Contributors

Carolyn J. Allen has taught in the Department of Literatures in English at the University of the West Indies, Mona and the School of Drama at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts and is the former head of the Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts. A lifelong theater enthusiast, she has practiced largely within the education sector. Her current interest is in Jamaican theater history. Her published work includes “Creole, the Problem of Definition,” in Questioning Creole: Creolisation Discourses in Caribbean Culture (2002), edited by Verene Shepherd and Glen Richards.Gavin Arnall is an associate professor of Romance languages and literatures and the director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of Subterranean Fanon: An Underground Theory of Radical Change (2020), the translator of Emilio de Ípola’s Althusser, the Infinite Farewell (2018), and the co-editor of Universality and Translation: Sites of Struggle in Philosophy and Politics (2025).Carol Bailey is a professor of Black studies at Amherst College, where she teaches courses in African American, African diasporic, and Caribbean literatures, as well as interdisciplinary Black studies. She is the author of Writing the Black Diasporic City in the Age of Globalization (2023) and A Poetics of Performance: The Oral-Scribal Aesthetic in Anglophone Caribbean Fiction (2014) and co-editor (with Stephanie McKenzie) of Pamela Mordecai’s A Fierce Green Place (2022). She is also a co-author (with Erold Bailey and Nigel Brissett) of the recently published Minority Voices in the Academic Superstructure (2024).Aristides Dimitriou is an assistant professor of English at Gettysburg College, where he teaches courses on Caribbean literature, Latino/a/x literature, ethnic literature of the United States, and hemispheric American studies. His work has been published in MELUS, Arizona Quarterly, College Literature, and Studies in the Novel. He is currently working on a book that examines time and narrative in the twentieth-century literature of the Americas.Ben Etherington is an associate professor in English at Western Sydney University. His current research, which is supported by a three-year Australian Research Council grant, is on the poetics of anglophone Caribbean Creole verse between the abolition of slavery and decolonization. The grant also involves a collaboration with the Sydney-based Jamaican writer Sienna Brown on a podcast series on the history of Caribbean people in Australia. Recent publications include Literary Primitivism (2018) and an essay on Louise Bennett and the decolonization of civic verse in Caribbean Literature in Transition, Volume 2 (2021).Jackqueline Frost is an intellectual historian and cultural theorist from southern Louisiana. Her research focuses on twentieth-century militant intellectuals, especially writers and artists, in the context of transatlantic decolonization and the global Cold War. She is a teaching fellow in international politics at the University of London Institute in Paris and was a postdoctoral researcher in the Aimé Césaire Research Group at the École Normale Supérieure (Ulm).René Johannes Kooiker is a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at Yale University. His main interests are twentieth-century Caribbean literature in English, Dutch, French, and Spanish, as well as Caribbean digital humanities. He is currently researching the Pan-Caribbean festival Carifesta. His work has appeared in Modern Language Quarterly and archipelagos.Sophie Maríñez is a professor of modern languages and literature at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. She is also an affiliated professor of French, Africana studies, liberal studies, and Black, race, and ethnic studies at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her research lies at the intersection of literature, history, and cultural studies from the Caribbean and its diasporas, the francophone world, and the Americas. She is a winner of the 2025 Frantz Fanon Award for Outstanding Book in Caribbean Thought for Spirals in the Caribbean: Representing Violence and Connection in Haiti and the Dominican Republic (2024), which received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the American Council for Learned Societies. In 2025, she was appointed to the Chaire de Professeure Invitée at the Sorbonne Nouvelle.Wayne Modest is the director of content at the Wereldmuseum in the Netherlands. He is also a professor (by special appointment) of material culture and critical heritage studies at the VU University 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 currently working on several publication projects, including, with Peter Pels, Museum Temporalities: Time, History, and the Future of the Ethnographic Museum (forthcoming) and, with Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Beyond Boundaries: Seeing Art History from the Caribbean (forthcoming). Previous publications include the co-edited volumes Victorian Jamaica (2018); Matters of Belonging: Ethnographic Museums in a Changing Europe (2019); Spaces of Care—Confronting Colonial Afterlives in European Ethnographic Museums (2023); and Our Colonial Inheritance (2024). Among other research projects, Modest is the program leader for the Dutch Research Council funded project Pressing Matter: Ownership Value and the Question of Colonial Heritage in Museums.Celenis Rodríguez Moreno is a member of Grupo Latinoamericano de Estudio Formación y Acción Feminista (GLEFAS). She is a PhD student in history at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, where she investigates the modern and colonial gender system in the Caribbean, the formation of sex-gender subjectivities among racialized communities, and marronage. Her essays have been published in the edited collections Feminismo descolonial: Nuevos aportes teóricos-metodológicos a más de una década (2023) and Decolonial Feminism in Abya Yala: Caribbean, Meso, and South American Contributions and Challenges (2022) and the journals Hypatia, Sociocriticism, Argumentos, and Iberoamérica social.Mervyn Morris is a Jamaican poet and Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing and West Indian Literature at the University of the West Indies, Mona. He is the author of eight poetry collections, including Peelin Orange (2017), and three books of criticism and biography: Is English We Speaking, and Other Essays (1999), Making West Indian Literature (2005), and Miss Lou: Louise Bennett and Jamaican Culture (2014).Nick Nesbitt is a professor of French at Princeton University. His most recent publications include The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean (2022) and Reading Capital’s Materialist Dialectic: Marx, Spinoza, and the Althusserians (2024).Grégory Pierrot is an associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut, Stamford. He is the author of The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture (2019) and Decolonize Hipsters (2021), co-editor (with Marlene Daut and Marion Rohrleitner) of Haitian Revolutionary Fictions: An Anthology (2021), and co-editor (with Paul Youngquist) of a scholarly edition of Marcus Rainsford’s An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti (2013).Esmee Schoutens works in research and policy at the Wereldmuseum in the Netherlands. She is also an independent researcher, an editor, and a curator. She holds an MA in critical studies in art and culture from VU University Amsterdam and has worked for several modern and contemporary art institutions such as the Amsterdam Museum, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and the Marres, where she has worked on exhibitions such as In the Presence of Absence (2020–21) and The Golden Coach (2021–22). Schoutens is interested in art/technology collaborations, financial infrastructures in the arts, darkness, and art activism. Among other journals, her writing has appeared in Metropolis M and the Journal of Curatorial Studies.Lisandro Suriel (whose work also appears on the cover of this issue) is a photographer and artistic researcher from Soualiga (St, Martin). He draws inspiration from the magic realism of the Caribbean and Atlantic worlds. His work explores the intersection of folklore, cultural memory, and decolonial histories, creating a visual documentary of the Atlantic imagination. Suriel delves into folktales, ghost stories, and theological tropes that shape Afro-Caribbean identities, proposing the imaginative lens as a device for reclaiming histories often overshadowed by colonial narratives. His photographic journey emerges from a desire to redefine Caribbean identity and uncover the richness of Afro-Caribbean cultural legacies. Suriel’s work has been exhibited globally, including at the United Nations Headquarters, the Singapore International Photography Festival, Photo Basel, and the Photo Vogue Festival, where he won the Studio RM Prize. A FOAM Talent and Tilting Axis Fellow, he has lectured at institutions such as the University of St. Andrews, Ghent University, and Tate Modern. Depicting the original cave and shell artefacts, the visual essay in this issue, The Riddle at Bizmoune, has been presented to Mr. André Azoulay, senior advisor to King Mohammed VI of Morocco.