...Glyne Griffith This essay argues that the short-lived West Indies Federation (1958–62) was not only undermined by the failure of the regional intelligentsia to comprehensively communicate a narrative of regionalism to the majority of the archipelago’s peoples but also further compromised by the BBC...

...Raphael Dalleo Examining the West Indies Federation during the twentieth century against the backdrop of the US occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934 shows the complex roots of decolonization and helps us understand the occupation as a foundational event for the twentieth-century Caribbean...

...Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel; Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann This essay introduces the special section “Con-Federating the Archipelago: The Confederación Antillana and the West Indies Federation,” which interrogates the literary, intellectual, social, and political imaginaries fomented...

...Jossianna Arroyo This response essay reviews the six contributions to the special section “Con-Federating the Archipelago: The Confederación Antillana and the West Indies Federation.” These key interventions on the Spanish Caribbean Confederation projects in the nineteenth century and the West...

...Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann The West Indies Federation, like the Confederación Antillana from the nineteenth century, was structured by a tension between the dream of a future Pan-Caribbean nation and the prospect of a sovereign archipelagic political body that would exceed the scope of the nation...

...Alison Donnell This essay explores the particular importance conferred on literary expression within a wide range of writings dedicated to understanding and responding to the project of the West Indies Federation. Although federation was conceived, and briefly achieved, as a political expression...

... federation, which took shape in the Anglo Caribbean between 1958 and 1962. I am currently working on a study of these two collective imaginaries as important interrogations of the model of traditional sovereign states. In the case of the West Indies federation, countries including Jamaica, Trinidad...

... the moment during which questions of “women” and “gender” began to emerge on the scene of scholarly, literary, and artistic production. The period ended in 1962 with the dismantling of the West Indies Federation and the independence of Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago. In this essay I lay out three...

... and abandoned its imperial subjects in the moment of liberalization, decolonization would have to overcome both domination and abandonment. In light of this doubled task, we might read Williams’s commitment to the West Indies Federation, his ongoing preoccupation with federal forms after 1962, and his career...

... Quarterly was that of the final winding down of British colonialism in the region, the collapse of the short-lived West Indies Federation, 2 See Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975; repr., New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 3 Ibid., 39. 4 Ibid...

... lead the British colony to independence. Rather than with independence, however, James was preoccupied with the mode of governance that the proposed West Indies Federation would bring into existence. From his perspective, there were two main issues: the nature of the Caribbean state after independence...

... but for the West Indies Federation—which prefaced independence for any of the now separate countries of the British West Indies—and also draws inspiration from countries that were not included, namely, Guyana and Haiti. Monchoachi, in contrast, writes extensively about the importance of Carib language to a creole...

...; the collapse of the West Indies Federation; the meaning of the Cuban Revolution; and the significance of the Cold War and American hegemony in the region and the world—as well as the terms for theorizing, conceptualizing, and explaining these and other developments—compelled intellectuals to address...

... Jossianna Arroyo, “Future Impossible Communities,” Small Axe , no. 61 (March 2020): 102. The Small Axe special section “Con-Federating the Archipelago: The Confederación Antillana and the West Indies Federation” was guest-edited by Yolanda Martínez–San Miguel and Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann; see Small...

... connected view of liberation and solidarity, one made evident by his own itinerary across the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, and North America. The historian Robert “Bobby” Moore, who was Rodney’s high school history teacher, recalled a lively debate on the West Indies Federation in June 1960 at which Rodney...

... affiliations and unity through a politics of compassion and against empire. As Ángel López-Santiago suggests in a recent article, we can recapture the genealogy of the Caribbean (con)federation, including the West Indies federational project, as a way of building new “sovereignties” in the region. 28...

... for federation or even outright “union” with the British West Indies. 9 From the Canadian perspective, these efforts were mostly about securing commercial advantages and a ready source of cheap labor, although as Hastings cogently argues, they also appealed to the fantasies of imperial expansion that lay...

... Republic; and in the early Antillean Federation; as well as on the British Caribbean colonies; later the newly independent countries in the West Indies Federation; the French Caribbean islands Martinique and Guadeloupe, still under France’s administrative, political, and economic...

... of the People’s National Party. In 1958 he was unsuccessful in contesting the St. Andrew constituency in the Parliament of the defunct West Indies Federation. Robinson served on the executive of the PNP and was the attorney general when the PNP won in 1972. During the election campaign in July 1959, Leacroft...

... for development and welfare in the West Indies, had produced a broadcast series on the movement, in which she described the WI movement’s model as a valuable initiative likely to “produce results.” 30 After 1944, prominent members of the WLC—and arguably the WLC itself—were absorbed into the new federation...