...Marisa J. Fuentes This book discussion essay addresses critical questions concerning historical methodologies when working with the archives of Atlantic-world slavery. Thinking with Hazel V. Carby’s Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands , the essay considers the power of historical memoir...

...Sandra Pouchet Paquet From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island is an autobiographical/biographical narrative that not only resituates the body of Lorna Goodison's published work in relation to the mother as archetype of female becoming, it also reaffirms the historical trajectory...

...Lauren Derby This essay argues for the utility of fugitive speech forms as primary sources for Caribbean historical research. It seeks to shift the discussion from forms such as autobiography and the memoir to more ephemeral speech forms such as hearsay, rumor, and gossip on the grounds...

... the memoir seamlessly weaves in historical facts. Early in this memoir, Goodison invokes the loss of the hardanga stitch in 1832 that coin- cided with the Sam Sharpe rebellion, signaling that this stitching metaphor is her method of recreating her mother’s family history to ensure that the struggles...

..., their historical presence in the United States situates them closer to the African American experience. 40 This can also be attributed to other Latin American and Spanish-speaking Caribbean migrant/immigrant communities, such as Dominicans. As previously discussed, Cepeda’s memoir underscores the sociocultural...

.... Crossing the distance between there (Haiti) and here (the United States), testing depends on women’s material bodies to be a lieu de mémoire to Haiti in American space. Counter to Nora’s formulation of lieux de mémoire as stabilizing historical memory, Breath, Eyes, Memory suggests not only that what...

..., administrative, or military bureaucratic capacity. To be sure, when considered diachronically the etymological connection between the various historical uses of the term mémoire is clear. My contention here is that the bureaucratic and especially judicial-forensic rhetoric of the revolutionary-era mémoire...

... borrow from three formula- tions of historical memory: Pierre Nora’s conceptualizations of lieux de mémoire (sites of memory Joan Dayan’s notion of “Vodou” history and Myriam J. A. Chancy’s concept of “culture-lacune and Édouard Glissant’s outline of a Caribbean “quarrel with history,” which...

..., and objects.”15 As Nora affirms, furthermore, such “lieux de mémoire are fundamentally remains, the ultimate embodiment of a memorial consciousness that has barely survived in a historical age that calls out for memory because it has abandoned it.”16 Glis- sant’s contribution to memory...

...Randi Gill-Sadler This review essay on Laurie R. Lambert’s Comrade Sister: Caribbean Feminist Revisions of the Revolution (2020) considers the narrative and rhetorical strategies that Black women political figures use in their memoirs to represent US imperial presence and violence in the aftermath...

...Lorna Goodison A response to Sandra Pouchet Paquet's and Donette Francis' discussion of Goodison's memoir, From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island Small Axe, Inc. 2010 Reporting Back to Queen Isabella, Donette Francis, and Sandra Pouchet Paquet Lorna Goodison...

... to this social critique, I engage fiction, memoir, and advertising images to explicate textual touristing, focusing on narratives that describe travel or examine tourist behavior. Touristing, a nexus for travel and leisure, encompasses ritualized behavior that fol- lows the colonial script: modern person travels...

... an informed and sustained debate about the present we inhabit, its political and cultural contours, its historical conditions and global context, and the critical languages in which change can be thought and alternatives reimagined. Such a debate we would insist is not the prerogative of any single...

... state of a leading official role in discussions relating to a Centre national pour la mémoires des esclavages et de leurs abolitions, and presents these as further evidence of the drawing of “a definitive line between cultural poetics and proper (‘inherently radical...

... representations of pessimisms that embraced life's absurd futility rather than its abject hopelessness. Reading the corpus of this Jamaican literary archive—twelve novels and one memoir—the author examines the heterogeneous nature of the decade's literary pessimisms, best characterized as a sensibility of radical...

... as an author, publisher, and academic. In Port-au-Prince, Haiti, he established the publishing house Editions mémoire in 1991, which supported the dissemination of writers of Haitian origin to the wider world. Once resident in Montreal, he founded Mémoire d’encrier, a dynamic publisher that celebrated its...

... white, Catholic (or secular humanist) roots, the historical reality is that French identity has never been uniform or stable. Wilks argues that, although Césaire's affirmation of specificity may seem contrary to French republican ideals, her writings suggest a means of addressing the cultural-political...

... that promise redemption. Read this way, the memoir is in line with novels that revisit the past precisely to flush out the terrors of earlier historical moments. 29 Yet Manley's account stresses her agency ; she locates herself as enabling one of Jamaica's most successful politicians to hold office...

... and Gill-Sadler, respectively, to inform a close reading of Phyllis Coard’s memoir Unchained: A Caribbean Woman’s Journey through Invasion, Incarceration, and Liberation (2019). The author argues that Coard’s representation of her body under incarceration serves to push her humanity into the consciousness...

... autobiography, family history, the history of colonial Jamaica, and the history of imperial Britain in a breathtaking demonstration of imagination, historical reconstruction, and critical reading. 1 Imperial Intimacies joins a number of extraordinary critical memoirs recently published by scholars...