Caribbean Studies Research Articles

Black Gravity, or a Hidden History of Empire

This essay takes this occasion—the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Evelynn Hammonds’s germinal essay “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality”—as an opportunity to explore the turn to spacetime and astrophysics in Black feminist writing and scholarship. This understudied tradition has unfolded concurrently alongside the rise of maritime and aquatic metaphors in Black studies. Focusing on the image of the black hole, the essay argues that this metaphor operates as a stimulus for confronting disciplinary objects of anxiety in Black studies, Caribbean studies, physics, and Black feminist studies. By analyzing origin stories that surround the moniker black hole in physics, the essay shows how imperial violence and notions of Black gender and sexual alterity suffused the term from its inception in the world of physics—a history that Black feminist theorists call to memory and challenge in their redeployment of the image.

The Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies Turns 50

The Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies Turns 50

Of homelands and global Blackness, or a trans-Atlantic tale of Caribbean relationalities: A geographic manifesto for change

This reflection traces my intellectual journey to geography. It focuses on the emergence of Global Black Geographies as a key methodological framework in my PhD research. The article explores its application to my work alongside my move from Jamaica to the United Kingdom. Global Black Geographies, which takes some of its cues from Black Geographies, is a field that powerfully interrogates the multiply complex definitions and geographies of Blackness in many parts of the world, including the Caribbean. I thus use the experience of my PhD research as a lens to demonstrate how Caribbean scholarship bridges Black Geographies scholarship and some of its more global concerns. In doing so, I reveal the central role Caribbean Studies have played in the development of Black Geographies, which ultimately connects my research interests to a context of several globally Black concerns.

Worldmaking on digital platforms: A study of Cuban comedy in social media

This article studies the digital-cultural labor of three Cuban Instagram comedians and the worldmaking they promote. The comedians, Marlon, Chupetin, and Kende, immensely popular among Cuban audiences, create content that centers their Black working-class and street-smart identity. Through a close analysis of how these comedians utilize performance as rhetorical tools, I examine the entanglements and possibilities that marginalized content creators face when making symbolic and embodied meaning not sanctioned by the nation-state's meta-narratives of normative identity. I draw on theories of performance studies, media anthropology and Caribbean studies, to conceptualize the political, cultural, and personal stakes that come with the ‘world-making’ labor of Cuban Instagram comedians. I argue performances of estranged ways of being, distributed through transnational digital networks, enact aspirations of redressing long-standing desires and anxieties about national identity and personal agency. Ultimately this article situates social media platforms as vital spaces of worldmaking in a digital era.

“Every Discipline […] is a Lineage of Begetting”: The Generation(s) of Francophone Caribbean Studies in the UK and Ireland

The article explores the emergence of Francophone Caribbean studies in Great Britain and Ireland. It focuses on the first generation of scholars—Richard D.E. Burton, Bridget Jones, Roger Little and others—who were in the vanguard of this opening up of teaching and research in French studies towards the literatures and cultures of the region. The aims of the article are four-fold: (i) to understand these developments biographically, and to consider the professional factors (notably early-career postings to universities outside Europe and early engagement in doctoral research with examples of French literature and culture that spill beyond the Hexagon) that shaped these challenges to the disciplinary status quo; (ii) to situate the emergence of Francophone Caribbean studies in relating to what Christophe Campos dubs a wider “cracking of coherence” in the study of French; (iii) to explore the ways in which historically existing disciplinary infrastructure—taking the example of the journal French Studies—adapted with varying degrees of enthusiasm to these changes; and (iv) to analyse the emergence and consolidation of a new disciplinary infrastructure in the 1970s–1990s—in Caribbean studies and Francophone literature more broadly (e.g., ASCALF, with its annual conference and publications)—to support these developments

What does capital consume? Racial capitalism and the social reproduction of surplus people

This intervention considers uneven development and social reproduction within racial capitalism. Social reproduction refers to the range of practices that form the conditions of possibility for the life of capital, as well as life and death within racial capitalism. This spans a range of institutions and networks within households, communities, states and across national borders as well as the labour practices, relations and organization that reproduce racial capitalism. Here, we examine the extraction of time, taking up theorizations across carceral geographies, postcolonial theory and Caribbean studies to demonstrate how coercive relations of social reproduction contribute to uneven development. In particular, we look at the role of the state in racial capital’s capture of reproductive activities across our work on electric utilities in Atlanta, Georgia and extralegal land tenure on Jamaica’s north coast. In bringing these distinct sites into conversation, we re-affirm the need to study uneven development by understanding how the circulation and accumulation of capital is imbricated with the production of hierarchies of all kinds of difference. We show how a conjunctural countertopography can reveal how state practices advance accumulation under conditions of widespread surplus lives, as capital wagers on captive life and premature death.

