States of Freedom: Freedom of States Symposium (2010)

ABSTRACTS

FREE TO BE A SLAVE: SLAVERY AS METAPHOR IN THE AFRO-ATLANTIC RELIGIONS

Lorand Matory, Chair: African and African American Studies, Duke University

African-diaspora scholars and lay people tend to represent “resistance” and the desire for “freedom” as the founding principles and enduring essence of black New World identities. Yet many of the religions that we allegedly “retain” by dint of “cultural resistance,” as well as many that we “freely” choose, configure human relations to the divine in images of un-freedom, representing gods as monarchs, feudal lords, masters and shepherds, while characterizing worshipers as subjects, slaves, and sheep. This presentation surveys the well-d but taken-for-granted images of enslavement at the heart of Afro-Brazilian, Afro-Cuban, Haitian and Black North American religions that employ slavery as a sacred metaphor of proper personhood, personal efficacy and moral rectitude.
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ENGAGING THE CRISIS OF CONTEMPORARY CARIBBEAN POLITICS

Rupert Lewis, Professor: Dept. of Government, UWI Mona

This paper argues that the focus in the Caribbean region and its Diaspora ought to be on the construction of a politics of popular participation and engagement on which basis meaningful discussion of civil society and governance can take place. Corrective interventions in the region’s politics have invariably derived from the development of social movements which give rise to new ways of thinking and practicing politics. The role of the political imagination cannot be underestimated in the struggle to transform political institutions that have atrophied since the period of independence and no longer fulfill their original mission. In this regard the work of the political imagination of ordinary people is critical to the vitalization of political life in the region.
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G.K. LEWIS AND REFLECTIONS ON SOVEREIGNTY IN THE CARIBBEAN CONTEXT: FROM COLONIAL NATIONALISM TO THE PRESENT DAY

Jessica Byron, Department of Government, UWI-Mona

G.K. Lewis, in most of his work, including The Growth of the Modern West Indies, Freedom and Power in Puerto Rico, Main Currents in Caribbean Thought, and Grenada: The Jewel Despoiled, reflected extensively on the concept of sovereignty and its import for territories in the Caribbean Basin. He dwells on the social and political stagnation of many Caribbean societies in the 19th and early 20th centuries, stuck in the “ennui of colonial existence”. He regards the social and psychological legacies of colonialism as the most damaging aspects and views political independence as essential for beginning the process of constructing new, healed, more organized societies.

This paper aims to explore and reflect on Lewis’ thoughts on sovereignty in the Caribbean, using this as a platform to examine more broadly Caribbean understandings and actual experiences of sovereignty, particularly since the mid-1900s. These are set against the backdrop of decolonization in the global context, the consolidation of a globalized economy and the evolution of the meanings of sovereignty on the international plane as well as in the national context. Lewis’ analysis of historical events will be juxtaposed against more contemporary developments as the paper endeavours to place his insights in the context of our ever more complex present-day political settings.
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INDEPENDENT THOUGHT AND DECOLONIAL FREEDOM: THE LEGACY OF SIR LLOYD BEST

Walter Mignolo, Professor: Romance Studies and Literature, Duke University

Sir Lloyd Best argued that freedom requires independent thoughts. The formula for his argument was ¨Independent Thought and Caribbean Freedom.” About a decade after his formulation, another Caribbean intellectual José Luis González, from Puerto Rico, concluded his passionate and classical short essays “El pais de cuatro pisos” affirming that Puerto Rican freedom is unthinkable without decolonization. By “decolonization” José Luis González meant something that today we would describe as decolonization of knowledge and of being, rather than “decolonization” as it was understood during the Cold War. Around the same years that Lloyd Best delivered his manifesto, Ali Shariati, the Iranian intellectual who met Frantz Fanon in France and translated Fanon into Persian language, also argued that Islamic freedom required independent thought. There is a common thread connecting these three formulations in spite of their singular local histories and their peculiar temporal and spatial unavoidable entanglement with the West (meaning imperial Western countries since the European Renaissance). The goal of this presentation is to argue that the common thread among them is the claim for and toward decolonial freedom and that decolonial freedom requires a pluri-versal vision of the future and the agency of the global political society.
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STATES OF GHETTO, GHETTO OF STATES: JEAN-JACQUES DESSALINES AND THE SOVEREIGNTY OF WORDS

