Keywords

Twenty-first-century literature by women from across the Caribbean and its diaspora evidences an urge to start afresh. It frequently points to the lingering legacy of enslavement, coloniality, and patriarchy as it denounces the pernicious effects of an inequitable global economic order premised on exploitative relationships and unsustainable practices that have ushered in ecological cataclysms. The present collection examines these matters through the prism of what we term “chronotropics.” Stemming from chronos (time) and tropos, both in reference to the geographical area under study and in its etymological acceptation of “a turn,” we use this neologism to designate a poetics that calls for a turning point, a revolution in the social, economic, and political spheres, but also of an epistemic and ethical order. The narratives included here are chronotropic in that they actively challenge the anthropocentric and androcentric logic propelled by European capitalism according to which space is delimited, privatized,1 tamed, and subject to extraction and time is measured, linear, singular, arbitrarily standardized,2 and teleological.

Bringing together Julia Alvarez, Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, Vashti Bowlah, Dionne Brand, Erna Brodber, Maryse Condé, Nalo Hopkinson, Rita Indiana, Fabienne Kanor, Karen Lord, Kettly Mars, Pauline Melville, Mayra Montero, Shani Mootoo, Elizabeth Nunez, Ingrid Persaud, Gisèle Pineau, Krystal M. Ramroop, and Mayra Santos Febres, Chronotropics: Caribbean Women Writing Spacetime proposes novel interpretations of the region’s landscapes and history that are anticolonial, gender inclusive, and pluralistic. Attuned to autochthonous modes of being, ancestral cosmologies, and an indigenous relation to terrains and temporalities, the theoretical and literary projects discussed in this pan-Caribbean volume gesture towards justice and social change through archival disruption, radical remapping, and epistemic marronnage. Our collection is articulated around these three converging approaches to Caribbean women’s spacetime.

The writers gathered here, each speaking from a particular site of enunciation grounded in various linguistic and cultural contexts, all invoke a need for solidarity from which to re-think geopolitical boundaries, racialized histories, and ethno-phallogocentric appropriations of spacetime. Each of them persists in challenging the contours of gender and the body as constructed within and by spacetime, in its physical, biological, and psychological materiality as much as its sociocultural, historical, and political manifestations. These writers’ dispersed, yet collective, locus of creation and activism invites us to pause and ask how we might break the cycle of violence and trauma repeated from generation to generation by forging new alliances and political coalitions, generating new myths, and remapping and reimagining our spatiotemporal relationship to the landscape, that is, space through time: isla, monte y mar.

The chronotropics uses Caribbean women’s creative interpretations of spacetime as its theoretical foundation to acknowledge their role in contemporary discourse and politics. By recognizing these authors as philosophers, public intellectuals and social activists, our conceptual framework redresses the frequent scholarly neglect of such vital contributions.3 Drawing on the theories of several women writers featured in this volume, this Introduction establishes the chronotropics along the axes of ontologies, cosmogonies, and epistemologies; it then proceeds to outline how each critical perspective engages with our gender-inflected paradigm of spacetime. “Charting the Chronotropics,” the opening section, defines and then situates the chronotropics as expanding current philosophical and literary discourses on human being such as those put forth by Mayra Santos Febres and Sylvia Wynter; the second section, “Inhabiting the Chronotropics of Ancestral Knowledge,” guided by the work of Lydia Cabrera, articulates the spiritual dimension of Caribbean epistemologies (belief systems, philosophies, wisdom, folktales, oral histories) like those espoused by Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, Erna Brodber, Rita Indiana, Fabienne Kanor, Mayra Montero, and Mayra Santos Febres. The third section, “(Im)Possible Subjects of the Chronotropics” reflects on identity, agency, and positionality politics in Dionne Brand, Maryse Condé, and Shani Mootoo. “Reengineering Community,” concludes our discussion by emphasizing writing and activism as political praxis.

