire, and diaspora and within the analytical framework of Lorgia García Peña’s Translating Blackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective (2022). Scholars like Elsie Clews Parsons, Martha Warren Beckwith, and Zora Neale Hurston, among others, conducted pioneering research on Afro-Caribbean cultures and emphasized the connections and adaptations across the African diaspora. As potentially foundational thinkers in “a way of knowing ...guided by the intersections of colonialism, diaspora, migration, and Blackness,” as Garcia-Peña challenges, their interdisciplinary approaches were complex and contradictory, at once critical of US imperialism while also reproducing colonial hierarchies. The essay examines the work and positionalities of these women scholars to reframe the origins of Caribbean studies and to integrate García-Peña’s idea of “transatlantic and transnational triangulation” in the interrogation of race, migration, colonialism, and belonging.

This response essay is a reflection, two years after publication, on the author’s TranslatingBlackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective (2022), prompted by a dialogue with critics Marisel Moreno and Elizabeth S. Manley. The author thinks through the ways the book reveals new pathways and conversations in today’s political moment as anti-immigration and anti-Blackness continue to operate together across our planet in ways that sustain andr eproduce exclusion. She shares the impetus that guided her to write Translating Blackness, as well as her desire for its reach and interpretation, and expands on her idea of “hegemonic blackness” as she muses on the meanings and possibilities of translation.