The Caribbean is the convergence point for a culture of modernity, forged through histories of slavery, indentureship, migration, genocide, and colonialism. This section offers critical reflections on how this culture of modernity has informed constructions of race and anti-Blackness in popular culture.
We have chosen the spectral as its organizing theme to track how anti-Blackness haunts, lingers, appears and disappears in popular culture and quotidian life. This section is thus dedicated to tracking the spectral qualities of racism and anti-Blackness, by mapping its visual, material, sonic, and cultural apparitions in the everyday.
Essays
The critical essays from performance artists, activists, and academics based in Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago, and Puerto Rico theorize specters of racism as a central part of the lived experiences of black people in the region. Using local vernaculars, each writer critically engages anti-Blackness in family life, social media, experiences of migration, Black organizing, and cultural practice.
Bibliography
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. A team of researchers, students, and artists produced entries in a Zotero library, offering a critical resource about anti-Blackness and popular culture in everyday life. The entries in the library focus on Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, the Bahamas, St. Vincent and the Grenadines from the independence period to today.
Team