A Multispecies Caribbean

In an era of deepening social and ecological calamity, artists from Puerto Rico currently address perennial questions of catastrophe in ways that foreground the island archipelago’s multispecies relationships: the dynamic assemblages of human and more-than-human organisms that confront the ongoing depredations of environmental colonialism. This essay takes a first step toward establishing a field of multispecies Caribbean studies by analyzing the work of the contemporary Puerto Rican artist Dhara Rivera. Rivera’s installations critically reimagine multispecies relations by crafting an aesthetics of ecological reinvention that neither hearkens back to a falsely harmonious ecological past nor foretells an entirely apocalyptic planetary future. Caribbean multispecies studies complicate commonplaces of ecocriticism by troubling the neat division between spectacular disaster and slow violence, questioning the mobilization of the assemblage as a straightforward and positive compositional attribute and bringing together environmental justice and environmental humanities scholarship with an eye to a livable present.

Pinning down Pan-Africanism: Exploring the Definition(s), Utility, and Durability of an Ideology and the Movements It Engendered

Pinning down Pan-Africanism: Exploring the Definition(s), Utility, and Durability of an Ideology and the Movements It Engendered Kenja McCray Adi, Hakim–Pan-Africanism: A History. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. 297 p. Rabaka, Reiland, ed.–Routledge Handbook of Pan-Africanism. London: Routledge, 2021. 548 p. People are likely to provide a myriad of responses if asked to describe Pan-Africanism. This diversity of perceptions reflects the enduring challenge of defining and discussing the topic. Hakim Adi begins Pan-Africanism: A History by employing a broad understanding of the term as an ideology and the movements it catalyzed. He writes that Pan-Africanism is “the striving for the unity and liberation of Africa and Africans” (p. 221). According to Adi, a single, universally accepted definition has never existed. He goes further, determining that the hazards of pinning some authors down to a definitive meaning stem from the reality that Pan-Africanism has assumed so many different forms over time and space (p. 2). Adi’s conception of its protean and enduring nature dovetails with the central framing of the Routledge Handbook of Pan-Africanism, which is edited by University of Colorado, Boulder Professor of African, African American, and Caribbean Studies, Reiland Rabaka, and contains multiple, adaptable meanings. Both books address the critical need to formulate a clear, concise definition of Pan-Africanism. They also wrestle with conceptions like Ashley D. Farmer’s. A specialist in Black women’s intellectual history, Farmer writes, “the destruction of racism, capitalism, sexism, and homophobia will not come from a uniform idea but rather from the recognition and implementation of the array of political imaginings that those fighting oppression develop.”1 Adi and Rabaka deliberate on several interrelated issues in delineating Pan-Africanism. They examine its durability and [End Page 177] critique its pragmatic expressions from two different but equally useful entry points: a single-authored survey and a multi-authored compilation of essays. Undergraduate professors and scholars of Black liberation movements will appreciate Adi’s Pan-Africanism for its concise survey of a central topic in African and diasporic history, which he covers with appropriate depth. The book emerged from Adi’s experiences as a Professor of History at the University of Chichester in the United Kingdom. Few suitable, up-to-date texts existed for instructors such as himself to assign to undergraduate students. Adi’s interests include the African continent and diaspora, with an emphasis on twentieth-century Britain. His specialization in Africa and the diaspora in Britain gives the book a particular focus on aspects of Pan-African history occurring outside the United States. He decentres both the United States and Whiteness, for example, when discussing the formation of the diaspora (p. 2). In contrast to Adi’s succinct survey, the term “handbook” is a misnomer for Rabaka’s hefty tome of detailed essays. With 36 chapters, it could be more precisely identified as a compendium on Pan-Africanism. A strength of this approach is that, like Adi’s survey, it generally avoids a longstanding tendency within the literature on Pan-Africanism to emphasize diasporic countries (especially the United States) and metropolitan cities in the West instead of centring continental African locales and Global South perspectives. The Handbook sidesteps this pitfall, in part, by showcasing diverse voices hailing from Kampala to Mexico City. When read together, these two books cover a breadth of subjects at the intersections of Pan-Africanism, race, class, gender, sexuality, politics, economics, and culture. Adi delineates Pan-Africanism by outlining two major phases. The first era began during the transatlantic trade with the concerted endeavours of eighteenth-century African-descended activists in the diaspora to either end the trafficking and enslavement of Africans or to emigrate to the continent. This initial period ended with the 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress (PAC). Adi identifies the second phase as one during which “Pan-Africanism returns home” to the continent (p. 129). It emerged from anti-colonial struggles, beginning with the post-Second World War period, and ended with the establishment of the African Union (AU) and the reparations movement during the last years of the twentieth century. The way Adi organizes his chapters reveals a shorter, thematically driven periodization...