This collection pays particular homage to three seminal edited volumes that have endured for decades: Her True, True Name: An Anthology of Women’s Writing from the Caribbean, by Pamela Mordecai and Betty Wilson (1990); Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, by Carol Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido, a contributor to this volume (1990); and Selwyn R. Cudjoe’s Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference (1990). Our pan-Caribbean approach likewise brings together several generations of authors and critics to argue that gendered perspectives on spacetime must be apprehended from a reevaluated and redefined notion of human being.

Charting the Chronotropics

Contemporary Caribbean women’s writing displays an array of innovative approaches to spacetime. This collection uncovers what will be characterized as a poetics and politics of the chronotropics. A paradigm referring to a vision informed by idiosyncrasies of being and knowing that have shaped distinctive approaches to space and time in the area, the chronotropics undermines the hegemonic perspectives steeped in Newtonian and quantum physics that are inherent to the novelistic chronotope of western modernity, as first popularized by literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin in 1930s Russia.4 The narratives herein therefore participate in the epistemic resistance characteristic of what Derek Lee (2020) designates the postquantum novel, or “speculative ethnic fiction” (1) whose main imperative is to question the supremacy of science and debunk Occidental pretension to universality. In these chronotropic narratives that work to destabilize debilitating colonial patterns, space can shift, contract, or expand to encompass the region as a whole, its multiple points of origin, and its diaspora, while representations of time convey how little structural reform these societies have truly undergone. The complex, multidimensional textual interventions of the creative writers-theorists-activists included here draw attention to gender to revitalize regional discourses such as Antonio Benítez Rojo’s repeating island (1989), E. Kamau Brathwaite’s articulation of creolization (1971), Paul Gilroy’s black Atlantic, or Édouard Glissant’s Relation (1981, 1990, 1997).

Chronotropics seeks to amplify the dialogue Paul Gilroy (1993) initiated as he reformulated Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope for his black Atlantic (see Odile Ferly’s opening chapter in this volume). David W. Hart (2004) also resorts to Bakhtin and specifically his chronotope of the threshold (in which time is measured by the events of collective life) to discuss how the past functions in Caribbean literature to claim cultural (and, we might add, political) agency in the present. Isabel Hoving (2001) and Clarisse Zimra (1993) accentuated the postcolonial turn by examining the chronotope as the house in Beryl Gilroy and as Africa in Simone Schwarz-Bart. In Njelle Hamilton’s analysis of what she coins chronotrope (2018, 2019, see also her Caribbean Chronotropes, in progress), time supersedes space. Returning to an equal emphasis on both, chronotropics places gender at the core of the conversation.

Despite their significant material impact on our daily reality, Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotopes largely belong to the abstract domain of narratives, ideologies, and the imaginary. In this they differ from Michel Foucault’s heterotopias, which exist and operate within the physical world, although they remain on the margin (Foucault 1984 [1967], 47). By contrast, the chronotropics is a vision in the process of being (but rarely fully) realized. Chronotopes and to a large extent heterotopias are inherently conservative insofar as they act as a pressure relief mechanism that helps maintain “the order of things” (Foucault 1966). The poetics and politics of the chronotropics, on the other hand, have an avowed vocation for revolutionary change: it is intentional about undoing the status quo. While it is made of the fabric of dreams and ideals, it is anchored in the real and frequently translates as social activism. This sets the chronotropics apart from the utopia, which is more firmly entrenched in the realm of the imaginary, the unreal (Foucault 1984 [1967], 47).

