External Affiliate Faculty Bookshelf

Among the narratives recounted in Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return, is a story of Rastafari longing for return. This discussion considers that story, told to Brand by a friend, alongside Chronixx’s song “Capture Land” and Nabil Elderkin’s short film, “Captureland.” In reading these works together, I use the concept of “capture land” to engage with the question of the authority of maps. I also examine how these works narrate land, coloniality and the politics of longing and belonging in diaspora and how they each locate Black life in and through different sites and scenes of (dis)orientation.

Virgin Capital examines the cultural impact and historical significance of the Economic Development Commission (EDC) in the United States Virgin Islands. A tax holiday program, the EDC encourages financial services companies to relocate to these American-owned islands in exchange for an exemption from 90% of income taxes, and to stimulate the economy by hiring local workers and donating to local charitable causes. As a result of this program, the largest and poorest of these islands—St. Croix—has played host to primarily US financial firms and their white managers, leading to reinvigorated anxieties around the costs of racial capitalism and a feared return to the racial and gender order that ruled the islands during slavery. Drawing on fieldwork conducted during the boom years leading up to the 2008–2009 financial crisis, Virgin Capital provides ethnographic insight into the continuing relations of coloniality at work in the quintessentially "modern" industry of financial services and neoliberal "development" regimes, with their grounding in hierarchies of race, gender, class, and geopolitical positioning.

Schomburg's writing on the archive over the course of his career demonstrates his continued efforts to articulate the project to which he dedicated his life: Black archives. In the same spirit, this essay looks at two of his works on Black archival theory: "The Negro Digs Up His Past" (1925), which espouses a counterarchival imperative rooted in New Negro ideology, and "Racial Integrity" (1913), which introduces a more radical theory of Black archives that better reflects his own collecting philosophy and archival legacy. Reading his distinct theorizations closely, the essay considers how Black archives navigate the tension between material evidence, belonging, and race on their own terms and in their own "turn."

Mapping literature from Spanish-speaking sub-Saharan African and Afro-Latinx Caribbean diasporas, Decolonizing Diasporas argues that the works of diasporic writers and artists from Equatorial Guinea, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba offer new worldviews that unsettle and dismantle the logics of colonial modernity. With women of color feminisms and decolonial theory as frameworks, Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez juxtaposes Afro-Latinx and Afro-Hispanic diasporic artists, analyzing work by Nelly Rosario, Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, Trifonia Melibea Obono, Donato Ndongo, Junot Díaz, Aracelis Girmay, Loida Maritza Pérez, Ernesto Quiñonez, Christina Olivares, Joaquín Mbomio Bacheng, Ibeyi, Daniel José Older, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Figueroa-Vásquez’s study reveals the thematic, conceptual, and liberatory tools these artists offer when read in relation to one another.

In 1979, the Marxist-Leninist New Jewel Movement under Maurice Bishop overthrew the government of the Caribbean island country of Grenada, establishing the People’s Revolutionary Government. The United States under President Reagan infamously invaded Grenada in 1983, staying until the New National Party won election, effectively dealing a death blow to socialism in Grenada.

With Comrade Sister, Laurie Lambert offers the first comprehensive study of how gender and sexuality produced different narratives of the Grenada Revolution. Reimagining this period with women at its center, Laurie Lambert shows how the revolution must be recognized for its both productive and corrosive tendencies. Lambert argues that the literature of the Grenada Revolution exposes how the more harmful aspects of revolution are visited on, and are therefore more apparent to, women. Calling attention to the mark of black feminism on the literary output of Caribbean writers of this period, Lambert addresses the gap between women’s active participation in Caribbean revolution versus the lack of recognition they continue to receive.