Deborah Jenson, Professor: French Studies and Romance Studies, Duke University

From the time Jean-Jacques Dessalines first announced “The independence of Saint-Domingue is proclaimed” in November of 1803 to his acceptance of his imperial nomination in the summer of 1805, this first black leader of a New World nation sought to avoid Haiti’s inception in a state of ghetto and as the ghetto of states. This unalphabetized leader strategized the crafting of Haitian sovereignty not least as a literary project, using several Haitian secretaries to flood the newspapers of the Western world with his characteristically fierce philosophy of freedom. As Susan Buck-Morss has demonstrated, the German philosopher Hegel may have had Haiti in mind when he theorized “’Even if I am born a slave, […] still I am free in the moment I will it,’” but Buck-Morss did not specifically note that Hegel had read a mini-anthology of Dessalines’ proclamations, including the full text of the Haitian Declaration of Independence. “We dared to be free when we were not free, by ourselves and for ourselves,” spoke Dessalines. Dessalines claimed that the French had brought the qualifying epithet of “slave” on their own heads by repeatedly subjugating others: “Slaves! …Let us leave that qualifying epithet to the French themselves: they have conquered to the point of ceasing to be free.” He proudly asserted that his own name, Dessalines, had become a motif of horror for “all people who desire slavery.” Dessalines as a political thinker and a philosopher of black sovereignty grappled again and again with the problem of how to remain open to a larger international sphere—one that happened to practice slave ownership, even when outsourced to the tropics—while jealously guarding an all too vulnerable freedom. Whom could he allow into Haitian territory for trade? How could he avoid the ghettoization of Haiti in the face of the French assertion that the law of Nations meant there was no room for neutral commerce with Haiti? Yet the association of Haiti with ghettodom continues to flourish today, more than 200 years after Haiti’s independence.

This ghettoized identity was provocatively explored in the December 2009 “Ghetto Biennale” on the Grand Rue in Port-au-Prince. In that calm December before the earthquake, many who heard proud proclamations about the art biennale being held in the ghetto were taken aback: the Grand Rue at the Western end of Jean-Jacques Dessalines Boulevard (–where Dessalines’ tomb stands in a small gated pocket of splendor), is certainly industrial, urban, “popular,” but it is not typically considered a ghetto. In effect, one could argue that the Ghetto Biennale constructed a ghetto at the same time that it deconstructed its stigma and embraced the ghetto as a new critical and aesthetic love object. The Ghetto Biennale did not venture into the internationally known ghetto of Cité Soleil (Site Soley in Kreyòl). Cité, with more than 300,000 residents, is often treated as a war zone within a country that is not at war, or like a criminal version of a civil zone—an uncivil zone–, where such events as the United Nations Minustah campaign popularly named “Without Pity for the City” are not followed by the prying eyes of the general population. As the work of Mike Davis (Planet of Slums) and other scholars of postcolonial ghettos have shown, slums—more and more connected via cell phones, pirated electricity, and “return to sender” Bush-era prisoner repatriation projects–also have increasingly transnational illicit commercial and ideological networks that have sprung up in the margins of “the daily violence of economic exclusion.”

This presentation segues performatively between Dessalines’ illiterate yet literary attempts to ward off the ghettoization of Haiti among colonizing or slave-holding nations, and visual and anthropological representations of the millennial crossroads represented by Cité Soleil in light of the freedoms, unfreedoms, and quasi- or anti-states built on the margins of constitutional zones.
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WANTED: HAITIAN GOVERNMENTS IN SEARCH OF A NATIONAL STATE

Jean Casimir, Professor: History and Romance Studies, Duke University

From the arrival of the Europeans on the island and most particularly from the end of the Seven Year War to the present days, the series of governments administering the western part of the island of Haiti have been investing most of their coercive resources to implement their laws and rules. In as much as the monopoly of public violence defines a state, one is inclined to think that the tasks of the Conquistador have not been completed up to now and still requires constant reform and boosting of the military. While one may argue that external forces were not favorable to a strong political structure during the XVIIIth and XIXth centuries, the same cannot be said from 1915, when the United States Occupation of Haiti achieved total and absolute control of the state apparatus and kept there after a watchful eye on its developments. Unfortunately state power does not breed rights. One then wonders, living aside the Spanish occupation and its genocide, what keeps this rather diminutive population away from the grasp of the state for such a long period of time, under such diverse political administrations and in the middle of the Caribbean Sea.
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“SO MANY SCHEMES IN AGITATION”: BRITISH NEGOTIATIONS WITH HAITIAN LEADERS, 1804-1805”

