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 […]
Author Archives: The Public Archive
Black Struggle and the New Society: An interview with C.L.R. James
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 04:53:10 PM, January 12, 2010
Evelne Alcide, Seisme (Earthquake), 2010. Museum of International Folk Art/Museum of New Mexico. Click links for more information; click image for larger version.
A Decade of Radical Black Reading
Soon after The Public Archive launched in 2010, we began featuring reading lists that, for the most part, appeared under the banner “Radical Black Reading.” To mark nearly a decade’s worth of publication, we’ve culled a number of entries from the lists, focussing on work that in our view deserves more attention while offering some direction […]