Issues

This essay examines the ethics of fictional representations of history underlying the work of André Schwarz-Bart, author of the Last of the Just (1959) and of a “Caribbean cycle” that he left unfinished. In this respect, his procedures can seem doubly problematic. Not only does Schwarz-Bart use fiction to relate historical events that are considered incompatible with it—the Shoah and the transatlantic slave trade—but he also sets up a comparison between the two. No historian worthy of the name would proceed in this way. Yet in the epilogue to A Woman Named Solitude (1972), Schwarz-Bart performs precisely these two operations. Starting with a close reading of this scene, this essay explores the issues it raises and how these resonate with the approaches of contemporary historians—namely, Georges Didi-Huberman and Saidiya Hartman—with a view to displacing the nodal points of the vast and highly charged debate it participates in. Under what conditions are imagination and comparison acceptable as means to grasp these historical events? What is the reasoning behind their mobilization, and with what ends in view?

This essay reanimates the archived performativity of Alfonso Teófilo Brown, widely known as “Panamá Al Brown,” a queer Afro-Panamanian world boxing champion from Colón, Panama, who lived in Harlem and Paris in the early to mid-twentieth century. Rather than recover Al Brown’s life as it “really” was, this essay closely attends to how he appears, outside the ring, in photographs and on film, such as the 2020 French documentary Cocteau–Al Brown: Le poète et le boxeur. In the absence of self-written traces, Brown’s recorded “disidentificatory performances” as a “Black dandy” and a nightlife entertainer represent his primary form of enduring self-expression, even as he is represented by others, in the past and in the present. Drawing from the fields of Caribbean studies, trans/queer studies, and performance studies, this essay proposes that Brown repeatedly performs a queer Afro-Panamanian masculinity on camera, fashioning a lasting, if ambivalent, account of himself. Specifically, through style and gesture, he queers normative racial and gender types, including the “Colón Man,” a folkloric hetero-masculine Afro-Caribbean figure. By thus attending to the potentiality of Al Brown’s documented disidentifications, this essay continues the critical work of revising postcolonial Caribbean paradigms of liberation and sovereignty.

Maryse Condé’s Moi, Tituba, sorcière ... Noire de Salem (1986) offers a radical reimagining of the historical figure Tituba, an enslaved woman from Barbados accused during the Salem witch trials of 1692. In this novel, Condé takes significant creative liberties with the historical record, especially in her English-to-French translation and rewriting of the Salem witchcraft trial transcripts. This essay analyzes that act of translation, alongside others of her writings and interviews, in order to identify in Condé’s work a perception of translation as destructive. Following this claim, this essay argues that Condé wields such “violent translation” to reinterpret the archive, challenging its presumed stability and underscoring the power structures that shape it. Through this method, Moi, Tituba recenters Tituba’s subjecthood and offers a powerful historiographic critique of the marginalization of enslaved peoples in the archival record.

It seems inevitable to analyze the photographic series Man Made Materials (1998–2001) by the Cuban artist René Peña in relation to questions of race and racism. The Black monochromatic self-portraits zoom in on the skin of the artist’s buttocks, toes, hands, lips, and some unrecognizable body parts. That is, each shows in maximum close-up and a perfectly centered frame the bodily feature that has since the eighteenth century been considered the main racial marker. Meditating on the photographic techniques employed for Man Made Materials and the particularities of Peña’s skin that consequentially comes into view, this essay suggests that the images stimulate the observer to be sensitive to their tactile rather than their visual qualities—to their texture rather than their color. Likewise, the author argues that the invoked transition from optical to so-called haptic visuality is inseparable from the skin’s transition from racial marker to matter.