Notes From the Editor

Notes From the Editor Gregory S. Crider The Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies convened 10-12 March 2022 in Charlotte, North Carolina for our Sixty-Ninth Annual Meeting. The conference featured forty panels on a wide variety of topics. Program chair Steven Hyland (Wingate University) saw to the essential tasks of putting panels together in the areas of Literature & Cultural Studies as well as History & Social Sciences. Monica Rankin (University of Texas at Dallas), Jürgen Buchenau (University of North Carolina Charlotte), Steven Hyland (Wingate University) and Gregory Crider (Winthrop University) organized local arrangements for the convention. Freed from many COVID-19 restrictions, attendees were thrilled to meet face-to-face this year after the successful but less personal online meeting in 2021. Centered in the historic Dunhill Hotel in uptown Charlotte, members enjoyed our regular social and networking events, professional development opportunities, and diverse local cultural life. As co-sponsors of the conference, the Consortium in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University and the Consortium of Latin American Studies Programs offered meaningful support and participation. Lou Pérez (UNC), Beatriz Riefkohl-Muñiz (UNC), and Natalie Hartman (Duke) provided critical assistance to the annual meeting. Our collaborators at UNC Press, John McLeod, Kate Stack, and Dylan Stroupe, offered much appreciated backing as well. Now with five years of alliance with the University of North Carolina Press, our readership and exposure continue to grow with inclusion in Project MUSE, an online database of peer-reviewed academic journals and books. The Latin Americanist also continues to partner with the SECOLAS podcast, Historias, which frequently interviews TLA authors and other Latin Americanists from diverse disciplines. The collaboration of these two projects produces opportunities for authors to share their work, advancement of meaningful scholarly engagement, and written and audio resources for classrooms and the public. As always, TLA editors welcome new ideas and suggestions. This volume features some of the best papers from the conference in article format. Eleven of the 150 presenters at the conference submitted revised manuscripts of their papers for publication. Following editorial and peer review and another round of revisions, the five articles published in this issue represent a range of disciplines in both the humanities and social sciences. Graduate assistant Rebekah Ward has played a key role in communicating with authors and organizing and preparing manuscripts for publication. [End Page 6] UNC Charlotte, Winthrop University, and Wingate University, the three SECOLAS host institutions, offer significant financial and institutional support for the publication and success of this journal. In particular, we offer our gratitude to Dr. Nancy Gutierrez, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at UNC Charlotte; to Dr. Takita Sumter, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Ellison Capers Palmer, Jr. Professorship of History at Winthrop; and to Dr. Jeff Frederick, Provost at Wingate University, for their continuing encouragement of both The Latin Americanist and SECOLAS. [End Page 7] Copyright © 2023 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies

Across Global Souths: Asian Migrations through the U.S. South and the Circum-Caribbean