Julia Gaffield, Department of History, Duke University

On January 1, 1804, General Jean-Jacques Dessalines issued the world’s second formal Declaration of Independence, announcing the founding of Haiti. Scholars often focus on the international “quarantine” of Haiti because Atlantic World states and empires were slow to officially recognize Haiti’s independence as legitimate. The overt challenges that Haiti presented to international systems of colonialism and slavery-based labor could not be ignored. However, my research shows that other colonial empires did not automatically stigmatize the new republic and that a diversity of opinion and action followed Haitian independence. On a recent research trip to Kingston, Jamaica, funded by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Duke University, I discovered a set of documents that emphasizes the complexity of international relationships in the early nineteenth century. In the early months of 1804 Governor George Nugent of Jamaica sent a representative, Edward Corbet, to negotiate a trade agreement with Dessalines. These negotiations did not lead to a formal treaty, but the correspondence between Nugent, Corbet, Dessalines, and other British officials highlight the complexity of international political-economic strategy in the early nineteenth century. Governor Nugent’s papers include correspondence as well as reports of state and military affairs in Haiti. Using this set of documents, this paper will analyze the diplomatic negotiations between a British colony and a black republic in the context of colonialism and race-based slavery. After the end of French Empire, Haitian leaders sought out relationships that would sustain their independence; the sources related to these negotiations highlight the flexibility of socio-racial ideologies in the context of international competition and political-economic strategy. Furthermore, these documents highlight that Haitian leaders did not perceived their situation as desperate and that they negotiated with confidence.
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POWER AND ITS SUBJECTS: ‘GOOD’ GOVERNANCE DILEMMAS UNDER CONTEMPORARY GLOBALIZATION PROCESSES

Michaeline A. Crichlow, Professor: African and African American Studies, Duke University

Mine is a relational and intertextual study, whereby I trans/position one place, over, through and against each other in an analysis of struggles over place, and territory playing out within three countries, namely, Fiji, The Dominican Republic and South Africa. I wish to explore the quest for citizenship and the expression of citizenness that takes places between state institutions and citizen/subjects and among them in non state spaces. These three territories exemplify a violent reworking of border lines that are being reconfigured under contemporary globalization processes. These border lines are spatially related geographically, but as well, to the normative locations of particular bodies deemed difficult and profane by narratives of nation and nationality-those bodies constituted as excess by fractured state institutions of rule. In Fiji and South Africa, two reverse processes are occurring. In the former, a militarized state struggles with traditional chiefs embodied institutionally in the Great Council of chiefs and the military junta which in its reconfiguration of citizenship seeks to diminish their authority. In the case of South Africa, the Traditional Authorities seem to be once again poised for exercising rule in the countryside in a version of Mamdani’s bifurcated state, after their end seemed predestined in the post-apartheid period. And in the D.R. after violating its own constitution to prove Haitian-Dominicans, or simply (unwanted) Haitians and therefore dispensable denizens, its newly revised constitution, now legalizes a practice, that could facilitate a mass deportation of Dominican born and undocumented individuals from La Republica. How can we read these exercises of power ultimately as the actions of defensive states channeling a virulent biopolitics in the name of creolized versions of ‘good governance’ the latest mantra regulating state practices for the advancement of programs of deregulation.
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SOVEREIGNTY FOR SALE: THE CHINA-TAIWAN DIPLOMATIC TUSSLE AND THE POLITICS OF MATERIALISM IN SAINT LUCIA (CONSEQUENCES FOR CARIBBEAN DEMOCRACY)

Tennyson S.D. Joseph, UWI- Cave Hill

In 1997, the Saint Lucia Labour Party (SLP) broke diplomatic relations with Taiwan in exchange for relations with mainland China, reversing the foreign policy stance which had been adopted by the United Workers’ Party (UWP) since independence in 1979. In response, following the 2001 General election, the victorious UWP effectively expelled the Chinese by re-establishing diplomatic relations with Taiwan. This development followed closely upon widespread allegations of Taiwanese involvement in the 2001 election and witnessed a heightening in the visibility of Taiwan in the political life of the country. Whilst the consequences of the shift from China to Taiwan has been most directly witnessed in Saint Lucia, the diplomatic tussle between China and Taiwan has been witnessed in Grenada and Dominica, and remains a contested issue in St. Vincent and the Grenadines and St. Kitts and Nevis. This paper examines the implications of the diplomatic wrangle between Taiwan and China for St. Lucian democracy. It addresses the question of the meaning of sovereignty, with particular emphasis on the democratic aspects of that concept. The paper locates the problem of “sovereignty for sale” in the materialist politics of Saint Lucia and identifies the emergence of the specific aspects of the China Taiwan conflict as part of the Caribbean’s response to a new global economy which challenges the old post-colonial model and to which the region is seeking to adjust itself.
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POSTCOLONIAL CARIBBEAN SOVEREIGNTIES: RE-THINKING DIASPORA, MOBILITY AND CITIZENSHIP

