Thinking with the Spectral: Anti-Blackness in the Hispanophone and Anglophone Caribbean

Abstract In the Caribbean, where most of the population is of African descent, experiences of anti-Black racism are encoded in social and political hierarchical schemas. These norms and their discourses manifest in ways that are more often felt—experienced—rather than explicitly and externally discerned and defined. It is this haunting, there-but-not-there, undefinable dimension of anti-Black racism that we seek to explore in its modern Caribbean iterations. This gathering of critical essays and resources from the Hispanophone and Anglophone Caribbean speaks to the lived experiences, contemporary theorizations, and popular engagements with specters of anti-Black racism in the region.

In her foundational text, Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom, Caribbean philosopher Sylvia Wynter argues that “the modern phenomenon of race, as a new, extra-humanly determined classificatory principle and mechanism of domination, was first invented” in the sociopolitical and geographic context of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Caribbean.¹ Spanish colonization of Hispaniola, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica in the fifteenth century and British colonization of many of the Leeward Islands, Barbados, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago set the stage for over five hundred years of colonial dominance. As colonial powers sought, principally, to extract wealth from these islands, the mutually reinforced logics of racialized exploitation and capital accumulation set the stage for centuries of plantation slavery across the Caribbean. The “plantation archipelago,” which has been indelibly marked by indigenous genocide and chattel slavery, has given rise to concepts and terms for “mixing” like creolization, hybridity, and mestizaje.² In the more recent political landscape, these terms have taken on a celebratory bent as they serve as “melting pot” euphemisms for modern nationalisms predicated on sanitized regional narratives. Despite the entangled histories that define the multitude of racial and ethnic experiences of the Caribbean, as Aaron Kamugisha reminds us, “similar to Caribbean slave society and economy, anti-Black racism is the generative event of the Caribbean experience.”³ 

In the Caribbean, where most of the population is of African descent, experiences of anti-Black racism are encoded in social and political hierarchical schemas. These norms and their discourses manifest in ways that are more often felt—experienced—rather than explicitly and externally discerned and defined. It is this haunting, there-but-not-there, undefinable dimension of anti-Black racism that we seek to explore in its modern Caribbean iterations. This gathering of critical essays and resources from the Hispanophone and Anglophone Caribbean speaks to the lived experiences, contemporary theorizations, and popular engagements with specters of anti-Black racism in the region. 

All ah we is one / Todos somos negros

Generally, ideas of togetherness, which permeate popular discourse around the region, often fail to question and make visible issues of gender, ethnicity, race, or anti-Blackness, even as they serve to unite Caribbean people through decolonial nationalisms. We can hear strains of this “All ah we is one” sentiment in popular music, including the lyrics of Lord Nelson’s 1999 calypso “One Family”:⁴ 

Bound together, one another
Nothing could separate we from since in slavery
When he building, or she planting 
Everybody helping, no money ent passing
Is tradition on the island 
Nowhere else that I know is like sweet Tobago
When we working or we loving
Is so the whole day long
Going from dusk to dawn
Rubbing shoulder all together
Poopa, gangan, tanty, macomere, pickney
All ah we is one family.

Within nationalist celebrations of diversity, the cultural productions of the lowest classes within each Caribbean nation (almost invariably Black populations) have provided sites for various forms of international and intra-regional unity. However, failed national mottos of surface unity have led to shallow understandings of who “we” are as a region, nation, and individuals. 

This collection of essays by four Caribbean artists, writers, and activists, therefore, seeks to unearth some of the region’s complex histories and shed light on experiences of racialization and its dynamics in the wake of colonialism.⁵ Each piece addresses the urgency of exposing the intangible elusiveness of racism and anti-Blackness. This shifty, ever-changing experience manifests subtly or indirectly, wrapped in “public niceties and politically correct jargon that produces an indescribable sense of paranoia.”⁶ 

In her poems titled “Death,” “Duty,” “Delusion,” “Decisions,” and “Departure,” Jamaican writer and scholar Carla Moore writes about the “unbearable burden of blackness” as one is forced to navigate specters of anti-Blackness in Caribbean life. The complexities of economic class, beauty standards, multiculturalism, and colorism in relation to race in Jamaica make it impossible to earn a livable wage. Carla writes, “The sun is wonderful until you have to work in it / you come here to tan while we sweat in embassy lines hoping to go there and get a job in a/c.” By exposing the sociopolitical differences between what it means to be a tourist versus a Black, working-class citizen in Jamaica, Carla unearths the paradox of loving a country that does not love you back, a place of “impending goodbyes” and transient becoming.

Helen Ceballos, a Dominican immigrant who grew up in Puerto Rico, discusses childhood awareness of race as she experienced racism. Despite the prevalence of ongoing injustice via the logics of racialization, Ceballos highlights how community and family were integral to her development of an ethic of love and resistance against a society that forgets about equality when structures of white privilege are at risk.⁷ In section V of her essay “The Colony,” she highlights the failure of a system that does not support Black lives. Even though anti-discriminatory laws were fought for and passed, capitalism promises a horizon of possibilities that can only be attained through labor. She states, “We are navigating a kind of historical bubble where they ensure we form part of a society with the same conditions. Even white fragility has accused us of reverse racism, of being obsessed with the persecutory idea that we are being marginalized.”  