This essay explores the concept of agency within the context of trauma and disability, focusing on Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night and particularly on Mala’s silence. Many critics of the novel have viewed Mala’s speech disability as a damaging symptom of her trauma, a symptom that is meant to be overcome or cured. In interpreting Mala’s silence as solely damaging or wounding, they overlook not only Mala’s resilience but also the queer potentiality made possible through her silence. The author views these critics’ analyses as functioning within a curative imaginary and as unconsciously holding on to the ableist ideology of neoliberal personhood that ties human agency to rational speech. Disagreeing with these critics’ curative interpretations of the novel, the author argues instead that readers listen to Mala’s queer silence as embodying not only her resilience and agency but also a queer and crip worldview-building epistemology based on a posthuman relationality and a political-ethic of antiviolence that resists curative interventions and the ideology of neoliberal personhood.

This essay explores the relationship between the precarious social and political conditions of twenty-first-century Puerto Rico and the role of Puerto Rican mega-celebrities and their forays into culture. While the racial and colonial politics of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton have been widely studied, the author proposes that looking at those politics in tandem with its creator’s interventions in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean adds a layer of complexity to our understanding of the contemporary shapes colonialism takes in the Caribbean. The essay examines the political and aesthetic investments of Hamilton from a decolonial Puerto Rican perspective, analyzing some of the song lyrics to reveal how the specter of Puerto Rican colonialism haunts the musical. It also considers Miranda’s interventions into the Puerto Rican debt restructuring and posits him as an “indebted docile subject.” It focuses on the production of Hamilton in San Juan in the context of Hurricane Maria recovery, where it became a central tool of the disaster capitalist recovery discourses. The essay argues that Puerto Rico haunts Miranda and Hamilton yet is simultaneously obscured from the musical, producing a legible liberal politics that omits colonial violence despite being purportedly centered on it.

In March 2024, Vanderbilt University convened a two-day symposium titled “Refashioning—Postcolonial Pasts, Decolonial Futures.” The title refers to the conclusion of Kamau Brathwaite’s canonical 1969 poem “Negus” and David Scott’s Refashioning Futures after Postcoloniality (1999). The coconveners of this special section of Small Axe question the very concepts and period frames—including postcolonial, decolonial, and anticolonial—in the wake of longstanding and close-at-hand environmental disaster and anthropocenic violence. This cluster gathers scholars from a range of disciplines who theoretically and methodologically rethink the terms of engagement that have long defined Caribbean studies. Richly at stake in these essays is the meaning and urgency of writing not just about the Caribbean but, in crucial ways, from the Caribbean. This means tracking how people, commodities, techniques, practices, and ideas move, circulate, and return to that site, thinking across the geographic and linguistic zones without acceding to the general critiques of coloniality or racial capitalism. With this, these essays illuminate shifting configurations of the political in a world increasingly shaped by crises whose colonial origins do not inform local responses in any immediate or obvious ways.

This essay questions what it means for Afrofuturism to be re-visioned via the “implications of location” that Nadi Edwards argues is central to critical theory, particularly Black diasporic theory. What does a Caribcentric Afrofuture look like, and what does its difference from a North American–centric Afrofuture tell us about the contemporary cultures of where we of the African diaspora landed? What care must be taken in putting these different visions of Black futures—and Black freedoms—into relation? The author begins by more clearly identifying the need to pay attention to location in both Afrofuturistic creative texts and criticism, relating location, diasporic (il)literacy, and questions of opacity. To make this argument more concrete, she presents brief examples from The African Origins of UFOs, a 2006 novel by the UK-based Trinidadian Anthony Joseph. In the second half, also informed by Joseph’s novel, the author offers indications of how respecting inherent opacities might enable relation with décalage as part of an argument for how we might formulate a critical Afrofuturism better able to recognize and engage with complex layers of meaning in Caribbean visions of a world to come.

