Caribbean Freedom beyond Coloniality

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 190-196
Author(s):  
Aaron Kamugisha
Keyword(s):  
Political Order ◽  
Intellectual Tradition ◽  
The Caribbean

This essay proffers a response to three critical engagements with the author’s 2019 Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition. The author contextualizes Beyond Coloniality as a book that seeks to effect a challenging alliance between studies of the anglophone Caribbean’s postindependence social and political order and scholarship on Caribbean thought. Ultimately, Beyond Coloniality engages in a quest for freedom beyond neocolonial citizenship.

Abduction and the Grounds of Caribbean Reasoning

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 182-189
Author(s):  
Raj Chetty
Keyword(s):  
Review Essay ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Intellectual Tradition ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Sylvia Wynter

This review essay engages with Aaron Kamugisha’s 2019 Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition by focusing on its methodological commitment to seeking Caribbean answers to Caribbean political and social problems. The author argues that Kamugisha powerfully offers something other than a methodology through which the circulation of Caribbean geographies, politics, epistemologies, and its people’s lived experiences moves outward to provide analytical and conceptual service for metropolitan centers, even if for ostensibly decolonial purposes. The essay demonstrates how by turning to two of the Caribbean’s major thinkers, C. L. R. James and Sylvia Wynter, and their far-less-studied Caribbean writings, Kamugisha takes seriously the centering of Caribbean thinkers in their own histories of political becoming. The essay ends with sustained focus on Kamugisha’s elaboration of two of Wynter’s conceptualizations: indigenization as an alternative to creolization and abduction as a kind of theorizing out from Caribbean reasonings.

Gender and the Americanist James

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-181
Author(s):  
H. Reuben Neptune
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
The United States ◽  
Unintended Consequence ◽  
Independent Reading ◽  
Intellectual Tradition ◽  
The Caribbean

This review essay asserts that Aaron Kamugisha’s 2019 Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition, for all its brilliance, does not do justice to the thought of C. L. R. James, especially in relation to gender. After claiming that Kamugisha mostly misses the emancipatory and at times radical aspects of James’s feminist thinking, which was developed most fully during his years in the United States (1938–52), the author allows that the omission appears to be not deliberate but an unintended consequence of Kamugisha’s faithful following of the dominant North Atlantic interpretation of the “American James.” In particular, the author sees Kamugisha as seeming to accept without question the hegemonic Americanist assumption that James took a romantic excursion in the United States, and thus Beyond Coloniality neglects the deeply gendered analysis at the heart of James’s 1950 manuscript that eventually found publication in 1993 as American Civilization. Although James certainly never got out of “gender jail” in his lifetime, American Civilization betrayed his hopeful vision of escape. This essay proposes to Kamugisha that a careful and independent reading of this text could have revealed James as a far more sophisticated failure than the virtually helpless figure drawn in Beyond Coloniality.

scholarly journals How Criminals Govern in Latin America and the Caribbean

2020 ◽  
Vol 119 (814) ◽  
pp. 43-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Enrique Desmond Arias
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Criminal Organizations ◽  
The Caribbean

Across the region, criminal organizations collude with the state, maintain local political order, and help nominate and elect politicians.

Thinking Beyond Coloniality: Toward Radical Caribbean Futures

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-170
Author(s):  
Mimi Sheller
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Tradition ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
Cultural Crisis ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Sylvia Wynter ◽  
Reparative Justice

This essay reviews Aaron Kamugisha’s reading of the works of C. L. R. James and Sylvia Wynter in his 2019 book Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition. Kamugisha issues a resounding call to reenergize the radical Caribbean intellectual tradition, saving us from our own alienation, colonization, and ambivalence. This essay takes inspiration from Beyond Coloniality to respond to the climate-political-social-cultural crisis in the Caribbean and to think through the possibilities for futurity in relation to reparative justice and ecological repair. It considers how the multiple devastations of recent “unnatural disasters” in the Caribbean are the outcome of the coloniality of climate, the deadly logics of racial capitalism, and the persistence of antiblack racism globally. The coloniality of climate calls for attention to repair, care, and reparations. We need to ask, Who is responsible, who is harmed, and who should be accountable?

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