Our approach also builds on transformative developments in philosophy such as those undertaken by Sylvia Wynter, Paget Henry, and Linda Martín Alcoff. Alcoff (2003) in particular has argued against the discipline’s assumptions that Western man and his experience constitute universality and truth. Alcoff has advocated for feminist epistemologies that legitimize the status of women and marginalized figures as authoritative knowers and that consider, in conjunction with other political markers such as race and culture, the implications of the “sexed body of the knower upon the production of knowledge” (Alcoff and Potter 1993, 2). The emphasis on community as the “primary agent of knowledge” (9) over the “isolated individual subject” (8) in Caribbean and feminist philosophies likewise often finds echo in the creative outputs that concern Chronotropics. The women authors examined here therefore reimagine the ontological and ontic in leading philosophical-political-poetic traditions. The result is that our collection emphasizes a sense of gendered solidarity embracing what Mayra Santos Febres, inspired by Erna Brodber (2014), has deemed a Caribbean fractality, one that conjures the concept of the uno múltiple, that is, the many-in-one.

Santos Febres (2019) expands on her concept in an unpublished lecture titled “The Fractal Caribbean.” For the Puerto Rican writer and scholar, feminist movements across the Caribbean underscore the ways in which African diasporic epistemological systems offer a space where we might reimagine solidarity practices beyond the geopolitical borders of the nation-state. She draws from teachings of Yoruba-Ifá traditions that claim Yo soy yo y mis santos (I am myself and my saints/spirits) as well as Vodou tradition which all understand the body as an open vessel. She likens it to the bodily experience of listening to jazz “a set of repetitions that are never the same, […] an improvisational solo from each and every instrument that composes melody, cacophony, but also rhythm … Improvisation lets different phrases reach for the manifestation of the message, the energy, the One that is Multiple” (translation Joshua R. Deckman’s). In this way, the atavistic drive towards the singular root or any claim of truth becomes obsolete, as each element within the totality is given the space to intervene, to interrupt, to demand a voice. She continues: “Time as rhythm becomes multi-layered. Each individual enters a system of relations that creates a reality that is both One and Multiple. Since we live in a world organized by linear movement of time and narratives, history is propelled by binary oppositions, black versus white, poor versus rich, native versus immigrant, male versus female, past versus present … or future.” Santos Febres urges us to break with this linear thinking in order to usher in new modes of relations, in which the stories and lived experiences of Caribbean women from across the diaspora combine with those of the archipelago to disrupt a violent history of colonial, heteropatriarchal power.

Remarking that theories of the Western Self (and by corollary its oppositional Others) developed in the age of colonialism and capitalism, foundational critic Sylvia Wynter takes a gendered anticolonial look at historically contingent epistemes or discursive frameworks and their conceptual schemas (Henry 2000, 126–128). Wynter (2003, 322–323) shows how epistemes, dependent on semiotically derived hierarchical binaries, schematize sameness/difference categories which, in turn, order and make social life intelligible. According to this tradition, first “Christian becomes Man1 (as political subject), then … Man1 becomes Man2 (as a bio-economic subject)” (318). Deemed as “isomorphic with the being of being human itself” (266), whiteness, Europeanness, and maleness become the dominant referents in this “matrix of colonial power” (Quijano 2000; Mignolo 2009, 3). The Caribbean woman exists discursively as “lack”: anti-reason, anti-civility, anti-culture, and as sub-human. Calvin L. Warren (2018) thus argues against a specific tradition of European philosophy that resulted in what he calls a “metaphysical holocaust” that enforced “the nonexistence of black being” (144) and obliterated their “place of representation” (145); he conveys the (in)ability to represent lack visually on the page by repeatedly crossing out the word “being” after “black” throughout his book. Wynter (1990) in her earlier work demonstrates the above by calling attention to the absence of “Caliban’s Woman,” a physiognomic partner for Shakespeare’s infamous racialized character in The Tempest. This volume engages with Wynter’s directive to decolonize spheres of intellectualism, especially the overdetermination of “Man.”

