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This study identifies a recurring yet overlooked figure in global ethnic and diasporic literature that I term homo amens. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben's concept of homo sacer and the postcolonial zombie, I argue that homo amens (\"the man without a mind\") is a powerful symbol of biopolitical violence that transgresses against immaterial bodies of knowledge—including indigenous cultural, familial, and scientific structures—instead of the material body. By focusing on the \"epistemological zombie\" in Erna Brodber's Myal (1988), John Okada's No-No Boy (1957), and Jonny Steinberg's Sizwe's Test (2008), I foreground the preservation of traditional knowledge as a political right and make the case for global ethnic literature as an instrument of epistemological equality.

In this article, I explore Merle Collins’ reworking of poems from the Nelson’s Royal Readers. Focusing on Part V of Ocean Stirrings, I explore Collins’ use of poetic form to represent the mental unravelling and restitching of Louise Langdon Norton Little, the mother of Malcolm X. Louise Litte—a Grenadian migrant woman—is depicted as unmoored by the travails of racism in early twentieth century USA. Louise’s ensuing psychological cataclysm is refracted through the prism of the memories of her grandmother’s Creole voice—an oral text which discursively radicalizes the colonial agenda that was core to the Royal Readers. I argue that Collins is intentional in her use of a decolonized poetic versification to represent Louise Little’s imaginative maneuvering into self-reclamation. Transposing her grief and loss onto the poems learnt when she was a child, Louise is depicted as poetically and creatively harnessing her grandmother’s grassroot wisdom on the value of strategic resilience. This retelling allows Louise to survive the trauma of her incarceration in a U.S. mental hospital and returns her to her Caribbean self: Oseyan.

In this article, I analyze Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day and Erna Brodber’s Myal in order to demonstrate that African-derived spiritual systems are central in Black women’s fictional depictions and theorizing of healing and disability. I argue that the violence of what Moya Bailey terms misogynoir is writ on Black women’s body, mind, and spirit—the latter of which is absent in disability studies frameworks yet central to healing and liberation in this literature. These writings present a syncretized spirituality drawn from African Diasporic, African Indigenous, and Indigenous American religious beliefs that have a more capacious understanding of wholeness and wellness to reimagine healing in ways that make space for a diversity of bodymindspirits. Black spiritual practice enables self-love and acceptance of disabled Black womanhood, and the Word, Nommo, bestows spiritual healing power.

European colonialism produced a corresponding archive of records of land and the enslaved, but one that is often incomplete or inadequate for use by the descendants of the enslaved, present day Caribbean people who wish to know how their family histories are tied to specific locations. This essay investigates how Jamaican writers Erna Brodber and Lorna Goodison use the genre of life writing in order to articulate a different relationship between the land and the people in the Caribbean than that depicted in colonial archives and in pre-emancipation paintings and drawings. In addition to the expected and yet always shocking written archives of the enslaved (registers of births, deaths, purchases, sales), visual representations such as maps, portraits of the enslaved and landscape paintings constitute another repository of information. Landscapes painted in the picturesque mode in the early nineteenth century framed the Caribbean in ways legible to European viewers. Picturesque images constitute an important archive of European views of the relationship between the enslaved and the land they worked, especially since, as Krista Thompson notes, no photographs of slavery in the British Caribbean exist

Erna Brodber's Nothing's Mat (2014) tells the story of a nameless protagonist (later nicknamed Princess by her husband) who visits Jamaica as a GCE (a British education qualification, after age 16) student to map her family tree for a social sciences project. Rebecca Romdhani's review of the novel comments on its success in exploring the \"difficult legacy of colonialism and slavery [and its offering] suggestions as to how to begin to heal it,\" follows the intricate familial patterns mapped in Nothing's Mat and credits Brodber for \"extending the concept of the collective Jamaican family\" (n. pag.). Eglash explains that the \"presence of mathematics in culture can be thought of in terms of a spectrum from unintentional to self-conscious\" (5), and his study points to a number of examples in traditional African architecture, art and culture where fractals are not only evident but also seemingly intentional. The feedback loop, the repetition of a process, is a necessary component in the fractal. Because the Fibonacci sequence requires the same complex process to be repeated, it can be characterized as a fractal.

With Alison Donnell, she worked between 2010 and 2011, in collaboration with the University of Reading, UK, on a research project entitled \"Breaking Sexual Silences: Literature and the Re-imagination of Caribbean Sexualities,\" which led to the organization of several events-some of them for the Barbadian public at large, not just for academics-and to the publication of a special issue of the Journal of West Indian Literature devoted to the Trinidadian writer Shani Mootoo (deCaires Narain et al.). Evelyn's 1990 article \"Interior Schisms Dramatised: The Treatment of the 'Mad' Woman in the Work of Some Female Caribbean Novelists,\" which was reworked into one of the chapters of her book Woman Version: Theoretical Approaches to West Indian Fiction by Women (1993), is not only an emblematic instance of her own brand of literary criticism: careful, well documented and respectful of the creative writings that it analyses. In the wake of this teaching experiment, an international conference followed, coorganized in Liege by Evelyn, my colleague Daria Tunca and myself, an event that, in turn, generated an edited collection of essays, Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature: On the Edge (Ledent et al.), which was published in 2018.

In mapping the field of Afro-Caribbean philosophy Paget Henry states that, until recently, asserting the \"African heritage\" of Afro-Caribbean philosophy would have elicited much skepticism among academic philosophers. This is attributable to the then widely held assumption that there was no such thing as African philosophy, especially since philosophy was presumed to be the product of Europe, not Africa. African \"wisdom traditions\" are steeped in spirituality, and are defined within the framework of myth, mysticism, sagacity, and proverbial discourses that are structured elements in African cultural systems. From the perspective of Western rationalism, these tenets of African philosophy and spirituality are generally deemed non-rational, (non-philosophical) systems and, according to these prevailing notions of philosophical discourse, are steeped in primitive mythologies, witchcraft, and black magic.

The inadequacy of the US government's recovery response left the surviving residents angry as well as traumatized and in the debate that followed-from which we now see the emergence of hurricane studies-the cause of the government's failure also came into focus. [...]from the point of view of the contiguous (or continental) United States, New Orleans, according to Spitzer is \"south of the South.\" Wilson Harris (144-150) has traced the indigenous myth-mutations of hurricanes from Central to South America through the Caribbean: from Quetzalcoatal (the plumed serpent-god of the winds in Mexico), to Yurokon (the mainland Carib spirit of the jungle), Huracan (the Aztec god of the storm) and Kukulkan, the feathered serpent of the Maya. Columbus encountered the force of tropical storms on his second voyage in 1495. [...]as Sharae Deckard says, the word is \"a palimpsest of the long eruptive history of multiple colonizations, dispossessions and exterminations in the Caribbean\" (27). The continuing use of the hurricane in colonialist discourse as a means to focus the region's violent alterity is well documented.1 But, as Deckard says, it retains \"the trace of Amerindian cultures and socio-ecological relations,\" and, \"from the first articulations of Caribbean identity,\" the hurricane has been crucial to the varying poetics of the region (25-45). [...]the eighteenth century, it focused on spectacular but singular events like storms and earthquakes rather than on the broader conceptual terrain of what we now understand as the weather. Yet cartography is particularly challenged by Caribbean space-by its postcolonial liminality or inbetweenness...