Caribbean Critical Theory

A discussion of Edward Baugh's essay "The West Indian Writer and His Quarrel with History," Perry Henzell's The Harder They Come, and The Wailer's masterpiece album Burnin'.

Kayna, Dalton, and Abby discuss the Creolist's response to Maryse Condé's critical remarks on the créolité movement, thinking through questions of nation, time, and identity.

A discussion of Maryse Condé's essay "Order, Disorder, Freedom, and the West Indian Writer" and the critical interview "Créolité Bites" with Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, with particular emphasis on the relationship between literature, identity, and diaspora.

Charlie, Lisa, and Teagan discuss In Praise of Creoleness and its cultural politics of race, identity, and expression.

Discussion of Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant's 1989 manifesto In Praise of Creoleness, with particular attention to questions of identity, cultural production, and the relation between writer and reader.

Discussion of Kamau Brathwaite's poetics and poetic praxis with Teagan, Kayna, and Lisa.

A discussion of the relation between orality and aurality in Kamau Brathwaite's poetics and poetic praxis.

A discussion of Wilson Harris' work with Mary Catherine Contreras, Twanna Hodge, and Christin Washington.

A discussion of two late essays by Wilson Harris on creoleness and the imagination, with particular emphasis on how they ask us to rethink and recalibrate our language of identity.

Abigail, Twanna, and Charlie discuss the intersections between the work of Glissant and Benítez-Rojo.

A discussion of Glissant's and Benítez-Rojo's conceptions of the archipelago, chaos, and the implications for an ethic of globalized aesthetics.

A discussion of Glissant's and Walcott's work, specifically the opening pages of Poetics of Relation and the poem "The Sea is History."

Reflections on Derek Walcott's 1977 poem "The Sea is History" and the opening sections of Édouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation, with emphasis on history and identity in relation to the Middle Passage and its catastrophic loss.

Kayna, Charlie, and Christin discuss V.S. Naipaul's Middle Passage and two essays by Derek Walcott, "The Muse of History" and "The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory."

A discussion of V.S. Naipaul's The Middle Passage (1962) in relation to Derek Walcott's "The Muse of History" (1974) and "The Antilles" (1992), focused on how Naipaul's melancholia structures his imagination of West Indian history and how Walcott's meditations on paternity and fragmentation reconfigures that imagination.

A discussion of two essays by Sylvia Wynter: "Toward the Socigenic Principle" and "Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom"

A discussion of Sylvia Wynter's work and its extension of Fanon's key insights, with particular emphasis on her essays "Toward the Sociogenic Principle" and "Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom."

Lisa, Abby, and Teagan discuss the significance and meaning of Frantz Fanon's 1952 book Black Skin, White Masks.

A discussion of key themes in Frantz Fanon's 1952 text Black Skin, White Masks, with particular attention to the function of language, sociogeny, and antiblackness in conceiving the possibilities of world-making.

A discussion of René Ménil's writings on surrealism and Caribbeanness, with particular focus on his essays from the early 1940s in the journal Tropiques.

A discussion of René Ménil's essays from Tropiquesand their vision of a poetics of Caribbean identity and life.

Reflections by Kayna Richards, Christin Washington, and Mary Catherine Contreras on Suzanne Césaire's essay on Surrealism.

An examination of Suzanne Césaire's essays for Tropiques on surrealism and Frobenius' notion of civilization, with particular attention to how those essays establish the conditions for a possible poetics of the post colony.

A discussion of Aimé Césaire's 1945 essay "Poetry and Knowledge" and 1956 essay "Culture and Colonization," with particular focus on how the poetic word functions as an anti-colonial intervention.