In the multi-ethnic and multi-cultural fabric of major cities in the post-colonial world, postcolonialism presented fresh possibilities for new history. It allowed Roman historians and archaeologists to reflect upon and break through the imperialist historiography of Roman history and to reach out to the intellectual discourse of the postcolonial age. Three prominent scholars who reoriented Romanization studies in the twenty-first century, Webster, Hingley, and Mattingly, turned their attention to the lower strata of the colonial power structure, the colonized and silent Other outside the hegemonic system of power and knowledge/truth – that is, the subaltern – and presented their alternative paradigms in postcolonialist vocabulary: creolization, globalization, and discrepant experiences, respectively. Pushing epistemological boundaries to the subaltern Other in the Roman Empire, they exposed Romano-centric and Eurocentric epistemologies underlying the paradigm of Romanization itself.

Histories of colonial energy tend to emphasize the development of the steam engine, the rise of electric power, or the beginnings of industrial agriculture, through the rise of cash crops such as indigo, cotton, sugar, and tobacco. Chapter 1, “Powering the Soul: Queer Energies in Haitian Vodou,” argues that any history of colonial energy production must also recognize that nonhuman forms of power were dependent on the human energy of enslaved labor, particularly reproductive labor. Yet far from considering enslaved labor as the flexible, malleable unit of energy desired by capitalist production, this chapter instead argues that Vodou radically disrupted the logics of racial capital and coerced biological reproduction. Vodou personhood is antithetical to the calculus of racial capitalism, and its porosity, I argue, helped reconfigure the plantation’s structures of power to resist imperialist extraction. Through an archive that ranges from colonial treatises to Vodou practices and epistemologies, this chapter highlights the ways in which Haitians expanded the category of gender and reimagined the energies of labor and birthwork under conditions of biocapitalist violence.

Chapter 4, “‘A Wandering Maniac’: Sojourner Truth’s Demonic Marronage” turns to a prophet seldom associated with the Caribbean. Yet Sojourner Truth, who was born in 1797 in the predominantly Dutch Ulster County, grew up in a world shaped by Atlantic empires; steeped in African, Native American, Caribbean, Spanish, Dutch, and French histories; and shaking with the tremors of the Haitian Revolution. Her first language was Dutch, her early spiritual beliefs were African, and her community was influenced by transatlantic and Caribbean channels of trade, labor, and revolution. This chapter examines the energy practices of Truth’s creolized milieu within a broader discourse on Truth’s celebrated mobility, historicizing her fugitivity within a transnational history of female marronage throughout the Americas. This hemispheric history of wandering evokes what Sylvia Wynter has understood as the “demonic grounds” of Black women’s liberation. Suturing the demonic (an energy force that emerges from Wynter’s critique of nineteenth-century physics) with Caribbean practices of marronage (a kinetic practice of flight against the immobilizing energy demands of chattel slavery), Truth, I argue, not only is an Atlantic subject but also expands critical understandings of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Caribbean philosophy and specifically Black women’s energy in the Americas.

Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.

Adding a race and colonialism component, this chapter examines how citizenship has been used as a powerful tool to undermine the colonized and erect an essentially race-based firewall between white Europeans, who are citizens, and colonials who are given lesser status. Investment migration is inseparable from citizenship’s past as a colonial tool of racial domination and subjugation.

Chapter 5 draws on notarial records and census reports (padrones) to track the ethnic language used to describe Afro-descended residents of Veracruz and other Gulf Coast cities and towns. Comparing this data to published studies of other Mexican and Caribbean areas, I argue distinctive African ethnic labels retained meaning in coastal communities longer than they did in the Mexican interior, reflecting patterns of usage in the Caribbean. This was true not only among individuals, but collectively in the form of confraternities. As late as 1667, at least five confraternities in Veracruz continued to use language of African ethnicity, while confraternities elsewhere in Mexico had long since abandoned ethnic language. The final section of the chapter uses the admissions records of the Hospital Nuestra Señora de Loreto to examine the size and shape of Veracruz’s Caribbean-born population. Because the records include birthplace information for the hospital’s predominantly free-black women who were its patients between 1684 and 1695, they allow us to understand more tangibly the intersections of Mexican-Caribbean networks and ethnic labeling.

This chapter has three main objectives. This chapter first describes multilingualism as a natural force, deeply rooted in Asian and African societies prior to the emergence of nation-states and currently flourishing and evolving in India. Parts 2– 4 of this chapter provide evidence from pre-colonial India and its neighboring countries to underscore the differential evolution of Indian and Chinese political multilingualism in both qualitative and quantitative terms. The chapter closes by investigating the dynamics of linguistic, non-linguistic, and cultural forces in Southeast Asia and China, forces that shaped, sustained, and spread pre-and post-fifteenth-century Indian multilingualism in and outside India. Super-diversity is a key marker of Ancient as well as Modern India. This region represents a microcosm of different languages, races, religions, and cultures that have blended and brought about a special unity in diversity. The chapter shows that sustainable and stable Indian multilingualism defies the conventional belief that multilingualism cannot survive or flourish without a writing system and/or government intervention. Salient linguistic and ecological features are identified to highlight the exceptional nature of Indian multilingualism and its spread to Southeast Asia and China.

