Issues

Much of the critical discussion surrounding Claude McKay’s landmark collection Harlem Shadows (1922) has centered on its peculiar mix of traditional poetic forms and revolutionary politics. Yet little attention has been paid to this book as McKay’s first attempt to seriously explore the past in verse and develop his own philosophy about history and temporality. This essay describes McKay’s historical imagination as it emerges in his views of the following: first, the history of former and current empires; second, the influence of economic systems on how time is experienced in the West and the Caribbean; and third, art’s historical function as a portal to lost customs. It also considers how this historical vision deepens and complicates the political commitments for which McKay is best known.

Focusing on Frederick Douglass’s “A Trip to Hayti” (1861) and the first installment of James Theodore Holly’s “Thoughts on Hayti” (1859), this essay examines the strategic idealization of Haiti in mid-nineteenth-century African American propaganda. Engaging with critiques of positive Haitian exceptionalism, the author argues that Douglass and Holly constructed Haiti as an exceptional symbol of Black liberation not merely to counter Haiti’s silencing but also to contest the anti-Black foundations of that silencing. Through biblical allusions, hyperbolic rhetoric, and affective appeals, they framed Haiti as a promised land and challenged the“unthinkability” of Black self-governance. This essay demonstrates how these propagandistic representations functioned as deliberate counternarratives to the erasure of Haiti’s revolutionary legacy. Beyond combatting erasure, these counternarratives of positive Haitian exceptionalism also provoked popular political consciousness and discourse about Haiti among African Americans facing multiple social and political crises in the years leading up to the US Civil War.

Through the analysis of Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa’s novel Daughters of the Stone (2009) and Josefina Báez’s long poem Comrade, Bliss Ain’t Playing (2011, 2013), this essay investigates how Afro-Latina writers depict Afro-Latinx subjectivities in the hispanophone Caribbean and the United States. The study makes the argument that Afro-Latina women have historically been underrepresented in literary interpretations of Latino-ness and are challenging dominant narratives of the Latinx and diasporic female body. It also considers how Llanos-Figueroa and Báez intertwine religion and spirituality into their work as integral components of Afro-Latina identity discourse. The two faith practices discussed are African Indigenous spirituality as it relates to the diaspora and Advaita Vedanta, an Eastern philosophical approach to nondualism.

In the late colonial British West Indies, movements for independence launched demands for the democratic control of land and natural resources. In petroleum-rich Trinidad, however, oil was not the only theater in which energy matters fueled anticolonial agitation. In 1959, public fears mounted over a secret missile tracking station built by the US military at its Chaguaramas base on Trinidad’s northwest peninsula. Subsequently, rumors of hazardous radiation generated demands for the return of the base and the establishment of a federal capital at Chaguaramas. Turning to the neglected writings of the Trinidadian Marxist C.L.R. James on the radiation issue, this essay meditates on the dual meaning of power—radiant power and political power—that surfaced in the anticolonial struggle for Chaguaramas. For James, the scientific fact of radiation remained secondary to the political fact of radiation as a basis for working-class power and self-organization.

This essay introduces a forum on Catherine Hall’s Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism (2024), situating the work in the context of racial capitalism and the history of empire in the study of slavery, gender, and family life in the British Caribbean and emphasizing Hall’s interdisciplinary engagement with Long’s life as a planter, a slaveholder, and the author of The History of Jamaica (1774).

Many scholars—perhaps too many—have analyzed the conditions of slavery at the expense of exploring the survival strategies of the enslaved. The historical record documents state and private violence, the threats and favors, and the lies and bogus theories required to keep people in their supposed place. This somber recital encourages scholars to see only social death in the place of social history, a deferral of Black history that acts as a kind of disavowal. It becomes too easy to forget—to deny and refuse and then repress—the possibility that Black people worked out strategies and tactics to confront the scope, force, and direction of racial capitalism in their own time, and that Black people now might be guided in their own decisions by the example of their ancestors. Catherine Hall’s Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism(2024) is a timely call to understand and redress the racial capitalism that the planter-historian Edward Long worked to create and sustain.

This essay argues that Catherine Hall’s Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism(2024) offers a new model for the study of racial capitalism by examining Atlantic slavery’s core antagonisms. By thoroughly interrogating the often hidden ideological and material basis of Jamaica’s plantation economy through its most famous slaveholder and proponent, Hall has written a new history of Jamaica, the Atlantic world, and the development of modern racism.

This essay reviews Catherine Hall’s Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism (2024)—an economic and intellectual history of the Jamaican enslaver and author Edward Long—emphasizing the way the book weaves together economic and intellectual history. It draws particular attention to how Lucky Valley treats Long’s thinking about race, arguing that Hall’s account allows us to see this idea emerging and changing in relationship with the specific economic and imperial conjuncture of the mid- to late eighteenth century. It likewise highlights Hall’s usage of the psychoanalytic idea of splitting as a way to understand how Hall seems to have projected onto Africans and enslaved peoples elements of Long’s fears and desires.