Susan P. Mains, Department of Geography and Geology, UWI-Mona

The concept of sovereignty is frequently depicted as the authority and autonomy exerted by a nation-state over the political and economic realm of a delineated social body, in a way that (ideally) matches public sentiment and a sense of “belonging” with a state apparatus able to effectively enact systems of representation and policing (e.g., through legal frameworks, modes of education, electoral processes and national arts institutions). Inherent in this notion of “legitimate” power is an overt expression of spatial and place-based identities, particularly in relation to the idea that sovereign authorities have an innate right to oversee a specific territorial realm and those who are directly linked to it (e.g., citizens). This concept of sovereignty—and related notions of citizenship—are complicated, however, by diasporic and postcolonial experiences of place and mobility.

In the context of Jamaica, growing political attention has been paid to members of diaspora communities in the US, Canada and the UK—particularly in relation to (potential) electoral participation, remittances, community outreach, economic and civic leadership. This paper explores the opportunities and challenges raised by discourses of citizenship, sovereignty and freedom in relation to the ways in which diaspora identities are “placed” and strategically mobilized. In many ways, dominant concepts of sovereignty and citizenship rely on the notion of (socially and physically) “bounded” spaces and identities. Caribbean diaspora communities challenge this latter idea by being a part of—and beyond—traditional boundaries of the nation-state. Indeed, due to their transnational, trans-scalar, and dynamic nature, diasporas can be viewed as an integrally creolized nexus of social and spatial relationships. These are relationships that offer the potential to develop postcolonial sovereignties which recognize and move beyond the limitations of nationalist infrastructures and ideologies, in a context through which sovereignty may emerge as an ongoing negotiation of powers rather than a representation of absolute control.
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THE POETICS OF FREEDOM AND THE FREEDOM OF POETICS

Elizabeth Walcott- Hackshaw, Senior Lecturer: French and Francophone Literature, UWI- St Augustine

In his most recent work Universal Emancipation: the Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment (2008) Nick Nesbitt, explores “the many ways in which the Haitian Revolution, an ocean away from Europe, both was inspired by Radical Enlightenment ideas and, in turn, fundamentally transformed this transnational , world- systematic historical process.” Nesbitt argues that although individuals had on occasion imagined (emphasis mine) universal rights as a pure abstraction, no society had ever been constructed in accord with the axiom of universal emancipation; in other words Haiti was the first to imagine a society without slavery where there was universal and unqualified human rights to freedom( Nesbitt , 2). This paper, inspired by Nesbitt’s notion of imagination and translation of the abstract, will interrogate the manner in which writers of Haitian origin have explored the trope of freedom in their literary works. The argument will necessarily be informed by both the politics and poetics of freedom. Fundamental problematics of freedom will be debated framed by the following questions: How does the external (politics) impact upon the internal (poetics)? How is freedom imagined on the page? How effective is a metaphorical construction of freedom?
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IMAGINED LIBERTIES: VERNACULAR CONSTITUTIONS, AESTHETIC NATIONS, AND THE PRACTICE OF FREEDOM IN ANGLOPHONE CARIBBEAN LITERATURE

Norval Edwards, Head: Department of Literatures and English, UWI-Mona

From the 1930s to the present, Caribbean literature has consistently explored fundamental issues of freedom, community, and identity within the varied contexts of colonial trauma, postcolonial nationhood, and the vicissitudes of diaspora and globalization. In this light, I examine selected literary works in order to chart the literary imagining of practices of freedom that are often legitimized by cultural scripts – which I term “vernacular constitutions” – that articulate notions of political community, citizenship, sovereignty, governance, and (un)belonging. I deploy an eclectic range of literary and political theories to demonstrate how Caribbean literature often conceptualizes the nation in terms of an aesthetics of performance or cultural tropes that enable us to rethink concepts of freedom and the notion of the political.
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FROM CHAMELEON TO MATADOR AND BACK; TOWARDS A FEMINIST POLITICS OF CHANGE IN MONTERO’S DEL ROJO DE SU SOMBRA, CHAMOISEAU’S TEXACO AND CONFIANT’S MAMZELLE LIBELLULE

