Abstract A scandal struck Cuba in the summer of 1989: a decorated military general, who had recently been assigned to the second-highest rank in the Cuban military, was arrested and charged with corruption and drug running. Within two months of his arrest, Arnaldo Ochoa and others from the military and Ministry of the Interior had been executed by firing squad. Cuban coverage of these scandalous arrests and accusations was at once unprecedented and inscrutable. The trials were televized and transcripts of speeches and testimony were reprinted in the state newspaper Granma each subsequent day. But Fidel Castro himself acknowledged that some footage was not aired, and some things were not said, to protect the innocence of the Cuban people and their families. Employing strategies most often used by historians of the colonial Spanish Americas and Africa, this essay exposes the fears and desires embedded in the Ochoa military tribunal transcripts, which do their best to obscure both. The scholars referenced use secrecy, rumors, and gossip as categories of analysis in their exploration of colonial trials. While Cuba was far from a colony in the 1980s, the author argues that the government had similar motivations as colonial governments did when they put seditious, rebellious, or conspiratorial enslaved people on trial: the government wanted to suppress the realities that Ochoa's scandal reflected—namely, the disaffection of thousands of veterans of Cuba's African wars. Thus, the author employs a similar strategy here, reading the tribunal transcript using theories around secrecy and gossip. Such a methodology illuminates the Cuban government's anxieties about race and Blackness embedded in Ochoa's trial. Ochoa himself was White, but he had led troops in Angola and Ethiopia, most of whom were Black and among whom he was extremely popular. Excavating the rumors and secrecy embedded in Ochoa's trial reveals a through line of racial tension in revolutionary Cuba that might have reignited in Angola. This essay proposes a new way of writing about the history of race in late twentieth-century Cuba, one that draws on the methodologies of colonial scholars.
Abstract This essay takes up the questions that Ryan Cecil Jobson's The Petro-state Masquerade: Oil, Sovereignty, and Power in Trinidad and Tobago (2024) provokes: Who performs sovereignty in the age of oil—and to what ends? Reading the dueling theatrics of corporate and state power alongside popular attachments to fossil fuels, the author asks how the masquerade of petro-sovereignty endures and what forms of collective freedom might yet emerge from within its contradictions.
Abstract This essay compares the ways two very different Caribbean historical novels explore different types of historical truth through their contrasting approaches to historical “facts.” The first is Valerie Belgrade's Ti Marie (1988), set mostly in Trinidad during the years 1777 to 1803. Widely considered a popular romance, Ti Marie does indeed contain elements of the fairy tale that appeal to the consumer of popular fiction. Nevertheless, several critics have noted its accurate historical detail, along with its complex themes and social framework. The other historical novel under investigation is David Dabydeen's The Counting House (1996), set mostly in Guyana during the early 1860s. This novel focuses on the experiences of a couple who migrate from India to Guyana as indentured laborers. Widely considered a literary novel, The Counting House, in contrast with Ti Marie, incorporates deliberate distortions of received history. Dabydeen eschews recorded history in favor of an imaginative recreation of “the madness” of the lives of plantation laborers, about which history has little to tell us beyond the well-known facts of their exploitation. Thus these two historical novels use very different approaches to explore different types of historical truth.
Abstract This essay pays tribute to Rhoda Reddock's groundbreaking work as a scholar-activist. As an ethnomusicologist and scholar of popular music studies, the author shares how her immersive rereading of many of Reddock's publications on the (neo)colonial constructions of gender, race, class, sexuality, and ethnicity, to name only a few, made her increasingly aware of how her work exemplifies the kinds of interventions—intellectual, institutional, political, and sociocultural—that make a difference in the world. This essay acknowledges Reddock's inspiring methodological approaches and sense of ethics (what she views as fair practice) exemplified by, among others, her inclusion of competing discourses in her publications. This, the author contends, says something about Reddock's listening to as opposed to listening for, her efforts not to be looking for confirmation of what she has already determined but rather to learn what other people think. The essay also underscores how Reddock's sense of ethics is further manifest in her refusal to shy away from confronting unspoken topics that, until recently, were widely known but kept as public secrets (homosexuality, HIV, sexual abuse) in academia and the Caribbean at large and beyond. Throughout this essay, the author notes how Reddock's lifelong work on gender, race, class, sexuality, and ethnicity (and more) has not privileged one community, religion, tradition, private sector, or set of activities—a feat in and of itself. Collectively, the author reads Reddock's writings as fighting injustices, apathy, and desperation, as laying bare her own engagement but also as simultaneously encouraging others to engage—with and beyond her.