This essay is a study of Catherine Hall’s Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism(2024) and reflects on Hall’s use of the psychoanalytic concept of disavowal to analyze the construction of racist ideas by the enslaver and historian Edward Long, whose three-volume book, The History of Jamaica, first published in 1774, has remained among the most definitive texts on the history of slavery, Jamaica, and Black people. The essay brings Long’s mother, Mary Tate, into the same analytic frame as the enslaved woman Queen Cubah and shows how the details of Cubah’s life that Long chose to narrate through caricature bear a striking resemblance to pivotal but painful aspects of Long’s mother’s life. The author shows how Hall connected the personal and family dramas of White people to how they viewed and wrote about Black people. The tone of Long’s racialism, particularly its rigid morality and acridity, was refined and sustained by things tragically rooted in his own family heartbreak and loss. The essay also contemplates the role of the unconscious in history, including historical production as a site of disavowal.

This review places Catherine Hall’s important book Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism (2024) within the global contexts of the eighteenth-century British Empire, where the violence and practices of the Atlantic world did not stay put but traveled to impose their hierarchies on other oceanic domains. It argues that close attention to the demographic and cultural pluralities of the imperial provinces, from the Kingston Maroons to the enslaved rebels of Bengkulu, Sumatra, can uncover new avenues of research into and reclamation for historical Black lives. Finally, it uses Hall’s and other scholars’ insights to demonstrate how barbarity and civility were mutually reinforced through the edicts of mercantile capitalism and knowledge-production in the long eighteenth century, inscribing racialized meridians of slavery and freedom on the globe that refuse to fade away.

This essay is a response to the questions raised by the five forum panelists who have commented on Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism (2024). It argues that the analysis of the life and writings of Edward Long is an intervention in the work of repair associated with the legacies of New World slavery.

Drawing on Édouard Glissant’s definition of glossaire included in Malemort (1975); its English translation in the glossary of Poetics of Relation (2010), Betsy Wing’s translation of his Poétiquede la relation (1990), which did not include a glossary; and Katherine McKittrick’s decolonial challenge of glossaries, this essay focuses on the role that the glossary plays in the translation of Haitian novels into English. It examines how the act of glossing provides an entry point into how translators of Haitian literature have approached polyglossic Haitian writing and the cultural layers present in Haitian fiction. It then explores how the author has crafted glossaries in the Haitian novels that he has translated to achieve translational goals that challenge the often violent, colonial function of categorizing words in languages other than English, the dominant language of the US literary market. The essay concludes by reflecting on how the glossary might prepare the ground for future readers to relate to Haitian literature beyond colonial, paternalistic, and heterosexist frames.

This discussion of Malcom Ferdinand’s Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World (2022) argues that Ferdinand maps the double fracture constituting modernity haunting its socioecologies—one fracture characterized by racialized social inequality, the other by intersecting ecological crises. Thinking at the crosscurrents of political ecology, landscape history, postcolonial theory, and political philosophy, Ferdinand advances the case for a decolonial ecology to repair the ongoing destruction of a world-ship caught in modernity’s tempest. Reading the 2024 Hurricane season through Ferdinand problematizes the geographies of climate catastrophe. This essay considers “the climate haven” and imaginaries of spaceships to rescue humanity from an imperiled Earth as betraying the racial politics of sociecological safety in the Anthropocene, the colonial grammars of security by settling frontiers, and the techno-utopianism of uncritical futurity. As such, the climate haven and spaceships are arks that are inevitably shoaled by the forms of life they attempt to corral into the steerage and hold.

This critical essay (in French) proposes to discuss certain points of Malcom Ferdinand’s Une écologie décoloniale: Penser l’écologie depuis le monde caribéen (2019), translated by Anthony Paul Smith as Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World (2022). It emphasizes three elements in particular: the fundamental importance of Une écologie décoloniale in decentering the French metropolitan gaze; the more global project of deconstructing dichotomous thinking that is carried out in the book; and the aesthetic dimension that runs through Une écologie décoloniale and plays a full part in its power and impact. The essay examines these various points, paying particular attention to the forms taken by Ferdinand’s discourse (rhetoric, symbolic system, networks of implicit meanings), demonstrating the close interweaving of theory and aesthetics.

As part of a discussion of the author’s Une écologie décoloniale: Penser l’écologie depuis lemonde caribéen (2019), translated by Anthony Paul Smith as Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World (2022), this essay is in response to the essays by Alex A. Moulton andSophie Large. First, the author more precisely articulates ecology with decolonial emancipation demands, including the need for a reinvention of our relationships with other-than-human animals. Second, he argues for the need to decenter Whiteness and coloniality in the appraisal of conceptual works that do not follow the focus of canonical European theory or the South American roots of decolonial theory. In conclusion, “small trees breaking down big axe” echoes the core proposition of Decolonial Ecology—that is, a political theory and aesthetics that holds together the need for the ecological preservation of Earth and the imperative of decolonial emancipation in the wake of euromodern colonization and slavery.