CR: The New Centennial Review

Introduction

2022-09-28T07:54:22-04:00

This introduction has served as our project archive, a map that marks the places, the events, and the trajectory that we have followed and the decisions that we have made along the way as our own effort to tell these stories again and differently in what we feel is one of the most important historical moments for our societies, our communities and our scholarship.

’Breaking and Entering the Colonial Archive’

2022-09-28T08:02:07-04:00

Interview with NourbeSe Philip, author of Zong!

Respite. Quiet. A House of Dreams.

2022-09-27T09:52:24-04:00

The brief narratives below analyze creative-intellectual archives (a poem; charcoal images; essays and ideas and dreams). The paper works through how black creative-intellectual texts are entangled with what Hazel Carby describes as “the broken threads of information”—the tallied numbers—that dominate archive materials (2020). I try to understand how black archives are explosive intellectual-creative texts, signs, and documents that are not primed for fact-finding blackness, but instead offer a set of provisional, layered, and uncontained stories that emerge from the broken threads. In addition to decentering the official archives (pristine tallies and other cherished documents) this piece considers how the black archive functions to narrate black livingness as unofficially expansive and beautiful.

Archiving Black Diasporas:

2022-09-28T03:44:35-04:00

In this essay I discuss the ways in which Saidiyia Hartman, Myriam J.A. Chancy, and Dionne Brand, thinkers and authors belonging to different areas of the Black diaspora, explore the iconic resonance of Black childhood by means of a dynamic strategy that shakes up the racist scripts and topology of the white "patriarchive." In the process they elaborate new ways to make visible, imagine and historicize the optic unconscious of photographs. The images I have selected are drawn from official or personal archives and visually reproduced in the text or evoked by figurative language. These images then serve as the testing ground of a radical theoria (in the etymological sense of viewing as spectator) based on practices of looking that involve shifting acts of viewing and performing and enact a distinct repertoire of embodied memory. Crucially, this work of embodiment engages the memory of/in history and decomposes the egemonic fixity of the pose in order to extract from it the glimpses of a history of the present that are yet to be scripted and yet to be looked at.

Theatre of Ancestral Mediation

2022-10-02T19:54:52-04:00

This essay explores the major themes of the play Chemin de fer, by the Congolese playwright Julian Mabiala Bissila, on the civil war in Congo-Brazzaville. It examines a performance of this play staged by the Haitian director and actor Miracson Saint-Val at the Festival Quatre Chemins in Haiti in 2017. The performance is a kind of palimpsest that allows us to think about the daily tragedies in Haiti through the juxtapositions it makes with the Congolese civil war. The unspeakability of the traumas of war, which is a central theme in Bissila’s text, finds a perfect echo in the performance by Saint-Val, who in turn appeals to the resources of Vodou ritual and the mechanism of identity-metamorphosis within the phenomenon of possession. Using this play as a case study, my essay develops a theoretical framework for understanding the anthropological, aesthetic and political entanglements of African and Afro-diasporic dramaturgies within the context of colonial trauma.

Lose Your Father

2022-10-07T03:13:49-04:00

In July 2019 I attended Nancy Medina’s staging of Caryl Phillips’s first play Strange Fruit at the Bush Theatre in London in the company of the author and a colleague specializing in his work. Medina’s performance left us feeling “assaulted.”

Starting from this experience, my article puts Phillips’s 1981 play Strange Fruit in dialogue with his 2007 essay by the same title and discusses how, in these two works, Phillips dramatizes the relation between knowing and not-knowing in relation to suppressed voices and long delayed moments of revelation that almost feel physical. Strange Fruit, the title of Phillips’s 1981 play and 2007 essay, recalls the piercing song by Billie Holiday about the horrors of lynching in the American South of the 1930s. However, Phillips leaves the American associations of the phrase half-claimed, until his first trip to the American South jolts him into negotiating a Black Atlantic moment of affiliation while unlocking a silent affective archive in his African American host.

‘“Liberty or Death!’: an Archaeology of the Freedom Narrative in the Age of Revolution”

2022-09-27T14:37:42-04:00

Indebted to the Black Lives Matter movement, this essay calls for a radical rethinking of the freedom (fugitive) narrative as the first literary genre to declare that Black lives matter. For about one-hundred and fifty fugitive authors, this was their overriding purpose. Too many scholars have interpreted the genre exclusively in relation to the American autobiographical tradition, often focusing on intertextual allusions aimed at establishing a tropological continuum between the fugitive narratives and life stories like Benjamin Franklin’s or the genre of religious autobiography. It is time to consider other connections closer to home. The genre’s emancipatory impulse springs first of all from within the breast of the author and secondly from below, from the fugitive’s enslaved community. Thirdly and more broadly, it draws upon the revolutionary resources of the circum-Caribbean and transatlantic worlds. Most fugitives looked to Canada, England, Haiti, or Africa as possible freedomlands, since the United States, in spite of its stunning Declaration of Independence, offered no safe haven for them.

Unhousing the archives around the Zong, again: Winsome Pinnock’s Rockets and Blue Lights and Lawrence Scott’s Dangerous Freedom

2022-09-27T05:15:15-04:00

The massacre of the Zong in 1781, during which slavers threw 132 captive Africans overboard, and the historical ramifications of such a horrendous event, have exerted a fascination on the authors of the anglophone Caribbean diaspora. This essay deals with the publication in 2020 of two fictional literary texts covering related grounds: Anglo-Jamaican Winsome Pinnock’s play Rockets and Blue Lights and Trinidadian Lawrence Scott’s novel Dangerous Freedom.

What I want to show in this essay is that beyond their many differences in tone, scope, and genre, Pinnock’s and Scott’s books, coming as they do in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and the Windrush scandal, display epistemological commonalities that are bound to the time of their release, at least in the way they can be read by contemporary readers. Like the fictionalizations of the Zong that came before them, Pinnock’s and Scott’s works contribute to the understanding of the British involvement in the slave trade and slavery by staging historical and visual archives. They also demonstrate the centrality of such documents in any attempt to draw a nuanced picture of the history of the nation, as fragmentary as these archives might be.