Abstract This essay is a brief reflection on the impacts of Rhoda Reddock's life and work for over forty years on the author's own academic journey to becoming an antiracist, Caribbean (socialist) feminist. It focuses on three dimensions—namely, an early definition of feminism, Reddock's attention to intersections of race and ethnicity, class, and gender in the Caribbean, including “douglarization”; and Caribbean women's (sexual) agency and autonomy. This constitutes only a tiny part of the powerful impact Rhoda Reddock has had on Caribbean feminism yet hopefully contributes to filling in a picture of her incredible legacy.
Abstract Reflecting on the contributions of Professor Emerita Rhoda Reddock, this essay explores her sustained engagement with Indo-Caribbean gendered realities and how investment in understanding her “other” has informed her scholarship and activism. Thinking with the process of mas making, and particularly with the character “Nachorious” created for Jouvay 2025, the author considers the ways Reddock's analyses have informed her own postindenture Caribbean feminist praxes. Both a review of Reddock's life and work and an engagement with her legacy, the essay grounds the creation of Nachorious in Reddock's pathbreaking research on Indian indenture, but it also points to her life lived by example, her good advice for public intellectual writing, her continued involvement in imagining social change, and the value of her work on the intersections of ethnicity, class, and gender for the larger society, particularly in divisive times. Written from the perspective of a younger scholar mentored over decades and an almost daughter, it traverses the ways Rhoda Reddock also influenced life paths, like the author's own, through establishment of her academic home, the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine.
Abstract The author came of age in the 1970s, an important period in her life and in the history of the Caribbean region. But seeds were planted and glimpses of her future were already visible from an early age. Her mother used to say that she was a lucky child; it didn't feel like it at the time, but on reflection, the author's life has been a series of new and pioneering adventures. This essay provides personal reflections on her life and work and the factors contributing to her personal and intellectual development. It provides insight into her education, upbringing, and the sociopolitical influences that shaped her life in the Caribbean and internationally. She reflects on the impact of the Black Power movements of the 1970s, her life-changing student experiences at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine and Mona, graduate studies in The Netherlands, and the political and social justice influences of the period. The author also traces the emergence and development of her feminist consciousness and the privilege to be part of the global emergence of feminist studies in higher education and its introduction to the University of the West Indies. Although still incomplete, the essay also traces her complex and creative life and the ways she sought to weave together her work as feminist and social movement activist, interdisciplinary decolonial scholar, university administrator, development sociologist, international human rights practitioner, and Trini mas player.
Abstract This essay responds to the critical reflections on The Petro-state Masquerade: Oil, Sovereignty, and Power in Trinidad and Tobago (2024) offered by Chelsea Schields and J. Brent Crosson. Meditating on the petro-state as a political form not limited to petroleum-exporting nations, it proposes instead that we tend to the petro-state as an arrangement of power that structures Caribbean political life after the oil price shocks of 1973. Finally, this essay considers how novel arrangements of power are made manifest in the Caribbean today.
Abstract In 1949 Gordon Parks had just been hired as a full-time staff photographer for Life magazine. That auspicious year, his work was bookended by two projects that took him to Puerto Rico. These trips confronted Parks with two distinct faces, two distinct visions of Puerto Rican and Caribbean modernity that were being elaborated at the time. Shot on assignment for two articles published in January and December 1949, Untitled, Puerto Rico (inauguration of Luis Muñoz-Marín) and Gambling Woman, Caribe Hilton Hotel, San Juan, Puerto Rico were not printed and exhibited until the early 2000s, appearing together for the first time in the exhibition Gordon Parks: The New Tide at the National Gallery in Washington DC. Their overwrought subjects and metaphoric symbolism were incongruous with the laudatory tone of the articles for which they were shot: “A New Puerto Rico” and “Caribbean's Fanciest Hotel,” respectively. More than simply going beyond the strict editorial parameters of Life, these images are metonymic representations of the uncertain future faced by Puerto Ricans in 1949. Through a visual analysis of these works in relation to the Life articles, contemporaneous trends, and present-day scholarship, one can see how viewing Parks’ images as a diptych embodies a moment defined by speculation.
