How did blackness and whiteness figure in the patterns of life and represenation that moved across the eighteenth-century theatrical empire? Performances of blackface characters in colonial environments – in this case of Mungo, the enslaved Black Servant in the comic opera The Padlock – could take the lead in parsing, categorizing and enacting typologies of "darker-skinned" peoples with lasting effects – an embodied form of racial "knowledge" that undergirded the subordination of non-British peoples in the construction of a global laboring class.

This analytical survey of key texts in contemporary urban Caribbean fiction and poetry from Kingston, Port-au-Prince, Havana, Santo Domingo and Pointe-à-Pitre explores several themes this literature holds in common: the postcolonial (or, in the case of Cuba, post-revolutionary) breakdown of the urban fabric and its attendant covert and more often overt violence, seen here in relation to the haunting and haunted after-lives of the plantation complex, along with the lived textures of daily life, with its unstable interplay of social anomie and possible emancipatory alternatives.