Warrick Lattibeaudierre, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures-UWI-Mona

The ever changing socio economic and political scene has called for more cunning means of survival for women as they negotiate a highly patriarchal context. The conditions in which women’s function require them to disguise themselves in one context while overtly revealing their actions in another. Of greater interest is the ability of women to simultaneously execute these seemingly contradictory roles ultimately subverting the system in which they find themselves. Our chameleon trope is used to reflect the multiple and subtle camouflages employed by women to negotiate a survival while our trope of the matador examines women as authoritative forces. We also seek to examine the dynamics responsible for the shift from our trope of chameleon to matador and back as presented by the above authors in their respective novels.
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CARIBBEAN-AFRICAN RELATIONALITY, OR, REMAINDERS OF FORMAL AUTONOMY

Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi, Assistant Professor: Département d’études anglaises- Université de Montréal

This paper is culled from a larger project in which I examine transnational poetics of a practice of life writing in which writers, activists, and scholars from the African diaspora formulate a post-national drive for alternative modes of solidarity beyond the framework of nation-state. In these narratives, writers use memories of slavery reflexively to assess how the concrete constraints of real politics have shaped the outcomes of post-emancipation and post-independence futures. By juxtaposing the imaginaries of national entities, within which they are engaged in search for autonomy, to outer-national imaginaries, such writers excavate historical relations between diasporic populations in order to rethink the possible horizons within which to articulate freedom under the pluralizing forces of a global neoliberal order and site-specific political impediments. I am especially concerned with African writers, such as Wole Soyinka, Ayi Kwei-Armah, Chinua Achebe and Peter Abrahams, who reroute their interrogations of the meanings of post-independence political, economic and cultural freedom through an encounter with the search for autonomy in Caribbean societies…
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REVISING THE DELINKING STRATEGY: IS THERE A CARIBBEAN MODEL, OR, CAN LESSONS BE LEARNED FROM CLR JAMES AND WALTER RODNEY?

Kenneth Surin, Professor and Chair: Literature Programme, Duke University

In a recent book I took up and revised the strategy of delinking advocated in the 1960s and 70s by the theorists of uneven development (Samir Amin most notably). The primary consideration for me was to ‘update’ the strategy to take into consideration the emergence of financialization on a global scale. While this book made some recommendations for the form of the state able to implement this delinking strategy, it did not proceed beyond the level of a conceptual explication. My aim in this presentation for the Kingston conference is to construct a more practical and specific model for a delinking strategy that may work for the countries of the Caribbean, reliant as they are on tourism, the extractive industries, specialized agriculture, and in the Anglophone islands the provision of services such as call centers for the US market.

To construct this model, a form of the state that approximates to a city-state will be needed, whilst being able at the same time to belong to a regional bloc. The questions of the scale and functions of this hybrid entity will be addressed.
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GOVERNING TOURISM: REPRESENTATION, DOMINATION AND FREEDOM IN PUERTO RICO: 1949

Richard Rosa, Associate Professor: Department of Romance Studies, Duke University

The paper will explore tourism as a biopolitical strategy in the U. S. commonwealth of Puerto Rico. I focus my paper on the year 1949, the year in which Puerto Ricans chose its first democratically elected colonial governor, and the year in which Conrad Hilton opened the doors to his first, non-mainland hotel, the Caribe Hilton. By analyzing political discourses, advertisements and other contemporary mediatic representation of these two events, I argue that tourism was indeed a new model of colonialism that used the Island as a ground for shaping a project for industrial, colonial (un)freedom in a post-industrial, post-colonial world. It provided a counter-model to the decolonizing model that was going on elsewhere in the undeveloped world. The intersection of democracy and tourism brings forth issues related to representation and governance in the Caribbean.
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FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM: LOCAL GOVERNMENT’S ROLE IN DELIVERING STATES FROM A STATE OF UN-FREEDOM AMIDST GLOBAL TRENDS.

Nyan Whittingham, Department of Government, UWI-Mona

The pace at which globalization has been progressing has increasingly lowered if not eliminated the barriers to state sovereignty. This process is more profound for those states that are classified as under-developed and are in need of a sense of direction toward affording their citizens a greater sense of security. Within this borderless world, the catch word has evolved from governing to that of governance. This is based on the fact that societies have become amalgamated to represent not just citizens of particular states, but also citizens of the global space. Contemporary developing states thus have to manage a diverse and plural society and achieve development amidst more demands, both in volume and diversity.