New postcolonial theories of Caribbeanness will only unfold, Wynter argues, after an “epistemological break” with the prevailing western logic/ideology (1984, 40), a mandate we call epistemic marronnage that the writers included here all take to heart, as illustrated most notably through their approaches to spacetime. Wynter and David Scott (2000) argue that “something else [besides the dominant cultural logic] constituted another—but also transgressive—ground of understanding … not simply a sociodemographic location but the site both of a form of life and of possible critical intervention” (164). Such sites of intervention are the “demonic” spaces and temporal pauses opened by each writer. The chronotropics articulates a new Caribbean, where bodies and imaginations come together to propose other modes of being in the world, ways that dissolve and break through the sediment of colonial-heteronormative patriarchy. Wynter’s move to apprehend ontology and epistemology from space and place opens critical paths towards “reengineering”—to borrow the term by Erna Brodber (1997)—an archipelago of woman’s thought which this volume begins to explore.

Inhabiting the Chronotropics of Ancestral Knowledge

Resonating with Wynter’s work, the authors studied here outline alternative ways of inhabiting Caribbean spacetime. Their writings reconstitute an expanded Caribbean space and actively push back at the legacy of colonialism that has been at the heart of the ongoing marginalization of women’s voices and (hi)stories. Many of these women tap into a deep feeling of solidarity with their kin, intellectual peers, and/or long line of ancestors to access “other” types of knowledge and creolize, as Henry argues, “aspects of shattered Amerindian, Indian, and African worldviews” (2000, 15). For example, Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, discussed in the opening chapter, pays tribute to her rebellious enslaved female forebears, whose spirits—much like Danticat’s in “Women Like Us” from Krik? Krak! (1995)—inhabit her and compel her to write “como si … estuviera en trance” (as if [she] were in a trance): “They direct my hands for me to write … for me to write them into being” (Arroyo Pizarro 2018, 48, translation Deckman’s). Among Arroyo Pizarro’s literary precursors is Santos Febres, whose novel Fe en disfraz (examined by Nicole Roberts) she credits as an inspiration for her own short stories in las Negras ([2012] 2013). Denouncing the official history of Puerto Rico “por habernos dejado fuera” (for leaving us out, translation Ferly’s) in her epigraph, Arroyo Pizarro restitutes the memory of enslaved women by illuminating their acts of resistance and contributions to humankind; reclaiming the woman-centered transgenerational knowledge in her fiction further advances her goal of “narr[ar] el devenir de las antepasadas” (Arroyo Pizarro 2018, 53) [telling the becoming of our forebears, Deckman’s translation], Arroyo Pizarro’s formulation evidences a chronotropic vision of time that merges past, present, and future: all happen and can be acted upon simultaneously. This applies to many works discussed in this collection, most prominently those that use time travelling as a central feature: Hopkinson’s Sister Mine (2013), Indiana’s La mucama de Omicunlé  (2015), Lord’s Redemption in Indigo (2010), Pineau’s Mes quatre femmes (2007), and Santos Febres’s Fe en disfraz (2009).

Thus, Arroyo Pizarro (like all the authors discussed in this volume) engage with “imaginación y creatividad” (Arroyo Pizarro 2018, 13) to forge a sense of community among black women across the archipelago and the black Atlantic who might see themselves in her fictional tales, in her archive of ancestral memories, and in the political project that emerges from her engagement with them. In Ferly’s chapter on Arroyo Pizarro and Kanor, this space of remembrance is re-articulated through the chronotope of the slave ship (in dialogue with Gilroy, Glissant, and Saidiya Hartman) and the immaterial archive of the body on which both writers draw to envision a future of renewed potential. Erna Brodber, Rita Indiana, Mayra Montero, and Gisèle Pineau utilize this same chronotope of ancestral knowledge to advocate for their own collective archives (biographies, histories, contemplated futures) in which women occupy a central place. Meanwhile, Nalo Hopkinson, Karen Lord, and Kettly Mars respectively outline a reliance on African and Hindu pantheons and folktales as well as the Bois Caïman Vodou ceremony in order to communicate a state of cohabitation with the spirits and a different metaphysics. Lisa Outar’s chapter expands the conversation to examine Indo-Caribbean representations that negotiate both vulnerable and powerful spaces of femininity to challenge the boundaries between the human and the non-human as well as conventional historiography and trauma narratives. This, in turn, opens a space for critical thought that may make room for women whose own beliefs, spiritual practices, oral traditions, and experiences have been systematically silenced or denigrated by the hegemonic history of their homelands. As such, this involves what Yomaira Figueroa (2020) has outlined as “worlds/otherwise,” or the enunciation of what has been rendered invisible by coloniality (2).

