Chapter One makes the case for a new way of seeing. Leaning on bell hooks and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s advocacy for an activist type of looking, it sets up some ways we might begin to read against – rather than with – the dominant narratives about disability. This chapter makes the first in a series of connections between classicism and coloniality that will recur in this book, and sees the process of reading bodies for meaning as rooted in colonial eugenics as well as classically-inspired physiognomy. Crucially for the argument of the book, the chapter concludes that reading bodies for meaning is neither a wholly classical nor a wholly colonial practice – and results instead from a particular way of looking back (or a linear inheritance model of classical reception). In closing, it introduces Michael Rothberg’s concept of the ‘implicated spectator’ as a way to return agency to the spectator in an assemblage-thinking model.

Chapter 4, “‘A Wandering Maniac’: Sojourner Truth’s Demonic Marronage” turns to a prophet seldom associated with the Caribbean. Yet Sojourner Truth, who was born in 1797 in the predominantly Dutch Ulster County, grew up in a world shaped by Atlantic empires; steeped in African, Native American, Caribbean, Spanish, Dutch, and French histories; and shaking with the tremors of the Haitian Revolution. Her first language was Dutch, her early spiritual beliefs were African, and her community was influenced by transatlantic and Caribbean channels of trade, labor, and revolution. This chapter examines the energy practices of Truth’s creolized milieu within a broader discourse on Truth’s celebrated mobility, historicizing her fugitivity within a transnational history of female marronage throughout the Americas. This hemispheric history of wandering evokes what Sylvia Wynter has understood as the “demonic grounds” of Black women’s liberation. Suturing the demonic (an energy force that emerges from Wynter’s critique of nineteenth-century physics) with Caribbean practices of marronage (a kinetic practice of flight against the immobilizing energy demands of chattel slavery), Truth, I argue, not only is an Atlantic subject but also expands critical understandings of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Caribbean philosophy and specifically Black women’s energy in the Americas.

This chapter provides an account first of the nature of English literary study in the colonial Caribbean, and then of Caribbean attempts to decolonize the practice in the later twentieth century. It analyzes the evolving ways scholars and teachers have understood the “coloniality” of the practices they inherited, and the different means by which they have attempted to change them. It also analyzes representations of literary study in works of Caribbean literature. It schematizes the decolonization of English literary study into three broad movements. First, it describes attempts to incorporate more material by Caribbean writers on literary curricula after independence. Second, focusing on Sylvia Wynter’s early essays, it describes the incorporation of anticolonial forms of critique in critical method. Finally, it shows how Caribbean scholars expanded the purview of literary studies, incorporating analysis of popular forms including calypso and dancehall. Overall, the chapter asks how scholars in the anglophone Caribbean have understood the task of decolonizing the English literary curriculum and what lessons this might hold for those working both within and outside the Caribbean today.

This chapter examines shifting understandings of the relationship between sexuality as a biopolitical phenomenon and literary practice by focusing on two uses of the concept “biocentrism.” By holding in tension Margot Norris’s use of “biocentric” to capture specifically modernist aesthetics, based on affirming rather than negating the animality of the human, and Sylvia Wynter’s argument that the post-Darwinian, globally colonialist conception of the human is “biocentric,” the chapter examines how the very concepts of “human,” “animal,” “sexuality,” and “literature” are all products of a colonialist episteme. The final section turns to Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s Becoming Human, which productively stages the confrontation between these two, pressuring literary studies to examine how its attachments to the very concepts of “sexuality” and “animality” reveal the coloniality of the field.

This chapter tracks the discourse around race, slavery, and racial Blackness in the Americas from the sixteenth century to the present day, with attention to the way the essay form has responded and contributed to the rise of new multiracial societies and struggles for emancipation and abolition. The author discusses how the work of abolitionist writers such as Lemuel Haynes, Ottabah Cugoano, David Walker, and Anna Julia Cooper has informed the subsequent tradition of Black essay writing in the United States and elsewhere.

The Introduction explains how and why our contemporary context prompts the reinvention of life as conceptualized by Western metaphysics. It theorizes why biopolitical governance should be understood as the real subsumption of life by capital and argues for the importance of speculative fiction as a cultural mode that reflects upon and responds to how biotechnology is remaking life, conceptually and materially. The Introduction argues that we need a new dispositif of personhood that must necessarily be attentive to issues of colonialism and race. Taking up work by Sylvia Wynter, the chapter connects it to Foucault’s discussions of Homo economicus. It concludes by suggesting that the contemporary world can be characterized as a condition of epivitality, the prefix signifying “over, around, and outside of” and thus signaling the blurring of living beings with objectified things in biotechnology and practices of dehumanizing labor.