Abstract The opacity of a national gaze that prevails in marketing Caribbean music tends to obscure origins and musical performances, even when that gaze is defied by musicians. This essay contributes to the literature networks of a meta-Caribbean musical maze that complicate national boundaries. Musicologists have documented how various styles arose as a combination of inter-Caribbean diffusion resulting from inter-island migrations and developments from common roots. They became defined as “national” as local musicians infused similar rhythms with a different “feel,” tempos, and local melodies. Styles considered national such as bomba, merengue, danzón, bélé, and cumbia, among others, often obviate common roots: the rhythmic arsenal behind these forms. The challenge to a national gaze and an example of a Greater Caribbean cartography is present in Rafael Hernández, regarded as a quintessential Puerto Rican musician composer of Spanish language tunes, whose role in “anglophone” jazz remains shrouded. Ditto for Harry Belafonte, enshrined as a singer of Jamaican ballads while his “Latin” connection remains below the radar. In both instances the artists’ cultural polysemy challenge normalized iconicity. Both cases point to a need to study the musical careers of composers and interpreters in order to fully understand and map the dimensions of a Greater Caribbean.
Abstract Ryan Cecil Jobson's The Petro-state Masquerade: Oil, Sovereignty, and Power in Trinidad and Tobago (2024) is a groundbreaking combination of careful historical research and in-depth ethnography that produces a timely intervention on the politics of fossil fuels in Trinidad. In this essay, the author engages with Jobson's book to argue for the necessity of (1) historicizing the petro-state as a term that carries imperial baggage, (2) rethinking the opposition between true and false in the conception of the “petro-state masquerade,” (3) considering the United States as a petro-state, even though it is seldom rendered as such, and (4) utilizing the work of Lloyd Best to think politics and power beyond the state form.
Abstract This essay investigates the web of capitalism, property, empire, and incarceration as it contemplates the work of two twenty-first-century poets, Roque Raquel Salas Rivera and José Ramón Sánchez Leyva, based in Puerto Rico and Cuba, respectively. Salas Rivera's collection Lo terciario / The Tertiary interrogates the Puerto Rican debt crisis, and While They Sleep (Under the Bed Is Another Country) focuses on the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Sánchez Leyva's work, which examines the relationship between the US naval base and the Cuban city of Guantánamo, offers an ideal site at which to examine contradictions embodied by Guantánamo, including the way the US base functions as the distilled essence of the US imperial project, its contradictions pointing to the larger contradictions of US Empire. The author not only analyzes Sánchez Leyva's poetry but also produces some of the first English-language translations of these poems.
Abstract The project to define a specific Caribbean feminism as different from the Western bourgeois European-American model was consistently a central concern for Caribbean feminists, from the 1980s inceptions that marked the start of CAFRA—the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Activism—of which Rhoda Reddock was founding president, and continuing into the present. Reddock has been at the forefront of defining that Caribbean feminism in both activist and intellectual contexts. Her work has revealed that Caribbean feminism has always been anticolonial, regional, and diasporic, with a clear sense of how race, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality combine. Her work provides a variety of pathways to situate women's activism and scholarship within larger histories, movements, and contexts of Caribbean struggles for full emancipation.
Abstract This essay explores the relationship between the precarious social and political conditions of twenty-first-century Puerto Rico and the role of Puerto Rican mega-celebrities and their forays into culture. While the racial and colonial politics of Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical Hamilton have been widely studied, the author proposes that looking at those politics in tandem with its creator's interventions in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean adds a layer of complexity to our understanding of the contemporary shapes colonialism takes in the Caribbean. The essay examines the political and aesthetic investments of Hamilton from a decolonial Puerto Rican perspective, analyzing some of the song lyrics to reveal how the specter of Puerto Rican colonialism haunts the musical. It also considers Miranda's interventions into the Puerto Rican debt restructuring and posits him as an “indebted docile subject.” It focuses on the production of Hamilton in San Juan in the context of Hurricane Maria recovery, where it became a central tool of the disaster capitalist recovery discourses. The essay argues that Puerto Rico haunts Miranda and Hamilton yet is simultaneously obscured from the musical, producing a legible liberal politics that omits colonial violence despite being purportedly centered on it.