Across Global Souths:Asian Migrations through the U.S. South and the Circum-Caribbean Joo Ok Kim (bio) and Giselle Liza Anatol (bio) A Special Issue of the American Studies Journal Across Global Souths: Asian Migrations through the U.S. South and the Circum-Caribbean investigates Asian/American cultures, politics, and relationships across multiple Souths, with an emphasis on the U.S. South and the Caribbean. Edward Said's foundational Orientalism (1978) has been expanded and extrapolated to multiple frameworks that situate Asian peoples and populations in terms of the East versus the West; this concept continues to circulate in the United States, where "Asian America" is largely envisioned as only populating the East and West coasts. The Across Global Souths project reframes the conversation with an emphasis on journeys to and from multiple Souths. The guest editors consider the broader geopolitical designation of "South" in the United States, including Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas, and the U.S. Gulf Coast as a region in and of itself. Asian Americans in Dixie provides a critical reference point, defining the South as "a region of the United States and a space connected to and part of other transnational spaces" (Joshi and Desai, 2013, 4). Grounded within recent scholarly developments in the field of American Studies, we have invited further reflections on the diasporic condition of the category "Asian," as well as the diasporic condition of the category "Southerner," simultaneously challenging notions of an exclusively white, Euro-American U.S. [End Page 7] citizenry. A more inclusive, diverse conceptualization of what it means to be "American" subverts common racial identifications, which frequently fail to address the critical role that adopted cultural and ethnic traditions have played in the development of the U.S. national landscape; it also undermines notions of an unchanging, fixed identity. Furthermore, "American" is used expansively to consider migrations to and from different locations across the Americas. Framed this way, Brazil—the home to the largest population of Japanese people outside of Japan—and Cuba's Havana Chinatown emerge as rich sites for exploration. What distinguishes this special issue, firmly ensconced within both American Studies and current Global South frameworks, is the comparative focus on Asians in the U.S. South and the Caribbean and Caribbean diasporas. Although Global South Studies has raised important questions on "south/south" and hemispheric discourses, and Caribbean Studies has long foregrounded archipelagic and transnational critiques of colonialism, an interdisciplinary examination of Asian migrations within two locations that share centuries of overlapping histories has been understudied. For instance, the troubling "John Chinaman" stereotype of the nineteenth century, which depicted Chinese immigrants to the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, and Australia as "sinister, crafty, dirty, diseased, inscrutable, economically threatening, and, of course, strangely inassimilable," is commonly framed as "widespread in the West" (Lee Loy 1, 2010, emphasis added), resulting from migratory routes that traversed longitudinal, rather than latitudinal, lines. But even as we, the editors and contributors to Across Global Souths, foreground the geographical spaces of the U.S. South and the Caribbean in this special issue, we are inspired by broader theorizations of "south" that assemble other underexamined geographies and a range of methodologies, such as ethnographies that allow inquiry within unexpected sites of cultural formations, like restaurants, motels, and fishing-folk circles. This project thus convenes scholars working "across" different fields, disciplinary approaches, and research methods to foster greater understanding of the U.S. South–circum-Caribbean network. We feel compelled by stories like that of writer Cristina García, whose novel Monkey Hunting (2003) was partially inspired by a visit to a Chinese Cuban restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and a plate of black beans and pork fried rice. The novel's publication and circulation animate histories of Asian migration to the Americas, and it implicitly critiques the loss of these histories; it also illuminates the scores of lost narratives about North–South crossings, including recipes, and patterns of movement engendered by the Vietnam War. In other words, even as it activates chronicles of the "coolie" trade, García's narrative engages texts that conventionally have been elided from constructions of historical archives (e.g., family...

“림보의 침묵”: 카마우 브래스웨이트(Kamau Brathwaite)의 아프리카-카리브 시학

Mainly due to the colonial history that the Caribbean archipelago has experienced, the Caribbean studies has grown into a competent field of study that can open a new horizon of humanities. The Babadian Kamau Brathwaite is often regarded as one of the major authors of Anglophone Caribbean literature. It is true, however, that he has been treated as a peripheral figure compared with such big names like Derek Walcott, George Lamming, and Wilson Harris. This study is suggested as a reminder that he is no longer a minor voice but rather a revolutionary figure in terms of modern Caribbean literature. Brathwaite has investigated the question of cultural identity mobilizing such loaded terms as creolization, tidalectics, and nation language. In his poems Brathwaite intended to celebrate the power of language that the American creole has inherited and retrieve the African legacy melted in the language. Analyzing some key poems in Arrivants and Middle Passage, this study is trying to identify the ways in which Brathwaite traces the question of cultural identity through the lens of Africa and linguistic experiments. (The Catholic University of Korea)

Massenrempulu Ethnicity from South Sulawesi in the Transformation of Political Identity and the Production of Cultural Differences

