To Be Black Is to . . .

Abstract

This essay shows that despite the variegated experience of Black-identified people globally and the unstable and processual nature of Blackness as a category, the meaning of Blackness remains anchored in the geography of the plantation, and the deathliness this produces still haunts the anglophone Caribbean. The focus is on how this haunting is palpable to the criminalized urban poor in Trinidad; yet Black has never simply denoted abjection. From the vantage point of postcolonial Caribbean nation-states founded on anticolonial projects of Black sovereignty, one can see not only the resilience of anti-Blackness that conditions what it feels like to be Black but also what Katherine McKittrick calls the “iterations of Black life that cannot be contained by black death.”