The conventional account of anglophone Caribbean writing from the nationalist period often tends to focus on male writers. Early articulations of a Caribbean literary tradition overlooked many writers, especially women, who did not fit into the frameworks of canon-builders like Kamau Brathwaite and Kenneth Ramchand. Almost up to the end of the 1970s, Jean Rhys remained the single widely known woman author, while a generation of writers who were arguably closer to changing Caribbean realities were neglected. During the past twenty years, scholarship on Caribbean writing has sought to recuperate these writers and take seriously their contributions, addressing how these might challenge conventional accounts of Caribbean literary cultures and characteristics. The result has been an expanded sense of the aesthetic and political projects of the period – a period marked by significant sociopolitical change in countries increasingly asserting cultural specificities and moving towards political autonomy. This essay focuses on five early anglophone Caribbean women writers of diverse backgrounds: Phyllis Shand Allfrey, Amy Jacques Garvey, Una Marson, Elma Napier, and Sylvia Wynter. While making different aesthetic choices, these authors gave passionate voice to the dominant concerns of their time – in particular the anticolonial struggle, socioeconomic disparities, and racial/cultural identity – as well as articulating issues of gender.

This essay charts key aspects of the development of canonical literary criticism in the English-speaking Caribbean. It argues that a full understanding of the ways in which proliferating critical statements coalesced into a major body of evaluative work across the decades, from the 1930s through the 1970s, needs to account for the diverse and intersecting communicative platforms the criticism relied upon. The burgeoning criticism responded to the blossoming of anglophone Caribbean literature in the post World War II period via print venues such as Bim in Barbados, Kyk-over-al in Guyana, and the Jamaica Journal and Caribbean Quarterly in Jamaica. In addition, during the decades of the 1940s and 1950s, the BBC literary radio programme Caribbean Voices functioned as a platform for the production and dissemination of Caribbean literary and cultural criticism. As such, the development of the critical canon in the anglophone Caribbean is not only the story of intersecting and mutually supportive media, print and electronic, but also the story of transatlantic knowledge flows. The essay therefore proposes that the intersection of print and electronic media and the robust transatlantic knowledge flows call into question, in the contemporary moment, any enduring distinction between those putative binaries that energized so many of the critical arguments of the period, viz. home vs. exile, oral vs. scribal, and folk criticism vs. cosmopolitan practice.

Very little has been written on Anglophone Caribbean theatre (the few publications include work by Judy Stone, Errol Hill, Richardson Wright, Rex Nettleford, and Wycliffe and Hazel Bennett). As for theatre from the French-speaking Caribbean, it also remains an understudied field. A few book-length studies (Bérard, Sahakian, Artheron) on theatre from the French Caribbean (Martinique, Guadeloupe. and French Guyana) have emerged in recent years; however, the extraordinary and rich theatre tradition of Haiti has been almost entirely neglected by scholars and critics of Caribbean theatre. Yet drama, in the form of dance theatre, music theatre, various forms of ritual theatre, political theatre, and national pantomimes, has not only been at the heart of the Caribbean literary and cultural sensibility. The genre in its various forms has played a major role in nationalist movements across the Caribbean, and in attempts at cultural decolonization viewed as indispensable to processes of political and social decolonization. This paper focuses on ritual theatre during the decades of the 1930s to the 1970s in the English- and French-speaking Caribbean, an era in playwriting and staging marked by returns to the Haitian Revolution; major investments in history; ancestral recuperation; politics and traditional culture; and cultural decolonization through the project of rewriting colonial narratives. I argue that ritual theatrical forms, enlisting Afro-derived Caribbean ontologies, reflected the importance of the sacred in affecting the material conditions of existence in the colonized post-slavery societies of the Caribbean.

Scholars such as Ian Smith, Jennifer Rahim, Nadia Ellis, Kezia Page, Rosamond King, and Timothy Chin have debunked the idea that sex and sexuality were either peripheral to or absent from the concerns of writers of the 1920s to 1970s. An examination of the sociocultural and literary-discursive mores that may have shaped the codes by which writers and critics addressed sexual issues enables an important re-evaluation of the relationship between literary works and the politics of respectability and heteronormativity often associated with the anglophone Caribbean. This examination attends to treatments of sex and sexuality that engage with nationalism, social status, queer desire, and cultural identity, and considers whether, how, and why the literary representations shifted at different points during this period and among different language traditions.

This chapter provides an overview of the volume’s purposes and describes why various chapters and critical perspectives have been included in it. It connects the wider project of various ways of thinking “after the human” to the inadequacy of western liberal theoretical perspectives in the face of contemporary challenges: climate change, growing economic inequality, ongoing injustices originating in colonialism and racialization, and espeiallly new developments in science and in STS scholarship that undermines distinctions once made between humans and other organisms, and between organisms and manufactured systems. It explains that the “post” of posthumanism has a range of meanings to different research communities, and argues that it is important that the volume collects perspectives that do not all align with one another, given that dissatifcation with “the human” can be traced, by multiple pathways and to multiple conculsions, to its false claims for universality. Posthumanism, thus, does not label a single new way of thinking about agency and being, but describes a process by which negotiate multiplicity within politics of affinity.