Abstract In this essay, the author meditates on the ways in which in Jamaica, metal, in contested iterations, has been a conductor of various creative and destructive imaginings across three crucial and overlapping ecologies: the colonial plantation, the twentieth-century bauxite mine, and the postcolonial city. She offered a more-than-human tracing of (a) how metal tools of agriculture, torture, and insurgent resistance were crucial to the articulation and disarticulation of the plantation geography as an engineered and extractive “naturecultural” world; (b) how bauxite ore, as the wealth of the nation, entangled fledgling postcolonial Jamaica in imperial, decolonial, and anthropocenic worlds shortly before and after the dawn of independence; and (c) how a uniquely aestheticized urban landscape, featuring metal security infrastructure, has shaped and continues to shape Jamaica's high-crime capital city, Kingston, alongside the recycling and trading of scrap metal—metal marked as both value-laden and value-less—which is today launching Jamaicans into new neoliberal networks. This essay illuminates metallurgy not as just a science of metals but as a critical mode of Caribbean historiography. In not losing sight of the aliveness of metal, this essay situates Caribbean metallurgy as decolonial praxis and ethos.
Abstract This essay examines the ethics of fictional representations of history underlying the work of André Schwarz-Bart, author of the Last of the Just (1959), and of a “Caribbean cycle” that he left unfinished. In this respect, his procedures can seem doubly problematic. Not only does Schwarz-Bart use fiction to relate historical events that are considered incompatible with it—the Shoah and the transatlantic slave trade—but he also sets up a comparison between the two. No historian worthy of the name would proceed in this way. Yet in the epilogue to A Woman Named Solitude (1972), Schwarz-Bart performs precisely these two operations. Starting with a close reading of this scene, this essay explores the issues it raises and how these resonate with the approaches of contemporary historians—namely, Georges Didi-Huberman and Saidiya Hartman—with a view to displacing the nodal points of the vast and highly charged debate it participates in. Under what conditions are imagination and comparison acceptable as means to grasp these historical events? What is the reasoning behind their mobilization, and with what ends in view?
Abstract This essay focuses on the work of the bomba composer and environmentalist Marcos Peñaloza Pica, who identifies as a descendant of Maroons and enslaved peoples. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with crews replanting and conserving the mangrove forest, bomba musicians, and community elders, the author examine how Marcos's compositions give voice and corporal meaning to Afro–Puerto Rican subjectivity. This subjectivity reimagines African traditions, removes these traditions from the stereotypical tri-cultural national heritage, and reconnects Afro–Puerto Ricanness with diasporic communities throughout Africa and the Americas. Moreover, Marcos and the author propose the theoretical argument that maroonage is culturally heritable but latent in Black music and ecologies co-opted into popular culture and stripped of their liberatory potentials when framed as “folklore” and “environmental conservation.”
Abstract This discussion essay offers a critical appraisal of Laëtitia Saint-Loubert's The Caribbean in Translation: Remapping Thresholds of Dislocation (2020) and situates her work within ongoing debates in translation studies and Caribbean literary theory. Saint-Loubert asks how translation can be decolonized in a region historically shaped by linguistic violence. Drawing on Barbara Cassin's and Emily Apter's theories of the untranslatable and Édouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation, she argues that Caribbean translators can use paratexts—prefaces, glosses, and notes—as “thresholds” that foreground cultural opacity and particularity. Through readings of Aimé Césaire, David Dabydeen, Edwidge Danticat, and Junot Díaz, Saint-Loubert reframes untranslatability not as linguistic failure but as a strategy of cultural difference. This essay, however, questions Saint-Loubert's reliance on an instrumental model of translation and her uncritical embrace of linguistic impossibility. Drawing on critics like Lawrence Venuti and David Bellos, it contends that all translation is interpretive, not reproductive, and that declaring Caribbean Creoles “untranslatable” risks reinscribing colonial hierarchies. Ultimately, the review calls for a more precise vocabulary for theorizing untranslatability—one that acknowledges translation's inevitable transformations while advancing decolonizing aims through interpretive openness rather than through essentializing linguistic difference.
