Issues

The received historiography of Negritude has long been organized around the masculine sovereignty of Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Léon-Gontran Damas as the “Three Fathers.” This essay treats that genealogy as a structural feature of mid-century anticolonialism, where political legibility clustered around the poet-statesman, national founder, and disciplined revolutionary subject. By triangulating this narrative through revolutionary China, it reconstructs a graded field of Afro-Asian political legibility. Bibliographic evidence from Yiwen, Renmin Ribao editorials and diplomatic reportage, later Chinese scholarship, and Caribbean feminist archives shows how Césaire’s poetics could be read through revolutionary awakening, while Senghor became legible through state protocol. Suzanne Césaire and Paulette Nardal leave no comparable trace in the Chinese materials consulted. Their practices of camouflage, botanical opacity, salon sociability, translation, and polyphonic relation, read alongside He-Yin Zhen’s anarcho-feminism, support an archipelagic genealogy of the global South beyond statist forms of freedom.

This essay examines the Puerto Rican poet Ángela María Dávila’s Homenaje al ombligo (Homage to the navel, 1966) as an intervention in Black Caribbean poetics that reimagines the relation among flesh, sound, and lyric. It asks, How might Dávila’s poetics of the navel reconfigure the Caribbean phonographic tradition by locating the birth of sound in Black flesh? Reading the navel as a recursive site where sonority and matter intertwine, the essay argues that Dávila stages a sonic ontology of the flesh that challenges Western lyric protocols. Through close readings of two poems, the analysis traces how Dávila’s poetics reroutes the teleologies of subject formation and lyrical universality inherited from colonial modernity. Dávila’s poetics transforms the moment of symbolic capture into a scene of resonance beyond logical arrest. By situating sound at the navel of poetic expression, Dávila offers a method for hearing the flesh’s capacity to remake the world from within the body’s geography.

Fred D’Aguiar reflects on Linton Kwesi Johnson’s dub poetry and its place in Black British cultural and political life from the 1970s onward. Moving between memoir and criticism—from first hearing LKJ at Goldsmiths in the late 1970s to a 1986 BBC panel with Derek Walcott to a Brixton Town Hall reading and a lunch at Trinidad’s Bocas festival—the author argues that rhythm generates rhetoric: Resistance is first a sound, a beat, before it becomes slogan or movement. He situates LKJ within a Black radical tradition running through Kamau Brathwaite, Martin Carter, Walter Rodney, Frantz Fanon, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, alongside reggae sound-system culture, Rastafarian “overstanding,” and the Black Arts movement. Considering fellow poets such as Jean Binta Breeze, Michael Smith, and Benjamin Zephaniah, the essay presents LKJ’s art as consciousness-raising and communal uplift, in which aesthetics and politics cannot be separated and the poet remains connected to his community.

This tribute to Linton Kwesi Johnson celebrates his work as a political activist, poet, and philanthropist. From his origins in rural Jamaica, he has come to claim his place as a major public intellectual in Britain. The author posits that Johnson authoritatively affirms the creativity of so many Caribbean migrants and their descendants who have made vibrant, therapeutic art out of the trauma of alienation in an unrepentantly racist society

 This is a brief personal essay on the poet and activist Linton Kwesi Johnson, author of, most recently, Time Come: Selected Prose (2023). As a member of the Race Today Collective he helped in 1981 to organize the Black People’s Day of Action, a march in London protesting the lack of accountability after thirteen young people in New Cross died in a suspicious fire, memorialized in his poem “New Craas Massakah.” Although long settled in Brixton, Johnson has maintained connections with family, friends, and institutions in Jamaica. He researched, wrote, and delivered From Mento to Lovers Rock, a ten-part series broadcast on BBC Radio One in 1983. He was emcee and “special guest” at a 1983 Louise Bennett event in London, recorded as Yes M’Dear: Miss Lou Live.

Linton Kwesi Johnson is the focus of the author’s doctoral dissertation in English literature about (University of Oxford, 2017). In this personal essay she looks back on the years of writing the thesis and reflects on how her interpretations of Johnson’s poetic and critical contributions have changed over the years, in close dialogue with her own coming of age, personal history, and the changing cultural connections to England, Jamaica, and Norway.

