Contributors

Donna M. E. Banks is an adjunct professor in the Department of African American Studies at New York City College of Technology. She takes a transnational approach to exploring the politics of belonging in contemporary cities and examines how marginalized populations interact within, navigate through, and disrupt racialized and gendered spaces.Nathalie Batraville is an associate professor at Concordia University’s Simone de Beauvoir Institute. She teaches in the areas of Black feminisms, sexuality studies, and prison abolition. Her scholarship has appeared in the Journal of Haitian Studies, the CLR James Journal, TOPIA, and Tangence. Her first book, Disruptive Agency: Towards a Black Feminist Anarchism, is forthcoming from Duke University Press. In her ceramic arts practice, she explores storytelling, Black liberation, plant life, and rebellion.Mano Delea is a lecturer in modern and Dutch history at the University of Amsterdam. The topics of his published works include slavery and its legacy, Pan-Africanism, colonialism, imperialism, and ethnic relations. His PhD research examines the transformations and knowledge production of Pan-Africanism. He cowrote a report commissioned by the National Institute for the Study of Dutch Slavery and its Legacy regarding the 1862 Dutch parliamentary debate on the abolition of slavery.Mamyrah A. Dougé-Prosper is an assistant professor of global and international studies at the University of California, Irvine, where she is also the director of the Center for Racial Justice. Her work generally focuses on protest movements in twenty-first-century Haiti. She has published in political magazines and academic journals and is completing her first book manuscript, “Development Arrested in Occupied Haiti: Social Movements and the Gangster State.”Jane Hiddleston is a professor of literatures in French at the University of Oxford, specializing in various aspects of francophone postcolonial literature. Her most recent book, Frantz Fanon: Literature and Invention (2022), is a study of Fanon’s readings of literature, and she is currently finishing “Aimé Césaire: Inventor of Souls,” a book for the Black Lives series with Polity Press. She is also currently working on the interaction between anticolonialism and ecopoetics, focusing in particular on Aimé and Suzanne Césaire and their peers.Geoffrey Holder (whose work also appears on the covers of this issue) was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in 1930. A true polymath, he was a painter, photographer, choreographer, director, costume designer, dancer, actor, and composer. In 1953, during his early twenties, he relocated to New York City, a move financed by the sale of his paintings, and by 1956 he would receive a Guggenheim fellowship in painting, the medium most constant and central to him throughout his life. As a visual artist, his works evidence a singular and recognizable spirit of combined calm, elegance, and life force. He brought a controlled intensity to the way he portrayed his subjects, who are often visually isolated in the frame yet possess a presence that fills the image. Holder died in New York City in 2014.Erica Moiah James is an art historian, a curator, and an associate professor at the University of Miami. Her research centers on Indigenous, modern, and contemporary art of the Caribbean, the Americas, and the African diaspora. In 2020 she received the Warhol Foundation / Creative Time Art Writing Prize and was also awarded research grants from the Mellon and Terra Foundations. In 2022 she curated Didier William: Nou kite tout sa dèyè, at MOCA-North Miami, and Nari Ward: Home of the Brave, at Vilcek Foundation NYC, and she was the 2023–24 Clark-Oakley Fellow at the Clark Art Institute. Her book After Caliban: Caribbean Art in the Global Imaginary is forthcoming from Duke University Press.Leslie James is a senior lecturer in global history at Queen Mary University, London. She is the author of George Padmore and Decolonisation from Below (2015) and has published essays in Callaloo, American Historical Review, Comparatives Studies in Society and History, and the Journal of Social History. Her broad interests include print cultures, imperial history, and the history of anti-imperialism, decolonization, and the Cold War in Africa and the Caribbean.Régine Michelle Jean-Charles is the Dean’s Professor of Culture and Social Justice at Northeastern University. Her scholarship and teaching include expertise on Black feminism, African diasporic literature, Black France, and Haitian studies. She is the author of Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary (2014), The Trumpet of Conscience Today (2021), and Looking for Other Worlds: Black Feminism and Haitian Fiction (2022).Mayaki Kimba is a political theorist and historian of political thought, interested in questions of the state and freedom, liberalism and empire, and Black and anticolonial political thought, especially from Suriname and the Dutch Caribbean. He is a PhD candidate at Columbia University, and his dissertation concerns how state practices in the intimate sphere affected varying perspectives on the state among Black migrants in 1970s Britain, France, and the Netherlands.Rashana Vikara Lydner is an assistant professor of Africana studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Bridging the fields of Caribbean studies, French cultural studies, linguistic anthropology, and Creolistics, her research focuses on a transnational approach to the study of Black popular culture in the francophone and anglophone Caribbean at the intersections of language, identity, and power.Minkah Makalani is the director of the Center for Africana Studies and an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. He works in Black political thought, intellectual history, and the Black radical tradition. He is the author of In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939 (2011).Kevin Meehan is a professor of English at the University of Central Florida, where he specializes in Caribbean and multi-ethnic US literatures and cultures, climate change education for sustainable development, environmental literature, and literary translation. He is the author of People Get Ready: African American and Caribbean Cultural Exchange (2009) and essays and translations published in Callaloo, Small Axe, Wasafiri, Narrative, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, among other journals and books. He has recently been a Scholar in Residence at the Schomburg Center and a Fulbright Scholar at Clarence Fitzroy Bryant College in St. Kitts-Nevis. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Organization of American States, and UNESCO.Nadève Ménard is the editor of Écrits d’Haïti: Perspectives sur la littérature haïtienne contemporaine (1986–2006) (2011) and the Journal of Haitian Studies special issue on Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2013). She is also the author of Lyonel Trouillot, Les Enfants des héros: Étude critique (2016) and a coeditor of The Haiti Reader: History, Culture, Politics (2020). Her translation projects include Gina Ulysse’s Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle (with Évelyne Trouillot, 2015) and Louis Joseph Janvier’s Haiti for the Haitians (2023). Her monograph Enduring Myths: Scholars and Stories about Haiti is forthcoming.Wayne Modest is the director of content at the Wereldmuseum in the Netherlands and a professor (by special appointment) of material culture and critical heritage studies at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. A cultural studies scholar by training, Modest works at the intersection of material culture, memory, and heritage studies, with a strong focus on colonialism and its afterlives in Europe and the Caribbean. He is a coeditor, with Claudia Augustat, of Spaces of Care: Confronting Colonial Afterlives in Ethnographic Museums in Europe (2023), and he is currently working on several publication projects, including, with Peter Pels, Museum Temporalities: Time History and the Future of the Ethnographic Museum (forthcoming). Together with Susan Legene, Modest is a lead investigators for the research project Pressing Matter: Ownership, Value, and the question of Colonial Heritage in Museums.Jahan Ramazani is University Professor and Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia. His most recent books are A Transnational Poetics (2009), winner of the American Comparative Literature Association’s Harry Levin Prize; Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres (2013); The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry (2017); and Poetry in a Global Age (2020). He coedits The Norton Anthology of English Literature.Nicole D. Ramsey is an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the Departments of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is currently working on her first book, which explores the intricate interplay of cultural politics, diaspora, Blackness, nation, and performance within Belize and its diasporic communities.Holger Weiss is a professor of general history at Åbo Akademi University, Finland, and an ordinary member of the Finnish Society for Sciences and Letters. His research focuses on global and Atlantic history, West African environmental history, and Islamic studies with a special focus on Islam in Ghana. His latest monographs are A Global Radical Waterfront: The International Propaganda Committee of Transport Workers and the International of Seamen and Harbour Workers (2021), and Muslim Empowerment in Ghana: Analysing the Spectrum of Muslim Social Mobilization during the Internet Age (2024).