In this essay, I argue that we must de-transcendentalize our ideas about decolonization within anthropology. In other words, I argue that we must learn to see decolonization as an ongoing and open-ended process, rather than as an event after which we are simply done with interrogating the coloniality of anthropology. I also call for the … Read more
Introduction Over the years, various Caribbeanist scholars, including this author, have questioned how we can imagine Caribbean sexual-economic praxes not merely as survival strategies; expressions of heteropatriarchy; or legacies of colonial, exoticizing, and hypersexualizing oppressions; but also as embodied practices that are deeply entangled with the region’s economic fabric. Such scholarship has analyzed the genealogy … Read more
i. the scent of jostled grief after and before carnival. causing carnival, there was a craving. a salt craving for a particular smell. no one talked about it. or explicitly associated the sweetness of saltfish with the memory of being packaged and preserved (barely) while crossing over. it was a memory too visceral for verbs. … Read more
Andaiye (11 September 1942 to 31 May 2019) Editor’s note: Andaiye has been one of the Caribbean’s leading radical political figures, social and political thinkers. In Guyana, she was a member of the Working People’s Alliance, through the period of political turbulence and antidictatorial struggle that culminated in the assassination of Walter Rodney on 13 … Read more
The forced coalescing of European scribal traditions with the oral traditions of displaced Africans has led to a creolized cultural space that is a shifting terrain of contested cultural expression. This terrain has yielded moments where writers textually experiment with orality in both form and content and so challenge the boundaries that might distinguish the … Read more
The last five years have seen increasing scholarly attention to Caribbean sexualities with the publication of landmark texts by several Caribbean scholars. Similarly, there are thriving regional networks of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) activists and scholars engaged in a sustained and visible programme of advocacy, activism, and transformation of Caribbean societies. For example, … Read more
An Incident and Its Context These reflections focus on a series of texts written in and about Haiti and circulated throughout the literary and cyber spaces of the global so-called First World. The first text is a November 2010 letter written by a Haitian woman who survived a brutal gang rape in one of the … Read more
For Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné. She took a husband on the riverbank after casting for his hearth tarot through the coppice of his leaves. Wayward she born, bush delivered and sudden like leaping moray tail slicing current. Let no man say she never knew what she wanted, or grew unable to track her mate by the swells … Read more
