Building on Robin D. G. Kelley's (1998) argument that hip hop constitutes a form of play-labor for working-class black youth, this article argues that the creation of hip hop as a form of racialized play-labor in the 1970s constitutes an Afro-diasporic labor regime and can best be understood as such when located within a specific period of racial capitalism in the United States characterized by a low demand for formal black labor. Accordingly, this paper argues that the emergence of hip hop in the South Bronx can be explained by the way in which several social-political factors dictated by the needs of the world economy converged with the resistance and labor of black people in the United States and the Anglo-Caribbean in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Faith Smith's analysis, in Creole Recitations, of the nineteenth-century scholar John Jacob Thomas's often contradictory allegiances offers us a way of reading the counterintuitively parallel career of the poet Eric Roach a century later. Roach is the subject of Laurence Breiner's monograph Black Yeats: Eric Roach and the Politics of Caribbean Poetry (2008). The positions Smith and Breiner ascribe to Thomas and Roach, respectively, articulate an enduring Caribbean contradiction between an aspiration to erudition on the one hand and the urgency of self-representation on the other. This essay argues that by obscuring the full range of Thomas' positions, which Smith's study so fully recuperates, and denigrating those same positions in Roach's work, which Breiner's study resuscitates, nationalist elites obfuscate their own connections to the full range of colonial and nationalist values by which they, too, have been influenced.
Although André Schwarz-Bart's first novel, Le dernier des justes, was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1959, the novel and author remained in the margins of 'canonized' Shoah literature. Numerous readers and anthologies exclude the francophone Polish Jewish author who turned to the African diaspora as a parallel universe to write about the haunting specter of the concentration-camp universe and Auschwitz. In this article, I will demonstrate how two of the most prolific and talented young African-American novelists and critics have 'borrowed' from this tour de force (without openly admitting it). John Edgar Wideman and Caryl Phillips write back, in various ways, to this neglected masterpiece. Both have recognized in this pioneering cross-racial approach the 'multidimensional' memory connecting black and Jewish diasporas. Indeed, André Schwarz-Bart intertwined all of his (auto-) fictional writing with the traumas suffered by black (Caribbean) people. It is, therefore, all the more problematic that this writer in the margins has been doubly excluded: almost absent in 'Holocaust Studies,' he remains 'silenced' in the francophone Caribbean realm by novelists and critics of the post-Négritude movement (Chamoiseau and Confiant, Glissant). This deception left the author shattered and hollow, like his main protagonists, Ernie Lévy from The Last of the Just, Mariotte in Un plat de porc (1967), or Solitude from La mulâtresse Solitude (1972), as he confesses in his posthumous 'circumfession/testament' L'Etoile du matin (Morning Star, 2009).
This essay examines C. L. R. James's relationship to the heroic and inspiring arc of labour rebellions that swept the colonial British Caribbean during the 1930s. The essay begins by discussing James's 1932 work putting the case for West Indian self-government, The Life of Captain Cipriani, and its generally positive reception in the Caribbean. We then turn to the 'outbreak of democracy' represented by the Trinidad general strike in 1937 and James's attempt to rally solidarity with this and subsequent rebellions elsewhere while in the imperial metropole itself as a leading member of the International African Service Bureau. Finally, this essay stresses how the Caribbean labour rebellions themselves, with their demonstration of the 'modernity' of the mass of working people in the West Indies and apparent vindication of the Marxist theory of permanent revolution, played their part in the shaping of James's majestic The Black Jacobins.
This article argues against the long-standing penchant to interpret the architecture of enslaved and free Africans in the Americas as evidence of West African cultural survivals. Conversely, this article reflects on the recent practice of repurposing amortized and discarded shipping containers to suggest that the earliest generation of free blacks in Jamaica similarly erected creative architectural responses to the intense pressures of colonialism. These buildings represent strategies by free blacks to fashion a way of life with limited material availability, shaped by intensive climatic conditions and oppressive racial injustices.
Using theories of performance geography, the author considers how black music and dance, especially the slave ship dance Limbo, create an urban counter-culture that evokes historic transcultural experiences of the Middle Passage, space, and modernity. Social theories of scholars including Michel Foucault, Paul Gilroy, and Catherine Nash are considered. Other topics include cultural geography, the Maroons of Jamaica, and dance customs of Trinidad. Interrelationships between performances at the Dancehall in Kingston, Jamaica, Blues music, and South African Kwaito music are explored.
Apart from the fact that it is one of very few book-length studies of a Caribbean-based British Caribbean black intellectual from the nineteenth century, and one of even fewer written by a literary studies scholar, Faith L. Smith's Creole Recitations stands out because of the light it sheds on the mechanics of anglophone Afro-Caribbean intellectual formation, self-representation, and epistemology posited in newspapers, nonfiction books, and speeches produced in the Caribbean during this period. This article is a reading of a conceptual thread that runs through Smith's book—the ways in which the approaches to transnational engagement embedded within English colonialism are at once accepted, interrogated, or utilized by Caribbean public figures in the nineteenth century. As such, Smith's book provides a way for us to situate modern Caribbean studies within an intellectual genealogy and a model for contextualizing the issues, experiences, and approaches that began to be highlighted with the advent of postcolonial studies.
Faith Smith's Creole Recitations offers a feminist critique and compelling alternative to the dominant narratives of Trinidadian and black nationalism. Smith's analysis of Thomas's participation in the anglophone Caribbean public sphere of the late nineteenth century makes visible that already in the 1870s, Thomas defined creole identity as normative and national in part by contrasting it to Indian and other ethnic identities. Smith illuminates the significant role women and womanhood played in the construction of creole identity and respectable middle-class nationalism. As importantly, Smith offers 'recitation' as a model for understanding social and cultural formation in the Caribbean. In contrast to the long-held view that recitation was necessarily an alienating act of mimicry, Smith reveals that recitation functioned as a creative process used both to resist and to appropriate colonial discourse. Through it, Thomas and other Afro-Caribbean intellectuals shaped the perception and material reality of their individual, ethnic, and national communities.
This essay uses the three interlocutors' reflections to return to Creole Recitations, and to reconsider Thomas's nineteenth century as an arena for thinking about Caribbean male intellectuals' self-fashioning and desire, diaspora and degeneration, the sexual politics of creolization, and what it means to think of the period as merely preceding the anglophone Caribbean's important political and cultural developments.