Alternative Soundscape Paradigms from Kamau Brathwaite and the Mighty Sparrow

This essay asks how the soundscapes represented in Caribbean literature and music provide alternative paradigms for conceptualizing noise and silence. As American and European sound studies have drawn from the writings of John Cage, Murray Schafer, and Jacques Attali to articulate alternative practices of listening and soundmaking, they have marginalized black experience. Caribbean noise, formed out of resistance to slavery and colonialism, has been excluded from informing those alternative practices. The depths of sonic experience revealed by soundscapes of Kamau Brathwaite’s poetry and the Mighty Sparrow’s calypsos concern the impact of centuries of Atlantic slavery on black hearing and speaking. They expose the racial and economic determinants of sound studies’ advocacy of indifferent listening and pure sound environments. In contrast, Caribbean histories of resourceful hearing and soundmaking bring distinctive sonic cultures to challenge established listening practices and provide ways of questioning canonical definitions of noise and silence.

Abduction and the Grounds of Caribbean Reasoning

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.

Caribbean Freedom beyond Coloniality

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.

The Dual Biopolitics in the Cuban Postplantation of Gloria Rolando’s Raíces de mi corazón

This essay focuses on the “dual” biopolitics of Cuban filmmaker Gloria Rolando’s Raíces de mi corazón (Roots of My Heart, 2001). In her film about an antiblack genocide in early-twentieth-century Cuba, Rolando seeks to recover the suppressed 1912 massacre of members of the black Cuban Partido Independiente de Color (the Independent Party of Color) and thousands of other Afro-Cubans through the plane of the intimate. The author argues that Rolando’s film challenges the myth of racial equality throughout Cuba’s modern history by celebrating Afro-Cuban traditions, from orisha rituals to patakíes (Afro-Cuban oral tradition), over a reappropriated plantational space in which black sensuality contests negative biopolitical forms. Rolando not only draws from transnational critical race theory to address the myth of Latin American exceptionalism, she also challenges Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of biopolitics casting black sensuality over racial violence.

Gender and the Americanist James

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.

Her Name Was Doña Margot

Margarita “Doña Margot” Rivera García (1909–2000) was a black working-class Puerto Rican woman whose labor as a composer, healer, midwife, and spiritual medium made her an esteemed community leader among her neighbors from Santurce, a predominantly black enclave in San Juan. Through her bomba and plena compositions, she helped forge modern black Puerto Rican music amid the rapid industrialization of Puerto Rico after the 1950s. However, her story has been overshadowed by the aura of her son, the legendary Afro–Puerto Rican singer Ismael “Maelo” Rivera (1931–87). Although Doña Margot is praised as a maternal figure who gave Maelo the gift of rhythm, her story as a woman and artist has remained widely unheard. This essay examines her parallel presence and erasure in salsa historiography, taking her testimonios about her musical gift as offering a counternarrative that defies masculinist music histories and serves as a site of memory that endures erasure.

Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and “Failed” Nations: Haiti and Jewish Refugees in the 1930s

Using the field of humanitarianism as the critical locus, this essay reflects on what Haiti, called the “Republic of NGOs,” can teach us about unsettling the coloniality of being, power, and freedom if we acknowledge in our critical thought system the acts of humanitarianism this nation has performed. By pursuing the issue of agency otherwise denied to any organism—be it political or intellectual—that departs from Western paradigms, the author aims to contribute to the call on critics and historians to rethink the ideologies that have informed and continue to inform the patterns of research methodologies entrenched in various disciplines to address the vexed question of epistemic dependency. In response, the essay focuses on the episode of inter-minority solidarity between blacks and Jews when, following the 1938 Evian conference, the Haitian government offered asylum to the undesirables of Europe based on the principles of the 1804 Haitian Revolution.

Redefining Mestizaje: How Trans-Caribbean Exchanges Solidified Black Consciousness in Cuba

This essay recovers the history of 1960s and 1970s black movements in Cuba through an examination of works by Afro-Cuban intellectuals and their meetings with Caribbean thinkers to show the coexistence of mestizaje and black consciousness as a defining, but overlooked, feature of black activism in Cuba. While the existing literature locates black consciousness in the English- and French-speaking Caribbean, this essay highlights how Afro-Cubans in Spanish-speaking countries were not only aware of but also adapted Caribbean ideologies to local circumstances. Using oral histories, cultural productions, and meetings between Caribbean intellectuals, this examination of Afro-Cuban activism reframes the period leading up to Nancy Morejón’s 1982 Nación y mestizaje en Nicolás Guillén to show that the poet was one of many artists-activists who resurrected black history, revalued African culture and black identity, and promoted Caribbean black consciousness in Cuba despite state attempts at censorship. For Morejón that meant offering a definition of mestizaje that goes through and coexists with black consciousness.

Nancy Morejón, Nicolás Guillén y el cimarronaje aún necesario en Cuba contemporánea

This intersectional and epistemological study of Nancy Morejón’s 1982 Nación y mestizaje en Nicolás Guillén resolves the tension, which intrigued most of her critics, between her political commitment and sophisticated lyricism. The author examines Morejón’s unquestionable revolutionary support and adhesion to Guillén’s conceptualization of la nación mestiza—instrumental for the cohesiveness promoted by the revolutionary regime—through the comprehensive analysis of her family socioeconomic background, the coincidence of her arrival to adolescence with the revolutionary triumph in 1959, and her affiliation to the editorial group El Puente (1961–65). Intersectionality allows an understanding of how Morejón’s self-identification and self-representation as a black revolutionary female writer condition her elaboration of counternarratives that thwart the Eurocentric and patriarchally constructed national history. The essay reveals rarely examined contradictions between Morejón’s and Guillén’s poetry and discusses how the writers’ shared essentialist views on nationhood fail to ultimately deconstruct the hegemonic Eurocentric epistemology they vowed to upend. (In Spanish; an English translation is available online)

Introduction: Literature and the State in Nancy Morejón

This essay introduces a special section on the Afro-Cuban poet and intellectual Nancy Morejón’s 1982 book Nación y mestizaje en Nicolás Guillén (Nation and Mestizaje in Nicolás Guillén). It sets up the contributors by surveying the literary and political trajectory of Morejón’s career in the years leading up to the publication of the book, focusing in part on her silencing by the Cuban state because of earlier activities centered on Afro-Cuban rights. The essay considers the themes and arguments of Nación y mestizaje, recognizing the surfaces, depths, and fissures of its actual and apparent doctrinaire lauding of Guillén as exemplar of Cuba’s cultural politics.