In many interviews and in his collected writings, Linton Kwesi Johnson frames himself as someone who was trying to be a poet, a novice searching for a way to articulate and act upon the emergent yet immiserated condition of Black British people. A productive tension arises between Johnson’s methodological choices and this shifting social terrain, inviting an analysis of Johnson’s aesthetic that stems from the formation of his interdisciplinary art form—reggae poetry. This essay focuses on Jamaican Grandson, an undated and unpublished autobiography written by Johnson sometime between his late teens and very early twenties. In it, Johnson describes a moment of transformation that has been instructive to the author’s approach, as well as his understanding, of Johnson’s later work and legacy. Rather than pass judgement about Johnson’s politics or attempt to show the efficacy thereof as proof of his literary merit, this essay instead aims to discuss the formation of his aesthetics, in order to productively draw out the differences between political and cultural work. In doing so, the author outlines how the unique challenges facing the emergent Black British population were revealed via the creative movements and tactics of a socially conscious poet.

An interview with the poet Linton Kwesi Johnson about his life and work.

This essay examines The Jungle (La jungla, 1942–43), painted by the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, in the context of the ongoing US imperial actions against Cuba. Taking up the differing manners in which the artist’s work has been misread, this essay suggests that Lam’s particular synthesis of European and Cuban artistic sensibilities enables politically engaged spectators to cut through the discourse of authenticity wielded by Cuban American warmongers to justify American imperialism.

This essay picks up where Erica Moiah James’s 2025 book After Caliban: Caribbean Art in the Global Imaginary leaves off, asking how the discipline of art history has addressed Caribbean art since the early 2000s. In response to James’s framing of art history as a Western-centered discourse that has struggled to embrace Caribbean art, the author examines failures within academia and the museum world to incorporate artists and art histories from the Caribbean as anything more than tangential, exotic, or other. She considers art history as a fundamentally conservative discipline, grounded in imperialist collecting strategies and Enlightenment epistemology that elevates European art as canonical. Articulating the hallmarks of a Caribbean inheritance as conceived by thinkers like Imogene Kennedy (Queenie), Kamau Brathwaite, Édouard Glissant, and Aime Cesaire, the essay thinks through a Caribbean epistemology that frees us from Cartesian, linear conceptions of space and time. This Caribbean reality and method-making is flexible and nonlinear, unbound by attempts at control, which are no more than colonial forms of madness. The author examines the ways James applies this Caribbean inheritance to the discipline of art history, asking how this might lead the discipline toward a more abundant future.

This essay critically engages with Erica Moiah James’s After Caliban: Caribbean Art in a Global Imaginary (2025), which reconceptualizes contemporary Caribbean art as a primary site of theoretical and decolonial innovation. Drawing from James’s exploration of Caribbean artists’ strategies to disrupt colonial narratives, the essay traces the evolution from inherited, outsider-imposed scripts toward the assertion of aesthetic sovereignty and epistemological agency. James’s framework, built on the figure of Caliban as reimagined by Aimé Césaire, advocates a shift from reactive reclamation to transformative creation, with artists using local styles—carnival, religious iconography, craft, and linguistic multiplicity—not as nostalgic gestures but as conceptual tools for producing contemporaneity. The essay examines how James’s cartography expands the Caribbean imagination beyond geography, centering the yard/lakou as a dynamic space of cultural production and theorization. It further interrogates the complexities of institutional recognition, cautioning against the co-optation and repackaging of Caribbean art within global art circuits. Ultimately, the essay argues that James’s After Caliban advances Caribbean discourse by situating contemporary art alongside literature and philosophy as a central driver of intellectual innovation and by foregrounding informal, community-based spaces as crucial sites of resistance and creativity in the ongoing redefinition of Caribbean modernity.

In After Caliban: Caribbean Art in a Global Imaginary (2025), Erica Moiah James turns to Aimé Césaire’s 1969 play A Tempest as a decolonial model for how global Caribbean artists of the 1990s critiqued and re-visioned both institutional space and artistic form. This response meditates on the contours of James’s metadisciplinary project.

This essay is the author’s response to three critical essays reflecting on her book After Caliban: Caribbean Art in a Global Imaginary (2025).