This presentation is thus inspired by an ongoing study that views local government as the institution that is best positioned and most poised to achieve any meaningful sense of development that can cater to such plurality and diversity. Local government is thus recognized here as having the ability to be the engine that powers states to greater degrees of freedom . The values embedded in discussion about local government are reflective of the values that have for decades, been associated with notions of development, conceptualized here as freedom.
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ABJECT BLACKNESS, HAUNTOLOGIES OF DEVELOPMENT AND THE DEMAND FOR AUTHENTICITY-A CRITIQUE OF SEN’S ‘DEVELOPMENT AS FREEDOM’.

Patricia Northover, Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies, UWI-Mona

This paper sets out to examine the limits of Sen’s paradigm of ‘Development as Freedom” by an interrogation of its critical silences on the structure of violence animating the progress of modern power. I argue that despite Sen’s radical shift to an ontology of capabilities for explaining and assigning states of (human) well being or development, and his move away from a methodological individualism as well as a utilitarian ethics for social choice, his approach is fundamentally compromised by its complicity with an idea of ‘absolute freedom’, rooted in Kantian and Smithian moral philosophy, and measured by the standing of the transcendent figure of a sovereign agency.

Specifically, I contend that Sen’s valorization of freedom depends on an uncanny silence on the founding violence conjoined with cutting the figure of freedom into being. This is moreover reinforced by his myopic presentism on the morphing violence emanating from a dialectic of becoming through this same figure of freedom. Sen’s ambitious project for global social justice and the advance of human development thus founders not so much on the normative fuzziness of values for sustaining choice, nor on the implicit privileging of an ethics of freedom over an ethics of care, but more fundamentally, the fault lines of his projects rests with an obscure yet pernicious dependence on a freedom sustained through hauntologies of ‘abject blackness’ in a politics of ‘mapping the present’ in a modern world. Moreover, the continued presence of such an hauntology in the present, tracked through the figure of transparency or freedom in the processes and projects for development, reflects the global shadows of a fetish of place, that is, a contingently racialized modern philosophy of place, which radically disables Sen’s efforts to sustain an authentic relation to the present.
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‘INFORMAL CITIZENSHIP’ – CONCEPTUALIZING EXPRESSIONS OF FREEDOM IN CONTEMPORARY DEVELOPING SOCIETIES

Eris D. Schoburgh, Department of Government, UWI-Mona

This paper examines the concept of informal citizenship as an outcome of socio-political relations within the post-modern era which are trending towards greater degrees of normalization and individualization in response to the high levels of ambiguity and uncertainty that characterize the human experience. These socio-political tendencies are made more complex with the onset of globalization with consequences in a “new politics of identity” in which there is a rejection of institutionalized rules and norms. Through social theorizing the paper offers the construct of informal citizenship as a manifestation of individual self-determination in contemporary developing societies. Using the socio-economic experience of the Jamaican body politic, the paper explores some of the values that are held dear and the extent to which these values are validated through one’s social membership of the socio-political collective. From this exploratory analysis it makes generalizations about interpretations of freedom.
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SPACES OF FREEDOM AND FREEDOM OF SPACES

April Bernard, PhD: Department of Government, Sociology, and Social Work, UWI–Cave Hill

This paper seeks to answer the question: Who defines the space in which notions of self and other are constructed and reconstructed for women and men of African descent in the African Diaspora? If there exists validity to Audrey Lorde’s statement that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (Lorde 1984, 110), in the quest to challenge oppression and notions of freedom, then African Diasporic women and men must begin by assessing not only the tools but also the space in which they were created.

The concept of space is not limited to two or three dimensional understandings of physical context, location, and environment. The aim of this paper is to explore and discuss types of space that encompass multidimensional aspects of existence. These “free spaces” (a term adopted from Aldon Morris’ work on plantation societies) includes intentionally created inner space, rituals and communities that are not bound by physical proximity but none the less exist and function to shape and transform constructions of self and other.