In the context of the political history of the kingdoms of South Sulawesi up to the end of the Dutch colonial period, Maspul was interpreted as a political alliance of small kingdoms in the mountainous region of South Sulawesi. the term Maspul is interpreted as an ethnic group among several more populous ethnic groups such as the Bugis, Makassar, Luwu, Toraja (South Sulawesi), and Mandar (West Sulawesi). This paper examines the phenomenon of identity crisis experienced by the Massenrempulu ethnicity in South Sulawesi. The Massenrempulu have long internally considered themselves an ethnicity, although outsiders do not widely recognize them as an ethnic group. This article is based on research on the topic of “The Emergence of the Massenrempulu Ethnicity in South Sulawesi,” which was an ethnographic study conducted in 2015. The research also included diverse sources such as the colonial notes by government employees of the Dutch East Indies held by the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) Jakarta. Through the application of a constructivist perspective, the socio-cultural complexity of Massenrempulu society can be explained in the historical context and understood as an ethnic group. Maspul people are an ethnicity in South Sulawesi in the same manner as the Bugis, Makassar, Luwuk, and Toraja. The Maspul ethnic group has consisted of three different subcultures, with their local histories, mythologies, and languages, which is understandable given the historical characteristics of the Maspul Federation.

Lose Your Father

Lose Your Father

Respite. Quiet. A House of Dreams.

Respite. Quiet. A House of Dreams.

The rhythms of “acostumbrarse”: Noticing quiet hydro-politics in Colombia’s Caribbean coast

In Colombia’s Caribbean region, where Black Diaspora agrarian spaces have been overtaken by oil palm plantations, access to safe drinking water has become increasingly difficult. Leticia is a water spring located in this historical afro descendant territory. Leticia’s near exhaustion in 2015 as a consequence of oil palm encroachment caused little public outrage even though nearby communities have depended on its waters for decades. Some residents explained their response to Leticia’s fate as acostumbrarse or “getting used to” these forms of harm. While such responses are often discounted as expressions of “giving up,” we argue that acostumbrarse to Leticia’s precarity expresses self-affirmation that overflows liberal notions of resistance. In conversation with Black and Caribbean Studies intellect and poetics, we first problematize how dominant ways of writing about black harm not only reproduce anti-black violence but also neglect the desires of quiet sovereignty in the experience of harm. Second, we re-story Leticia’s sociality as immanent and acostumbrarse as a collective politics of perseverance that ebbs and flows in this hydro-sociality. Our goal is to open space for noticing and storying quiet responses such as acostumbrarse as an opaque politics of perseverance, forming and reforming through recurring and punctuated experiences of both life and death, harm and collective self-affirmation.

Across Time, Space, and Matter

Across Time, Space, and Matter

Contributors

Contributors

Modern Dermabrasions

This essay sketches out a protocol for reading Ren Ellis Neyra’s The Cry of the Senses: Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics (2020) from the vantage point of Ellis Neyra’s more recent work on Brownness and (non)relation. The essay aims to explore further the tensions that Ellis Neyra has identified across the fault lines of “Black/Brown” racial formations in a post-1492 context by paying specific attention to how these tensions crystalize in Latinx, Latin American, and Caribbean studies. The essay unpacks Ellis Neyra’s account of the breakdown of the concept of Brownness as articulated in José Estebán Muñoz’s work in order to detect an analogous breakdown in Bolívar Echevarría’s influential work on racial modernity. In conclusion, the essay poses a question about the emancipatory potential of abjection by putting Ellis Neyra’s compelling reading of Pedro Pietri’s The Masses Are Asses in dialogue with the work of the late feminist-deconstructionist thinker Mara Negrón.

Transformista, Travesti, Transgénero

This essay considers the stories of Blaccucini and Ángel Daniel, two Black transgender drag performers from Cuba, and dwells on the relationship they imagine between their work as performers and their subjectivities as trans people. The author situates these narratives within queer Cuban and Caribbean studies, noticing the ways they push back against renderings of gender and sexuality as inherently distinct categories. Instead, for these artist-thinkers, trans subjectivity is informed by various experiences related to gender, sexuality, race, class, and geography. The essay offers some possibilities for greater nuance in accounts of sexual subjectivity in Cuba and the Caribbean and locates the stakes of these discussions in broader transnational LGBT rights discourses.

Keywords in Caribbean Studies

This essay introduces a new featured section, to be published in Small Axe annually, that explores the critical vocabulary of the field of Caribbean studies.