...Donette Francis Jamaican fiction published in the 1960s was fundamentally pessimistic. These writings drew from regional ontologies of religious millenarianism, colonial abjection, and racial damnation, as well as of existentialist philosophies of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, to offer...

... as articulated in José Estebán Muñoz’s work in order to detect an analogous breakdown in Bolívar Echevarría’s influential work on racial modernity. In conclusion, the essay poses a question about the emancipatory potential of abjection by putting Ellis Neyra’s compelling reading of Pedro Pietri’s The Masses...

... haunts the anglophone Caribbean. The focus is on how this haunting is palpable to the criminalized urban poor in Trinidad; yet Black has never simply denoted abjection. From the vantage point of postcolonial Caribbean nation-states founded on anticolonial projects of Black sovereignty, one can see...

... expropriation, labor superexploitation, and (neo)colonial absorption of financial risk. Next, it analyzes antiblackness—understood as legitimating architecture that devalues, distorts, criminalizes, and abjects those racialized as black—as a constitutive feature of racial capitalism. Finally, the essay...

..., beautiful and dignified. Báez's commanding female figure reflects both difference (as per Julia Kristeva) and traces of the abject through her hair-covered body. In another reference to Dominican folklore, with her upper body is covered in abundant lengths of hair, tracing a resemblance to the Ciguapa...

... a mere six months before his death. While a graduate student under his and Josie Saldaña's direction, I shared with him my thoughts on a developing dissertation chapter on Mendieta's early abject performances and curatorial work for the A.I.R. Gallery. I remember framing my project by underscoring that I...

..., ed., Beautiful Ugly: African and African Diaspora Aesthetics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 345. 12 Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 1. 13 Ibid., 2. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 3. 16 I...

.... 13 Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality,” 268. 12 For a discussion of the role of the abject—or abject blackness—as construed through the development imaginary, see Patricia Northover, “Abject Blackness, Hauntologies of Development, and the Demand for Authenticity: A Critique of Sen's...

... name calling constitute what I call the racial abject, a term that designates the visual spectacle of humili- ation and shame occasioned by a person’s skin color as it functions to signify both race and poverty. The racial abject depends on the rhetorical focus of the audience’s gaze...

.... According to these terms, Moïse’s juxtaposition of living and dead not only is a metaphoric contrast but enacts a simultaneous embrace and refusal of the ontology of dispossession and abjection that has been assigned to Haiti and Haitians. It becomes what Sharpe calls “a mode of inhabiting and rupturing...

.... 31 • March 2010 • Michelle V. Rowley  |  3 These historical antecedents hold specific ontological urgency for women in and of the African diaspora. This urgency arises first from the role that humanistic narratives played in the invention of abject blackness and second because...

... biopolitics of fucking with the “fucked-upness” of sex—the gloom, darkness, depression, and devitalism—that is audible on every grimy surface of Tricky and Martina's music ( SB , 187). Jayna Brown has recently revisited and amplified this account of Tricky's abject masculinity, which he styled “brownpunk...

... Chinese Jamaicans as sharing, even in small part, an abject position with poor disenfranchised black Jamaicans challenges historical representations of them as a detached parochial nation within a nation. Lee—poet, actor, orator, playwright, television and radio director and producer, retired ordained...

... glimpses of Khan's grandmother, whom she describes as a silent woman with “no voice and whose existence was exacerbated by a life of poverty.” Her grandmother, exhausted by her abject life of poverty, suffering, and misery, attempted to kill herself and her children in a river. We also learn about an aunt...

... invention than reality.” 12 He occupied in Cuban letters then, as Oscar Montero has proposed, both a central and marginal place. 13 He was, as Francisco Morán has convincingly argued, an abject and liminal figure against which the Cuban literary canon had been formed since the late nineteenth century...

... hurts after fourth hour manually aerating the fishtank. Hey, look! Inside each tiny bubble a City, absolute abject alone (except for the fish.) What must atomic people in bubble cities think of you, oh absent father in the cloying night? You left just like the light. For work...

... abjection. The selection of paintings here provides a small window into Holder’s oeuvre. Though his subjects range from still life to landscape, we focus on his interest in people. Bold and simultaneously tender, these paintings travel beyond the initial seduction of their beautiful lines, self...

... difference, intensifying hierarchies, [and] producing distinct modalities of violence” (30). This accounts for the production of “the indebted man[,] . . . an undisciplined, corrupt individual[,] . . . an abject subject . . . responsible for the failures of the neoliberal project” (31). Grounded...

...” and “unbundling of infrastructure”, and function as filaments of metropolitan connectivity which hop over otherwise abjected and disconnected regions of the world, such as those that James Ferguson has so compellingly described in Africa.4 In the Caribbean, such bifurcated processes of connectivity...

... they were for poor boys of families that squatted on the nearby hillsides, who, it was said, came from the small islands to vote for the Afro-Creole nationalist party. I longed to leave this dreadful place. Up to this day I can’t understand how the signs of abject failure never terrified many other...