October 27, 2021
2:00pm – 3:00pm EDT
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Meeting ID: 955 5851 762
Passcode: 462383

This talk draws from James Cantres’s Blackening Britain: Caribbean Radicalism from Windrush to Decolonization, a capacious investigation into politics of resistance and novel ingenious epistemologies expressed through Caribbean activism, cultural production, and knowledge-making across the decolonizing Black Atlantic world. Exploring notions of “unbelonging”,” Cantres considers the way radical Caribbean artist-intellectuals and organizers agitated to critique racialism in metropolitan Britain while creating spaces, ideas, and institutions grounded in Caribbean and African sensibilities. The radicalism of these post-national Caribbean mobilizations in Britain extended beyond the limits of the structures of post-coloniality in the West Indies. Yardies, Rastafarians, and calypsonians in the capital were responding directly to conditions of in the metropole and informed by networks linking them to anticolonial, antiracist projects across the world. Part of the Global Critical Caribbean Thought series at Rowman-Littlefield International, Blackening Britain demonstrates the unique diasporic formations rendered through Caribbean historical actors’ reckoning between histories, citizenships, privileges destroyed or taken away and the emergence of new modes of liberatory thinking. Afro-Caribbean political negotiations and innovative imaginaries reflect tensions of the unique historical moment out of which they emerged in the context of Black Atlantic upheavals.

James Cantres is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Africana and Puerto Rican/Latino Studies at Hunter College. Visit him online at jamescantres.com.