Through its examination of multimedia artworks from the 2022–23 exhibit no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria at the Whitney Museum of American Art, this essay explores the performance of utopia as a decolonial practice rooted in material struggles against austerity. The phrase neoliberal weather indexes how the after effects of so-called natural disasters, like Hurricane Maria, are inseparable from the economic foundation on which they hit. The author engages Gary Wilder’s theory of concrete utopianism to explore the interplay of poetics, performance, and activism in artworks that pursue untimely and uncanny strategies for bypassing impasses of the neoliberal present, attending to, for example, the wild growth that overtakes modernist architecture in the speculative paintings of Rogelio Báez Vega and the wild forces of Awilda Sterling-Duprey’s dance as she invokes the orisha of wind, storms, poetry, and cemeteries to counter the island’s neoliberal blackouts, or apagones. Through these readings, the author demonstrates how performances of utopia function more as an undoing than a doing, releasing their creators and audiences from the suffocating logics of neoliberal austerity.

This essay advances disaster narrative-as-refusal as a methodological, ethical, and political analytic for understanding flooding and ecological crisis in Cap-Haïtien, Haiti. Drawing on more than fifteen years of ethnographic engagement and over fifty narrative interviews conducted along the Haut-du-Cap River, the author examines how residents narrate flooding as a consequence of infrastructural neglect and state abandonment. Against dominant disaster frameworks that render Haitians passive, vulnerable, or perpetually in crisis, the interlocutors articulate incisive critiques of governance, humanitarian spectacle, and environmental management while asserting their own interpretive authority. These narratives refuse the naturalization of vulnerability and instead situate risk within histories of racial capitalism, anti-Haitianism, and imperial governance. This essay demonstrates how everyday storytelling functions as theory-making, civic critique, and a practice of care. By foregrounding community-led dredging efforts, mutual aid, and spiritual ethics, the essay shows how refusal becomes generative. Disaster narrative as refusal reframes narrative research as an epistemological intervention that challenges technocratic disaster models and insists on the agency and futurity of Haitian life amid ecological crises.

Climate change is expected to fundamentally alter the geography and lifeworlds of Piñones, Puerto Rico—a cluster of Afro-Puerto Rican communities located in the Río Grande de Loíza estuary. This essay asks how climate change is visualized by climate scientists versus how it is perceived by people living on the frontlines of the climate crisis. Piñones was once home to large coastal sand dunes and vibrant life-making practices that are slowly eroding, but here loss has been engineered, literally and figuratively, to create modern infrastructures for urban residents in San Juan, the capital city. Thus risk and how it is understood by Afro–Puerto Ricans in Piñones is crucially bound with seeing the racism and colonial violence embedded within the climate crisis and which often fall outside the purview of climate scientists. Here the future is the struggle, a struggle for the future of Piñones and all Puerto Ricans.

This essay focuses on the work of the bomba composer and environmentalist Marcos Peñaloza Pica, who identifies as a descendant of Maroons and enslaved peoples. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with crews replanting and conserving the mangrove forest, bomba musicians, and community elders, the author examine how Marcos’s compositions give voice and corporal meaning to Afro–Puerto Rican subjectivity. This subjectivity reimagines African traditions, removes these traditions from the stereotypical tri-cultural national heritage, and reconnects Afro–Puerto Ricanness with diasporic communities throughout Africa and the Americas. Moreover, Marcos and the author propose the theoretical argument that maroonage is culturally heritable but latent in Black music and ecologies co-opted into popular culture and stripped of their liberatory potentials when framed as “folklore” and “environmental conservation.”

In this essay, the author meditates on the ways in which in Jamaica, metal, in contested iterations, has been a conductor of various creative and destructive imaginings across three crucial and overlapping ecologies: the colonial plantation, the twentieth-century bauxite mine, and the postcolonial city. She offered a more-than-human tracing of (a) how metal tools of agriculture, torture, and insurgent resistance were crucial to the articulation and disarticulation of the plantation geography as an engineered and extractive “nature cultural” world; (b) how bauxite ore, as the wealth of the nation, entangled fledgling post-colonialJamaica in imperial, decolonial, and anthropocenic worlds shortly before and after the dawn of independence; and (c) how a uniquely aestheticized urban landscape, featuring metal security infrastructure, has shaped and continues to shape Jamaica’s high-crime capital city, Kingston, alongside the recycling and trading of scrap metal—metal marked as both value-laden and value-less—which is today launching Jamaicans into new neoliberal networks. This essay illuminates metallurgy not as just a science of metals but as a critical mode of Caribbean historiography. In not losing sight of the aliveness of metal, this essay situates Caribbean metallurgy as decolonial praxis and ethos.