In “sticky time,” Amir Hall, the Trinidadian artist and writer, describes the paranoia and elusiveness around naming anti-Blackness and racism in the geography of Trinidad. The afterlife of slavery oozes, and the invisibility of power maintains the caste systems that permeate the culture and its relationships to race. Time becomes sticky, “an algorithm to obscure the past,” and clings to the body, generating uneasiness and shame. In Amir’s reflections, anti-Blackness in Trinidad and Tobago is akin to a black hole, transcending and bending time-space, suppressing light—rendering Black people and their oppression invisible while forcing one to learn to love themselves within the abyss of it all.  

“Racism Kills Us” by the activist Ana Belique from the Dominican Republic highlights how contemporary Dominican society has adapted and accepted anti-Black laws imposed by the government. These laws support a social and political sector that develops oppressive and discriminatory campaigns against Black Dominican society, Black immigrants, and Dominicans of Haitian descent on the island. But this racist and anti-Black ideology comes in the wake of many past events, like the Parsley Massacre in 1937, where fifteen to twenty thousand people lost their lives for being Haitian immigrants or Black within the Dominican state. Even though racism and anti-Blackness are visible in many ways, there is a negation of their existence, and, at times, racism is dismissed as an import from the United States. 

Temporalities of the Spectral: Crafting the Zotero library

To illuminate the different temporalities of the spectral in the Caribbean, we tracked how slavery’s legacies haunt cultural production today. These temporalities do not only refer to the ways racism of the past lives in the present, but they also name the distinct time frames that we have used to engage anti-Blackness in the contemporary moment. In addition to the four essays, this forum includes a zotero library. A team of researchers, students, and artists produced the entries in the library, offering a critical resource about anti-Blackness and popular culture in everyday life.  But the starting point of the contemporary moment in the region is necessarily disparate and diverse. Histories of independence in the nations of the English-speaking and Spanish-speaking Caribbean vary. As is the case for other countries in Latin America, like the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Venezuela, independence occurred in the nineteenth century. But for Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, and Guyana, independence took place in the early and late 1960s. For nations such as Antigua and St. Kitts-Nevis, independence came in the 1980s. Due to its ongoing colonial relationship to the United States, Puerto Rico falls outside “legal definitions of either independent nation-states or formal colonies and instead, operates in a state of what Yarimar Bonilla calls “non-sovereignty” and independence is a site of contestation.  ⁸ To account for these complexities, we see the spectral as encompassing distinct and disjunctive, multiple and overlapping temporal moments across the region. And we sought to reflect these complexities in the formation of the library.

The research team focused their entries to the Zotero library on Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, the Bahamas, St. Vincent and the Grenadines from the independence period to today. We included some entries from the pre-independence period to note significant historical actors or events that were crucial to local understandings of race and popular culture. Figures such as the Bahamian actor Sidney Potier, the Guyanese novelist Edgar Austin Mittelholzer, and the Antiguan poet and writer Althea Romeo Mark all engaged race in popular culture in ways that reverberate in the present. When faced with a smaller body of work on race and popular culture in places like Belize, and Antigua and Barbuda, we decided to not limit the entry to a specific temporal period. The temporality of the spectral thus encompasses the ongoing legacies of those who used the popular as a ground for taking up questions of anti-Blackness before and after the formation of the nation-state.

Because independence remains an ongoing site of debate and struggle in Puerto Rico, the entries about the island begin from 1948 when the first general elections took place and Luis Muñoz Marín was elected president. Although anti-Blackness has much deeper roots in the island, during this period, Puerto Rico’s triracial discourse intensified and remains important for understanding specters of anti-Blackness as expressed in popular culture today.⁹  

We also sought to account for how anti-Blackness rearticulated itself during a set of foundational and transformative events in the modern Caribbean. For example, our entries in Cuba focused after the 1959 revolution, wherein the specters of anti-Blackness were reshaped by both the advancement of racial equality and the state’s official silencing of race.¹⁰ This approach also included the changes in the 1990s, which occasioned a renaissance of scholarship on race and increased interest in Afro-Cuban culture and folklore. Such shifts in state policies were crucial to the emergence of Cuba’s hip-hop movement, which remains a voice of Black struggle and racial affirmation today.  Similarly, anti-Haitian discourse is foundational to anti-Blackness in the Dominican Republic, and the Zotero entries focused on the 1970s and 1980s onwards, which followed the assassination of Trujillo in 1961; the US invasion of the island in 1965; and the Dominican exodus to the United States.¹¹ For Venezuela, the resources focused primarily on the 1980s which is one of the earlier periods in the economic and political crisis that have shaped popular culture today.  We chose a similar time period for Grenada to not only account for independence from the United Kingdom, but also the Grenada Revolution, and US invasion in 1983. Specters of anti-Blackness are shaped and reformed by the transformative changes in state policy, immigration policies of the imperial north, and moments of national crisis.

As such, the contemporary moment, as defined in this Zotero library and through the renderings of the authors, necessarily houses different temporalities. The spectral names the present as a disjuncture in a Caribbean whose geographical complexities and racial diversities often defy systems of classification, including normative forms of textuality, representation, and expression. Thus, the experiences of anti-Blackness, understood as spectral hauntings, speak to the intangible, elusive, and often unnamed constant of the shared legacies of racial domination and colonization across the region. This overlapping of experience, time, and space, which is characteristic of the Caribbean region and its entangled histories, undergirds these essays and their readings.

Notes