There is a present-day tendency to retreat into the realms of dystopia, of catastrophe and disaster, of failed states and fascism, of environmental collapse and economic apocalypse. This tendency is neither wrong nor mistaken. Yet it is often suffocating, only adding to the pressurized dread of the era, offering no antidote to the plague of […]
Author Archives: The Public Archive
Anarchy / Autonomy / Utopia
Posted in Haiti
Tagged anarchism, archive, autonomy, Caribbean, freedom, liberation, libraries, literature, pan-africanism, reading, Trinidad
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The Black Agenda Review: A Manifesto of First Principles
The 2020 U.S. elections seem to be over and much of the world is preparing for a new Biden-Harris administration. So, what now? What changes should global Black communities expect? Our sense is that expectations need to be tempered by the lessons of past experience. Long ago we learned that representation is not a sign […]
Posted in Haiti
Tagged anti-Blackness, anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, archives, blackness, history, imperialism, pan-africanism, racism
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Black Struggle and the New Society: An interview with C.L.R. James
Across three Saturdays in June, 1977, the New York Amsterdam News ran an extended interview with CLR James. At the time, James was seventy-six years old and teaching at the University of the District of Columbia. The interview, conducted by Amsterdam News feature writer Dawad Wayne Phillip, covered the question of Caribbean Federation, the importance […]
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Tagged 1970s, africa, African-Americans, anti-colonialism, Black Jacobins, Civil Rights, CLR James, sovereignty
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Caribbean Workers and Capitalist Geography: An interview with Marion Werner
Geographer Marion Werner’s Global Displacements: The Making of Uneven Development in the Caribbean is among the most important, and easily the most innovative, work of political economy to emerge on the Caribbean region over the past decades. Issued by the excellent Antipode Book Series, the imprint of Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, Global Displacements […]
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Tagged 1937, anti-Blackness, anti-Haitianism, Aristide, borders, Caribbean, Caribbean Studies, coloniality, Dominican Republic, economy, factory, geography, Haiti, labor, neoliberalism, plantation, political-economy
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Revolutions and Revisions: An Interview with Charles Forsdick and Christian Høgsbjerg
In Toussaint Louverture: A Black Jacobin in the Age of Revolutions (Pluto) Charles Forsdick and Christian Høgsbjerg have produced what is arguably the most important biography of Louverture since CLR James’ magisterial Black Jacobins was first published in 1938. Kicking against the contemporary anti-Black and anti-radical revisionism that downplays the historical importance of the revolution while […]
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Tagged 1804, 1938, archives, Black Jacobins, CLR James, Dessalines, Haiti, history, memory, representation, revolution
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Archive of Audio Recordings of Haitian Poets & Writers at the Library of Congress
Dating back to 1943, The Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape at the Library of Congress contains nearly seven-hundred recordings of poets and prose writers participating in sessions at the Library’s Recording Laboratory and at other locations around Spain and Latin America. It also contains seven recordings of Haitian writers. We provide links to those […]
“The lass days of KB and CowPastor Vandal”
[The following letter of protest from the late Kamau Brathwaite was circulating in 2005. It is at once a heartfelt plea for his own plot of land in Barbados and a tragically visionary comment on the future of the Caribbean’s ecology]. Pl circulate this ATTACH (ihope it will open!) aswidely as possible as a contribution […]