On 3 January 2026, US President Donald Trump announced the capture of President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela. Abandoning the rationale of “narco-terrorism,” Trump informed the world that the objective was to “run Venezuela” and to retake ownership and control of “America’s oil” that had been unilaterally “seized” and “stolen” by Venezuela. This was in keeping with a new iteration of the Monroe Doctrine and its later respecification intended to own and control the “territory and resources” of the Western Hemisphere through deployment of America’s might and power. This may well be America’s attempt to contain and manage a rupture in the Post–World War II American-centered global order in the face of its unviability. The rupture is evident in geopolitical realignments occurring with emerging multilateral partners in the global South.

Laëtitia Saint-Loubert’s The Caribbean in Translation: Remapping Thresholds of Dislocation (2020) examines the practice and production of Caribbean literature in translation by thinking through concepts drawn from Caribbean studies, transoceanic cultural studies, and translation studies, among others. Saint-Loubert assembles an impressive corpus of literary texts produced in the Caribbean as well as outside of the region to, Saint-Loubert explains, “interrogate the porosity of literary circulation on both an international and on a regional level.” Through this lens, the book makes clear the insights gained when translation, translators, and the paratexts they produce are placed at the center of an analysis of literary circulation within and beyond the region. This discussion essay responds to The Caribbean in Translation by exploring how the intimacy of paratextual materials encourages readers to interpret translation as a practice of care for the book, the author’s legacy, translators, and the self. The author revisits Saint-Loubert’s analysis of translations of René Philoctète, Aimé Césaire, and Frantz Fanon with a particular focus on translation as care and closes by reflecting on his experience corresponding with Anita Roy, a writer and translator, about the intimacies of a book they each separately translated, Makenzy Orcel’s The Immortals (né Les Immortelles).

This discussion essay offers a critical appraisal of Laëtitia Saint-Loubert’s The Caribbean in Translation: Remapping Thresholds of Dislocation (2020) and situates her work within ongoing debates in translation studies and Caribbean literary theory. Saint-Loubert asks how translation can be decolonized in a region historically shaped by linguistic violence. Drawing on Barbara Cassin’s and Emily Apter’s theories of the untranslatable and Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, she argues that Caribbean translators can use paratexts—prefaces, glosses, and notes—as “thresholds” that foreground cultural opacity and particularity. Through readings of Aimé Césaire, David Dabydeen, Edwidge Danticat, and Junot Díaz, Saint-Loubert reframes untranslatability not as linguistic failure but as a strategy of cultural difference. This essay, however, questions Saint-Loubert’s reliance on an instrumental model of translation and her uncritical embrace of linguistic impossibility. Drawing on critics like Lawrence Venuti and David Bellos, it contends that all translation is interpretive, not reproductive, and that declaring Caribbean Creoles “untranslatable” risks re-inscribing colonial hierarchies. Ultimately, the review calls for a more precise vocabulary for theorizing untranslatability—one that acknowledges translation’s inevitable transformations while advancing decolonizing aims through interpretive openness rather than through essentializing linguistic difference.

This essay is a response to two discussion essays engaging with her The Caribbean in Translation: Remapping Thresholds of Dislocation (2020). The author revisits the concept of the threshold—central to the book—and elaborates on the transoceanic approach she used to examine translation flows in the Caribbean and beyond. She also connects the book’s island-to-island, horizontal methodology—particularly in the final chapters—to her current research on the Caribbean literary ecosystem.