This chapter traces the expansion of English from its beginnings to its present-day global role. Viewed from a geographical perspective, settlement moves and colonization have re-rooted the English language to different continents and countries, producing distinct contact types. We outline these developments from their historical and demographic perspectives as well as with respect to linguistic contact conditions for North America (including African American English), Southern Hemisphere varieties (Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa), and second-language postcolonial Englishes in Africa and Asia. In addition, it is shown how recent, vibrant processes have established new forms of English in new contexts, including non-postcolonial countries, lingua franca uses, and in cyberspace, thus producing radically new contact ecologies. Contact scenarios in these processes have involved dialect contact between native speakers from different regions, the process of structural nativization based on local feature pools, various degrees of restructuring and creole formation, and the genesis of hybrid varieties and innovative multilingual settings. We outline theoretical approaches to grasp these processes, including the Dynamic Model of the evolution of postcolonial Englishes, the Extra- and Intra-territorial Forces Model, and the postulate of different types of “nativeness.”

Positing that African countries willingly commemorate the transatlantic slave trade but forget the legacies of domestic slavery, this chapter examines the continuation of slavery in the shadows of the House of Slaves at Gorée Island. To examine these hidden legacies of slavery, this chapter looks at the history of the mixed-race Signares and their historical implication in the slave trade and domestic slavery. One of the moral conundrums in the legacy of the Signares is their mixed parentage of European fathers and subordinate Black mothers, placing race at the heart of the cultural creolization (métissage) that is celebrated today as the legacy of Signares. This chapter establishes that the heritages of the slave trade and the Signares are framed as irreconcilable discourses that lead to divergent interpretations of the material culture of the island. Examining a controversial statue, the island’s architectural legacies, the impersonators of Signares, and the Festival of Return, this chapter establishes that the antinomies between the legacies of the slave trade and the Signares are occasionally overcome in rituals of reconciliation.

“Hurricane Alley” ponders what happens when we define the literature of the coastal American South (Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas), as shaped by the paths, threats, and aftermaths of hurricanes. It explores what shifts in our understanding of the field if we consider Southern literature not solely in terms of plantation and Creolization, but also around a geography of vulnerability. It argues that coastal southern literature (and its resonances with the Caribbean) provides an apt example to reflect on the Anthropocene, climate change, and environmental racism. With a nineteenth- to twenty-first-century corpus featuring fiction, poetry, theater, visual arts, and cinema by George Washington Cable, Lafcadio Hearn, Zora Neale Hurston, Mark Twain, Tennessee Williams, Edwidge Danticat, Spike Lee, Patricia Smith, Kara Walker, Benh Zeitlin, Natasha Trethewey, Tiphanie Yanique, and Jesmyn Ward, the chapter expands the limits – generic, geographical, ethnic, generational, gendered, sexualized -- of southern literature.

Following the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea, per Evelyn O’Callaghan, Jean Rhys held a singular and pre-eminent position as the most widely known and systemically surveyed anglophone woman writer, but despite her literary project of decolonization, various critics describe the position of Rhys and her text as initially and continuously contested. Indeed, the ‘absence’ of women writers during the male-dominated nationalist period as well as their later emergence in the USA accounts for African American genealogies of Caribbean women’s writing advanced by scholars such as Carole Boyce Davies and Belinda Edmondson. Attention to Rhys’ insider/outsider ambiguity in that nationalist literary era evinces her influence on subsequent Caribbean writing, however, and an examination of works by Caribbean writers, spanning both of what Donette Francis refers to as the ‘second’ and ‘third waves’, suggests that writers consistently return to Rhys’ iconic novel not only as an ur-narrative of place, space, and identity for the anglophone Caribbean female subject but also as a source of what Elaine Savory dubs Rhys’ ‘productive contradictions’ as a literary foremother. This essay thus examines Rhys’ work and the complexities of its reception diachronically in conversation with some of these writers, assessing its manifold genealogical impacts both in its time and the present. Writers discussed include Jean Rhys, Marlon James, Derek Walcott, Lorna Goodison, Robert Antoni, Michelle Cliff, Elizabeth Nunez, and Kamau Brathwaite.

The essays in this volume assess the field of early Caribbean literary studies at a moment when it is undergoing important transitions. Our contributors study genres of writing previously marginalized as nonliterary: popular writing in newspapers and pamphlets; genres of fiction and poetry such as romances, sentimental novels, and ballads; non-elite memoirs and letters, such as the narratives of the enslaved and the working classes, especially women. Contributors focus on the multilingual, multi-imperial, and regional literatures of the Caribbean, in keeping with the comparative emphasis in contemporary literary studies. Our contributors infer the cultural presence of non-elite groups within the texts of the dominant classes: can the worlds made by enslaved and indentured people be reconstructed by reading texts that enslavers created? Our contributors move back and forth between time periods, linking texts, writers, and literary movements together in ways that exceed traditional notions of literary influence. The analysis of Caribbean literature before 1920 is a vital exercise in understanding our present moment.

While the rich ethnic diversity of the Caribbean has been mobilized discursively in the postcolonial Caribbean as a resource to represent multicultural unity (especially in national mottoes like Jamaica’s ‘Out of many, one people’ and the Trinidadian ‘Together we aspire, together we achieve’), the social relationships between different ethnic groups have also been charged with tension and conflict. Caribbean literature in the late twentieth century represents the histories of ethnic/racial rivalries and divisions, but also the solidarities and criss-crossing creolizations that occur in everyday interactions and that mobilize class, gender, sexuality and generation as points of alliance. The recognition of literary styles and critical frameworks distinctive to Indian-Caribbean literature and Chinese-Caribbean literature has developed in the twenty-first century, although it has remained relatively understudied and theorized. These literatures must be read through the lenses of feminism, dougla identities and queer identities to sustain a fullness of their interpretations, in both scholarly and secular/societal settings.