Contributors

Abstract

Kathleen Donegan is associate professor of English and Daniel E. Koshland Distinguished Chair in Writing at the University of California, Berkeley. She is author of Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early America (2014), which explores the relationship between suffering and violence in the early English colonial settlement period and argues that the first forms of colonial subjectivity and literature appeared out of this catastrophic relationship. She is currently working on a project titled “The Spectral Plantation: The Other Worlds of Slavery,” which traces the “other worlds” enslaved people created, having been unworlded by the conditions of their enslavement. It explores four modes of departure from within the plantation complex—haunting, madness, obeah, and music.Marta Fernández Campa is a literary scholar whose research and writing focus on the creative processes of writers and visual artists, in particular, their critical inquiries into historical archives and notions of archiving. She is a former Fulbright and Leverhulme Fellow and has published her work in Caribbean Literature in Transition, volume 3, and in the journals Callaloo, Comma, Small Axe, and Anthurium, among others. She serves as special projects editor at Caribbean InTransit.Lorna Goodison is a major figure in world literature. She was Poet Laureate of Jamaica (2017–20) and was awarded the 2019 Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Other awards for her work include the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Poetry from Yale University, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Musgrave Gold Medal from Jamaica, and the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, one of Canada’s largest literary prizes, for From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People (2007). In addition to the memoir, she is the author of twelve books of poetry (her Collected Poems was published in 2017), three collections of short stories, and a recent collection of essays. Goodison is professor emerita at the University of Michigan, where she was Lemuel A. Johnson Professor of English and African and Afroamerican Studies.Warren Harding is Deans’ Faculty Fellow and visiting assistant professor of Africana studies at Brown University, where he earned his PhD in Africana studies and AM in comparative literature. He studies twentieth-century Black Caribbean women writers and cultural producers. More broadly, he is interested in ways of reading African and Caribbean diasporic literary cultures that enhance comparative geographic, feminist, and humanistic inquiry and learning.Aaron Kamugisha is Ruth Simmons Professor of Africana Studies at Smith College. He is the editor of ten books and special issues of journals on Caribbean and Africana thought and author of Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition (2019).Jovan Scott Lewis is associate professor in and chair of the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. His research examines the questions of racial capitalism, underdevelopment, and repair. He is author of Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica (2020). His book on the consequences of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Restoration in Tulsa, is forthcoming.Susan C. Méndez is professor in the Department of English and Theatre at the University of Scranton. Many of her courses support the women’s and gender studies and Latin American studies programs. Her publications have appeared in journals such as Centro: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Chicana/Latina Studies, Afro-Hispanic Review, MaComère: The Journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars, and Label Me Latina/o.Beverley Mullings is professor of feminist political economy in the Department of Geography and Planning at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. Her research interests include the transforming nature of work within racial capitalist regimes, the financialization of remittance economies, and the place of diaspora in the remaking of Caribbean radical traditions. Her publications have appeared in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers; Gender, Place, and Culture; the Journal of Economic Geography; Antipode; the Review of International Political Economy; Small Axe; Geoforum; and Environment and Planning A, among others.Patricia Noxolo teaches in the School of Geography at the University of Birmingham. Her research brings together the study of international development, culture, and in/security, and uses postcolonial, discursive, and literary approaches to explore the spatialities of a range of Caribbean and British cultural practices. Her recent work focuses on retheorizing Caribbean in/ securities, theorizations of space in Caribbean literature, Caribbean laughter and materialities, rethinking the decolonial city, and African Caribbean dance as embodied mapping. She is former chair of the Society for Caribbean Studies, coeditor of the journal Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, and member of the RACE group of the Royal Geographical Society.M. Nourbese Philip is an unembedded poet, essayist, novelist, playwright, and independent scholar who lives in the space-time of Toronto. A former lawyer, she has published the award-winning