The paper argues that the shared and blended history of patriarchy, capitalism, and racism has functioned to define the space in which notions of self for African Diasporic women and men have been derived. The concept of “free spaces” and their potential for mobilizing individual and collective action for change will be explored and applied to opportunities for Caribbean women and men to re-define and address inherited ideologies that perpetuate social, economic and spiritual oppression. This analysis concludes with a discussion of the limitations of the liberal and inherited approaches to social change and justice and proposes the use of the concept of “free spaces” as an African Diasporic centered tool for the reconstruction of ideologies, relations, norms, policies, communities and states.
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POLITE VIOLENCE’ AND RASTAFARI’S PEDAGOGY OF FREEDOM”

Jahlani Niaah, Institute of Caribbean Studies, UWI-Mona

The Rastafari movement has been described as one of the clearest voices to have broken the silence on the unresolved issues related to African freedom. To this extent Rastafari has emerged in this time as a principal activist and teacher of freedom and empowerment for the oppressed. Through an engagement of the dialogical framework developed through the Trench Town Rastafari, this paper engages Planno’s idea of “Polite Violence” as a reciprocal method and modality of negotiating African-Jamaican freedom.
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THE ICONOGRAPHY OF FREEDOM AND BONDAGE IN MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY JAMAICAN ART

Veerle Poupeye, Executive Director: National Gallery of Jamaica

This illustrated paper discusses how bondage and freedom have been represented in modern and contemporary Jamaican art. It explores how Slavery and Freedom have been represented in mainstream Jamaican art, with special reference to official monuments such as the Laura Facey’s Redemption Song, Edna Manley’s Bogle and Kay Anderson’s Sam Sharpe Monument. The relationship between these artists’ interpretations will be compared to the historical and other official representations of these subjects and to the popular conventions that surround them, with which they often exist in tension and which has contributed significantly to the controversies that surround such public monuments in Jamaica. The paper also explores how Slavery and Freedom have been represented in the work of contemporary artists, such as David Boxer, Petrona Morrison, Roberta Stoddart, Omari Ra and Khalfani Ra, in ways that are more deliberately provocative and motivated by a range of political perspectives, some of which deliberately challenge the nationalist premises of the official representations. Finally, the paper also discusses the more recent thematic focus on broader and more individual notions of bondage in the work of younger contemporary artists such as Marvin Bartley, Khary Darby, Philip Thomas, Marlon James and Stefan Clarke, which exists in a provocative and at times disturbing tension with the mainstream representations of Slavery and Freedom.
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INCORPORATING: ON CHINESE/TRINIDADIAN CULTURAL PRODUCTION, SPECULATION, AND THE STATE

Sean Metzger, Assistant Professor: English and Theatre Studies, Duke University

This essay constitutes part of a larger work-in-progress tentatively titled The Archipelogics of Belonging. In this project, I examine iterations of freedom in expressive cultural forms from post-plantation island cultures that surround the US. My goal is to complicate assumed ideas about nation and flows of transnational capital that undergird Atlantic and Pacific Rim discourses. Building on my expertise in Asian American and Chinese diasporic studies but extending my focus into the Caribbean and Pacific, I interrogate the easy collapse of Americanization into globalization and think through the ways in which specific locales generate different matrices of racialization (understood as both a political and economic as well as social process) that construct quite different conditions for and articulations of ideas of freedom. I ask how belonging as a form of freedom/ freedom as a form of belonging is performed in relation to the place of “America,” but from an ex-centric perspective. I examine island spaces that are or have been constitutive of the US national space but now have different forms of postcolonial status (e.g., Cuba, Trinidad, Hawaii, etc.). Guiding my study are the following questions: What histories have been occluded in the claiming and dissemination of US-inflected versions of democracy as a generalized notion of freedom? How do belonging and freedom function for populations of US or (formerly) US-occupied soil that do not have access to the supposed guarantees of citizenship in the republic? What sorts of political possibilities have been or can be imagined in cultural productions that center on island spaces? How do transnational circulations of capital shape these cultural productions and how might the productions themselves constitute certain capital? The Archipelogics of Belonging investigates these questions by articulating several logics through which we might differently understand belonging and freedom in relation to (but not necessarily in) the US.

Emerging from this more general framework, I elaborate the logic of “Incorporating” by focusing on the oeuvre of Chinese Trinidadian artist, writer, and dramatist Willi Chen, during the years following the US occupation of Trinidad. Chen is perhaps the best known writer of Chinese descent in the Anglophone Caribbean. Although his collections of short stories have garnered some critical attention, his work with the Trinidad Theatre Workshop remains largely undocumented as does his work in visual media. The few scholars of Chen’s work argue that he offers a unique perspective on Trinidad’s racial dynamics, often through the figure of the Chinese entrepreneur that occupies a privileged position in much of Chen’s creative work. Of course, trade—particularly the traffic in people and the establishment of the plantation system that provided materials for European and, later, US metropoles—is precisely what shaped the Atlantic into the engine of modernity. Within this system, Asian migrant labor complicated, destabilized and sometimes contradicted a black-white social structure. Rather than showing the Chinese as assimilating or sojourning, I hypothesize that Chen’s work demonstrates a different logic of “incorporating.”

