Rastafari, the Transnational Archive, and Postcolonial Caribbean Intellectual History

This essay argues for an approach to postcolonial Caribbean intellectual history that moves beyond the national archive to rely on a globally dispersed archive. It uses Rastafari repatriation to Tanzania to highlight the intellectual history of the movement and to demonstrate the extent to which the repatriation created a transnational documentary trail with a set of archival imperatives that renders the national archive insufficient for the reconstruction of postcolonial Caribbean intellectual history.

Southern Processes of Planetary Urbanization in Hartford

Chapter one examines historical processes of urbanization, with the focus on Hartford, seen from indigenous, postcolonial, Caribbean and African/African-American re-mappings of its metropolitan geographies. The chapter thus applies global South ideas to an examination of planetary urbanization in an urban area conventionally located in the global North. It argues that southern concepts are highly relevant to understanding and remapping Hartford as a global urbanism. Developing an historical geography from indigenous, postcolonial, and southern angles gives opportunities for detailing the specificities of planetarizing processes. Scholars need to look at longer-term processes producing planetary urbanization from elsewhere, to erase blind spots that universalizing theorizations produce. Here, this means rethinking the historical geography of indigenous peoples in the region, slavery, and labor migration.

Black Carcerality and Emancipation in Postcolonial Jamaica

In 2017, the Jamaican government communicated to the populace its intention to introduce the National Identification System (NIDS), which would house biographic, biometric, and demographic information. Following the announcement, NIDS became engulfed in controversy. Deep suspicions arose about the government’s desire to provide each citizen with a unique identification number and secure biometric data. For some, the introduction of identification numbers was read as an apocalyptic reference to the Mark of the Beast, a sign of those who worship the anti-Christ, as detailed in The Book of Revelation Chapter 13. For others, such as those who protested in Kingston’s Emancipation Park, the move to collect biometric data was taken as an act of warfare against the liberty of the Jamaican people. What is at stake in a post-slave and postcolonial Caribbean society with the merging of the body and technology predicated on state-legitimized techniques of branding, surveillance, and control? In this essay, I interrogate NIDS as an infrastructure of postcolonial datafication governance (Arora 2016) and one that embodies simultaneously biblical, spatial, and corporeal fears of insecurity in a Caribbean geography that lies in the shadow of the plantation. Moreover, in elucidating the discourses of racialization, carcerality, and emancipation surrounding the resistance to NIDS, I argue for a reading of the Caribbean that positions it as a critical geographic lens through which to consider Simone Browne’s (2015) contention that blackness is a key site through which surveillance is not only practiced, but also creatively resisted. In responding to the call for the decolonization of surveillance studies, this reflection takes seriously what the Caribbean can contribute to our understandings of the possibilities of black emancipation in the present moment of global surveillance.

When Revolution Is Not Enough: Tracing the Limits of Black Radicalism in Dionne Brand’s Chronicles of the Hostile Sun and In Another Place, Not Here

This chapter analyzes Dionne Brand’s poetry collection, Chronicles of the Hostile Sun (1984), and her novel In Another Place, Not Here (1996). While Chronicles pinpoints the misrepresentation of the Grenada Revolution in anti-revolutionary narratives emanating from American imperialism, In Another Place highlights how structures of healing and alternative epistemologies of black radicalism are developed between queer women who are on the margins of both the postcolonial Caribbean nation and the revolution intended to subvert American imperialist forces. Brand’s writing interrogates the black radical tradition in search of a radical feminist politics that can account for gender and sexuality alongside race and class.

If You Just Close Your Eyes: Postcolonial Perspectives on Preaching from the Caribbean

This essay builds on the author’s experiences hearing preaching while growing up in the Caribbean. The author offers an acute critique of the traditional sermon, affirming that “deductive preaching is colonial preaching.” Acknowledging the contradictions common in the Caribbean, where the colonial and the postcolonial clash every day, Jiménez calls for the development of a postcolonial Caribbean homiletic.