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2021 ◽  
pp. 0308518X2110654
Author(s):  
Stefan Ouma ◽  
Saumya Premchander

In this commentary, we call upon critical labour scholars, including labour geographers, to feature what sociologist Palmer called the ‘thrust of efficiency’ more centrally in their work. We put forth that the push for efficiency, as made possible by digital technology, needs to be analysed in terms of its historical lineage as well as in terms of its geographical scope. Centreing efficiency in critical labour studies, necessitates three scholarly moves. These are particularly relevant for labour geography, a field that has so far tended to circumvent questions of coloniality/labour, digital Taylorism, and the politics of (re-)writing economic geographies, in by-passing the literatures that deal with them. The plantation, an analytical category and ontic reality that stretches across several yet often unconnected bodies of literature – literary studies, Black Geographies, Caribbean studies, and the Black Radical Tradition, as well as in Global History – is central to our effort. Eventually, writing the plantation into the technological present-future can be the starting point for a larger and historico-geographically informed critique, in economic geography and beyond, of efficiency, a mode of thinking-cum-praxis based on input–output calculations, objectifying practices, violent value extraction and the removal of undesired ‘social frictions’ for the sake of capital accumulation.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michel-Rolph Trouillot

This collection of writings from Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot includes his most famous, lesser known, and hard to find writings that demonstrate his enduring importance to Caribbean studies, anthropology, history, postcolonial studies, and politically engaged scholarship more broadly.


2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-115
Author(s):  
Margo Groenewoud

This essay traces the roots of marginalization of the Dutch Caribbean in Caribbean studies, approaching these roots as an integral part of a shared Caribbean intellectual history. In the era of twentieth-century Caribbean anticolonialism, nationalism, and decolonization, local intellectuals emerged in the public arena throughout the Caribbean region. The author studies the intellectual interplays and incubations taking place, asking if and how Dutch Caribbean thinkers and writers were involved. Her analysis finds that neglect and erasure impacted Dutch Caribbean studies first and foremost from within. Mid-twentieth-century Dutch Caribbean anticolonial intellectuals have confronted strong oppression and retaliations, leading to obscured publications as well as to considerable societal and archival silences. This reflects on the self-image of the Dutch Caribbean and an observed otherness attitude among Dutch Caribbean intellectuals.


2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 104-118
Author(s):  
Nalini Mohabir ◽  
Ronald Cummings

This interview provides a rich account of Frank Birbalsingh’s experiences from his early life in colonial British Guiana in the early part of the twentieth century to his continuing work as a literary scholar and critic in diaspora. What is also revealed is a thoughtful critical reflection on the Caribbean, its multiplicity, and its course of change over a lifetime. The discussion also traces Birbalsingh’s migrations to India, Canada, New Zealand, and Nigeria and examines how these journeys have shaped his critical work within the fields of Commonwealth literature, postcolonial literature, and Caribbean studies, situating these shifts and movements within and against the backdrop of histories of decolonization. Birbalsingh’s early years in a plantation colony become prologue to his experience of education as a pathway to migration (a brain drain that still marks Guyanese and Caribbean experience to this day). The interviewers focus on the scholar’s career highlights and finally turn to the space that all wide-ranging departures and journeys beyond the nation encounter (regardless of emotional investments)—the place of exile and diaspora.


Author(s):  
Gregory Luke Chwala

This paper examines the ways in which Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven (1987) uses postcolonial Gothic conventions to articulate a convergence of gender, race, sexuality, capitalism, colonialism, and environment. I argue that the novel diverges from colonial values in its production of conflicting identity politics, and that these can be best understood through decolonial queer ecologies. The paper begins by situating the work of Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley and Edouard Glissant to lay a foundation for the decolonial queer ecocritical analysis that follows. Both Tinsley and Glissant stress the importance of the land to Caribbean culture and people, but Tinsley further establishes a framework for queer Caribbean studies that can help one better understand my critique of Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven. From this framework, I show how both raced and classed queer and trans characters transgress colonial boundaries through the ways that they reappropriate spaces and bodies in Jamaica’s ruinate. I further examine how the Afro-Carib people who assemble in the ruinate challenge imperialism by forming a coalition that embraces trans leadership. In order to renegotiate human agency in the ruins of empire, Cliff’s novel utilizes coalition building as a form of decolonization to explore non-hierarchical relationships between queer/non-queer characters and their relationship with the land. No Telephone to Heaven repurposes the Gothic as a means for characters to discover new, more productive relationships with one other and their environment.


2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 35-49
Author(s):  
Mark Overmyer-Velázquez

This article examines how situating our academic inquiry from geographic vantage points outside of the United States allows scholars to recast epistemological and ontological assumptions in the field of US Latina/o Studies. It asks how, from a global reorientation of the cognitive map of US Latina/o Studies, we might reconsider the experience of the Latin American and Caribbean diaspora and the notion of Latinidad in places such as Jordan, Spain, and Canada. This analysis places Latina/o Studies and Latin American and Caribbean Studies into conversation by reconsidering their status as traditionally isolated epistemic sites of US ethnic and area studies. In addition, it explores how new “Latino” and diasporic identities are forged through hybrid ethnic interactions among minoritized populations in the Global South.


Author(s):  
Geoffroy de Laforcade

Amzat Boukari-Yabara's portrait of Guyanese scholar and activist Walter Rodney (Walter Rodney: Un historien engagé, 1942-1980, Paris: Présence Africaine, 2018) is not a traditional biography, but rather a narrative of the context in which he deployed his work as an historian and a politically engaged contributor to African and Caribbean studies in the 1960s and 1970s. The author, like Rodney himself, believes that the history of African and Afro-diasporic peoples should be written from the Africas and the Americas themselves. Whether writing about the history of the slave trade, the African past, decolonization or black power, the biographer expertly conveys Rodney's erudition while directing students of these issues toward a broader retrospective, contextualization and actualization of his thought. More than any existing biography or chronicle of Rodney's life, it is a book that redefines and actualizes what it means to be an “historien engagé,” a politically and socially committed student of the past and its lessons for the present.


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