Tag
Caribbean
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“That’s How You Survive”: Gloria Blizzard on Third Culture Kids and Black “Identity”
“I look at myself as a place of intersections.”
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Thelma King and the Call for Revolution
In 1963, a Panamanian assemblywoman took to Cuban radio to condemn the United States and its control of the Americas.
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How to Step Out of Comfort Zones
Caribbean authors—and the “disorderly” women of whom they write—can reveal how important it is to seek out one’s true self.
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When Martinique Cannibalized Colonialism
What to do with Confederate statues in the US South? Martinique didn’t just destroy its colonial-era statues—it rebuilt them into something else.
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Public Thinker: Annette Joseph-Gabriel on Black Women, Frenchness, and Decolonization
“The women in my book really disrupted France’s ideas about citizenship, about who belongs. I’d like us to be similarly disruptive.”[none-for-homepage]
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Lessons from Haiti on Living and Dying
If he had to write The Black Jacobins again, C. L. R. James “would only give Toussaint [Louverture] a walk-on part.”
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B-Sides: Denis Williams’s “Other Leopards”
Denis Williams was a painter in London, a novelist in the Sudan, an art historian in Nigeria, and an archeologist in his native Guyana: the polymath’s polymath …
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Imperial Couplings
Hazel Carby’s Imperial Intimacies explores the couple, and intimacy, as foundational historical categories in postcolonial and decolonial studies. At the heart of her narrative lie Carl, a Jamaican …
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Homing Empire
Family memoirs are a special kind of historical offering. They have the power to tell fine-grained stories of the past, of epochal events—wars, migrations, empires—and to intricately connect them to the lived present of the author who reconstructs them. Done well, memoirs people the past, putting their reader in touch with affects, intentions, and relations…
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Identity, Islands, and Hazel V. Carby
What histories do we inherit? In the current crisis of Brexit—which points to larger global shifts toward nationalism and xenophobia—there is no more urgent a …
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“Who Inherits?”: A Conversation between Tao Leigh Goffe and Hazel V. Carby
Over the decades of her transatlantic career, distinguished Yale University professor emerita of American and African American studies Hazel V. Carby has considered how one negotiates ancestral ties to two islands intimately entangled by empire, Britain and Jamaica. Her new book, Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands, is her answer to that question. As…
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Novels of Colombia’s Patriarchy
Fathers dead and fathers dying—as well as adult children struggling to leave their fathers’ shadow—shape two recent novels from Colombia. Though one concerns a …
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How Haiti Got Free
I vividly remember the rush I felt after my first encounter with the story of the Haitian Revolution. It was a sudden and miraculous sense that everything was not as it seemed …
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And Cuba Shall Lead Them
In an era when, history textbooks contend, the United States lurched to the right, Gus Newport presided over an unapologetically leftist government in the San Francisco Bay Area. If the region has a progressive reputation today, it is because people like Newport fought to make it so. As mayor of Berkeley from 1979 to 1986,…
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Casa Mueller’s Ghost: Displaced Afro-Caribbean History in Panama City
I’m standing on a foot-wide cement island in the middle of the bustling Avenida …
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“Slave Old Man” in English, English in “Slave Old Man”
Linda Coverdale’s English translation of the 1997 novel L’esclave vieil homme et …
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The Caribbean: Through a Lens Brightly
James Anthony Froude is a name now lost to time. In the Victorian era the British historian, writer, and traveler held great prominence, much of which was due to his unabashed celebrations of imperialism, which he most famously presented in his influential 1888 study, The English in the West Indies. Froude’s infamy arises from his…
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“Every Negro Walk In A Circle”: Commuting With Marlon James
Biking alongside Manhattan’s West Side Highway two winters ago, I ran into a group of demonstrators. That evening Officer Daniel Pantaleo had been acquitted, after infamously choking Eric Garner to death just a few months earlier. The sight of the highway stuck me as a future scene—crowded as it was with people and not with…
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Breaking Down Walls at the Havana Biennial
The Malecón, Havana’s five miles of curving, spray-soaked seawall and esplanade, is both magnificent and intimate. Since the early 20th century, it has been the site for evening promenades, a meeting spot for lovers, and a place for fishermen to cast their lines. The far side of its roadway used to be fronted with elegant…
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Spiralism: Haiti’s Long-Lost Poetics of Protest
Reading Frankétienne’s Ready to Burst is eerily similar to contemplating a wound that won’t heal, inspiring trepidation at what might soon—or potentially worse, not ever—change. Such was my experience of following the novel’s protagonists, Raynand and Paulin, as they attempt to make modest yet always ill-fated bids for basic human happiness in a Haiti in…
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Marlon James’s Savage Business
The irony in the title of Marlon James’s new novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, is twofold. For one, this 686-page book is far from brief. On the contrary, it is a raucous, nearly …