young adult novel Harriet’s Daughter (1988), the seminal poetry collection She Tries Her Tongue; Her Silence Softly Breaks (1989), the speculative prose poem Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence (1991), and the genre-breaking book-length epic Zong! (2008). She is a Guggenheim and Rockefeller Fellow (Bellagio) and in 2020 was the recipient of the PEN/ Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. In 2021 she was awarded the Arts Molson Prize by the Canada Council for “invaluable contributions to literature.”Timothy J. Reiss is professor emeritus at New York University. Since his 2012 retirement, he has twice been a visiting professor at Stanford University, and for three years he was a visiting scholar at the University of Hawai’i-Manoa. He is editor most recently of Ngũgĩ in the American Imperium (2021) and is currently finishing books on Descartes in his age’s political practice and thought and on the Renaissance as a stage in long continental and oceanic intercultural exchanges.Kevon Rhiney is assistant professor in the Department of Geography, Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Prior to joining the faculty at Rutgers, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford and taught for several years at the University of the West Indies, Mona. His research is situated at the nexus of critical development studies, decolonial thought, and human-environment geography.Gordon Rohlehr is emeritus professor of West Indian literature at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, where he worked from 1968 to 2007. His main areas of research and publication include West Indian literature (poetry, the novel), oral tradition, the calypso, popular culture, West Indies cricket, postindependence Caribbean politics, and Trinidad carnival. His main publications are Pathfinder: Black Awakening in “The Arrivants” of Edward Kamau Brathwaite (1981); Calypso and Society in Pre-independence Trinidad (1990); My Strangled City, and Other Essays (1992); The Shape of That Hurt, and Other Essays (1992); A Scuffling of Islands: Essays on Calypso (2004); Transgression, Transition, Transformation: Essays in Caribbean Culture (2007); Ancestories: Readings of Kamau Brathwaite’s “Ancestors” (2010); My Whole Life Is Calypso: Essays on Sparrow (2015); Perfected Fables Now: A Bookman Signs Off on Seven Decades (2019); and Musings, Mazes, Muses, Margins: A Memoir (2020).Elaine Savory has published widely on African and Caribbean literatures and, in recent years, environmental humanities. She coedited, with Carole Boyce Davies, Out of the Kumbla: Women and Caribbean Literature (1990), celebrated at Cornell University in 2021. In 2019, she gave the Earl Warner Memorial Lecture in Barbados. Her recent work includes essays on the breadfruit; fiction by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Helon Habila; pedagogy for postcolonial environmental humanities; Caribbean theater and Earl Warner; Jean Rhys; and Kamau Brathwaite. An ecocritical study of Caribbean literature, which includes a chapter on Kamau, is in progress. She is emeritus professor of literary studies at the New School.Chelsea Stieber is associate professor of French and francophone studies at Catholic University of America, Washington, DC. She is author of Haiti’s Paper War: Post-independence Writing, Civil War, and the Making of the Republic, 1804–1954 (2020), and coeditor, with Brandon Byrd, of the critical translation of Louis Joseph Janvier’s Haiti for the Haitians (forthcoming). Her scholarship and essays have appeared in academic journals, including Francosphères, French Studies, and Contemporary French Civilization, and on digital platforms such as Africa Is a Country, the Abusable Past (Radical History Review), and Public Books. She is currently working on a new project on Caribbean fascism, for which she was awarded an ACLS fellowship for the academic year 2020–21.Gio Swaby (whose images appear on the cover of this issue) is a Bahamian mixed-media artist whose practice encompasses installation, textiles, collage, performance, and video. Her work revolves around an exploration of identity, more specifically, the intersections of Blackness and womanhood, with attention to the ways this physical identity can serve as a positive force of connection and closeness, while also examining its imposed relationship to otherness. As she states, “I want my work to function as a love letter of sorts to Black women.” Swaby was raised in Nassau, where she obtained her AA at the College of The Bahamas. She is a graduate of the Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, Canada, and is currently an MFA candidate at OCAD University in Toronto.Leanna Thomas is a White settler doctoral candidate at the University of New Brunswick, Canada. Prior to attending UNB, she studied at the University of Central Florida, where she examined Acadians’ resettlement in Louisiana following their deportation from Canada. She has published in Louisiana History and Acadiensis. The recipient of a Canadian federal Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council scholarship, she is currently comparing how twentieth-century literature has contributed to creating historical narratives of resilience and survival for francophone communities under colonialism in Atlantic Canada and the Caribbean.