The flesh that lingers in the root of the word incorporating is the site through which economic and social adaptation becomes manifest, but the financial dimensions suggested by this term point towards particular relations between the state and individuals that exceed the boundaries of singular bodies-be they nations or people. The complexities engendered in this negotiation of person and collective enable new forms of belonging that shift our understanding of the nation-state and the subject ostensibly appropriate to that formation. My essay demonstrates how Chinese/Trinidadian cultural production facilitates this sort of speculation and outlines the stakes of a critical engagement with more conventional ideas of freedom and belonging.
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EXORBITANCE: TOWARD A POLITICAL AESTHETICS OF INTER-ATLANTIC INSULARITY

Francisco-J. Hernández Adrián, Assistant Professor: Spanish and Latin American Studies, Duke University

Exorbitance is used today as an economic and philosophical notion. But in its seventeenth-century and later usages, it was often a legal and moral concept specifically tied to territorial sovereignty and wealth. Seen from the viewpoint of creolization, the historically situated notion of exorbitance expresses some of the negative dimensions of modern ideas of freedom and justice. In this paper, imaginaries of excess in the Atlantic world affect discourses of circulation, dependence, and excessive deviance or chaos in the Caribbean. Focusing on Cuban artist Tomás Sánchez, I consider exorbitance as a visual trope, and define it as an enabling critical strategy in the works of contemporary artists who reflect on insular environments in global terms. I argue that creolization processes, with regard to notions of modern sovereignty, insurgency, and emancipation, can be examined not as instances of exorbitance, but as its constitutive scenario.
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ICONS AFLOAT: CREOLIZING SEMIOTICS IN CARIBBEAN ART

Marcela C. Guerrero, Department of Art History-University of Wisconsin-Madison

In their famous manifesto—Éloge de la Créolité—Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphael Confiant argued for a créole language that would better serve the voices and identity of Francophone Caribbeans. “Creoleness,” according to the authors, “is not monolingual. Nor is its multilingualism divided into isolated compartments. Its field is language. Its appetite: all the languages of the world. The interaction of many languages (the points where they meet and relate) is a polysonic vertigo. There, a single word is worth many.”1 In this paper I want to argue that the linguistic cross-fertilization process seen in créole language—also called creolization—can also be evidenced in contemporary examples of Caribbean visual arts by applying a semiotic analysis that neatly reflects the shift from structuralist to post-structuralist semiotics. I have identified several recurrent icons in contemporary Caribbean art that abound across the islands; among them the flag, the island, the suitcase, the airplane, the sea, the boat, and even flip-flops. These icons appear in artworks by artists from the different linguistic clusters of islands from the Caribbean basin and are, thus, the basis for a common Caribbean iconography. I want to propose that a semiotic analysis of the visual construction of these multi-media works and assemblages is particularly relevant for the study of post-structuralist semiotics because of the opened and uncontained relationship between signifier and signified in Caribbean art. Visually and linguistically, the link between signifier and signified sets the meaning of these artworks in motion.
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CARIBBEAN FASHION WEEK: CREOLISING BEAUTY IN “OUT OF MANY ONE” JAMAICA

Carolyn Cooper, Professor: Dept of Literatures and English- UWI-Mona

The elitist Jamaican motto, “Out of Many, One People,” privileges racial hybridity as the quintessential marker of national identity. Conversely, populist constructions of Jamaican identity acknowledge the primacy of the African majority. The ‘mixed-race’ ideal inscribed in the national motto becomes the aesthetic standard for judging ‘beauty’ and ‘ugliness’. Beauty contests, for example, become sites of contestation in which competing representations of the face of the nation jostle for recognition. Identifying with marginalized African-Jamaican aspirants who often fail to win these competitions, discontented patrons routinely claim the right to assert alternative models of beauty that challenge the authority of the ‘out of many one’ aesthetic. The emergence of a modeling industry in Jamaica that valorises idiosyncratic style has opened up a space in which black images of beauty take centre stage. Caribbean Fashion Week is the major platform for displaying internationally acclaimed Jamaican models. Showcasing a high percentage of decidedly black male and female models wearing spectacular designer clothes, Caribbean Fashion Week enables multiple readings of the body as cultural text. The permissive modeling aesthetic engenders capricious images of beauty that contest the very conception of the “model” as a mould into which a singular figure of beauty is impressed.