These women point to an “ancestor”—explicitly and implicitly—of trans-Caribbean identity and epistemologies: Lydia Cabrera, whose ethnographic studies on Ñáñigo people and Afro-Caribbean beliefs chart stories of gender, sexuality, and race that lay the groundwork for an intra-Caribbean immaterial archive. This archive—whether spiritual or corporeal—is elaborated as certain spiritual traditions, customs, nonmaterial entities, and ancestors are invoked, engaged, or given cultural value to make sense of lived experience. It is encoded in the practices that surround its construction—in the memories, feelings, and yearnings that mark its emergence. While for Kanor (2006, 2009) this archive grounded in the body encompasses more than the spiritual, Cabrera, specifically in her books Yemayá y Ochún and El monte, encounters a space of freedom and becoming within the realm of religiosity in which women in particular are empowered to follow the spirits to experiment with gender expression and sexual desire. She calls upon the spiritual archive of Afro-Cuban deities to document how her interlocutors engage with them, emulate them, and draw knowledge. In a similar way, Rita Indiana recurs to the work of Cabrera and her engagement with these religious practices—particularly in the blurring of gender and sexual boundaries through the deity Yemayá-Olokún, as noted by Joshua R. Deckman in his chapter on La mucama de Omicunlé.

Echoing other writers of the collection such as Nalo Hopkinson, Mayra Montero, or Pauline Melville (1997) in relation to Indigenous cosmologies in Guyana, Indiana returns to Afro-Indigenous ontologies to reject the idolatrous Cartesian mind/body dichotomy so central to European thought; in doing so, she breathes life back into old ways of knowing to produce new knowledges. Indiana thereby represents a particularly pan-Caribbean approach to these categories, anchoring herself firmly in the syncretic gaps between the islands of Cuba and Hispaniola. Born in the Dominican Republic and influenced by systems of Haitian Vodou that are prevalent in her musical productions (e.g., the song “Da’ pa’ lo’ do’”), she is an initiate in Afro-Cuban rites who resides in Puerto Rico. Her move to engage Yoruba systems developed in Cuba to make sense of Caribbean environmental disasters and colonial destruction specifically on the island of Hispaniola therefore performs a critical intervention that exceeds imposed colonial, linguistic, temporal, and epistemological boundaries. Indiana’s non-binary protagonist is the uno múltiple of African spiritual traditions—that is, they are themself, but they are also informed by multiple entities from the past and the future simultaneously. In this way, Indiana reconfigures how we might comprehend several Caribbean presents, by engaging with what Brodber would call a fractal timeline—or what we call a chronotropic mindset—whereby the here and now is disclosed through a continuous negotiation of what has come before and what may come to be.

Furthermore, Rita Indiana looks to her Afro-Cuban pantheon to envision an alternative textual-sacred space for gender fluidity and queerness. The author underscores the patakí of Yemayá-Olokún, a spirit of multiple caminos who can take on “male” and “female” attributes depending on the need of the moment. Indiana reconstructs gender by merging spirituality and storytelling; this resonates with several other writers such as Karen Lord, whose speculative folktale Redemption in Indigo disrupts sexual difference. As Tegan Zimmerman’s closing chapter argues, Lord updates the African-Caribbean Ananse figure by exploring the maternal/feminine and portraying the storyteller as non-binary. Other folkloric reimaginings within this collection, like the churile or the diablesse, strongly suggest that such stories can function as chronotopes capable of not only breaking through modern desires of (dis)embodiment but also destabilizing understandings of time that subscribe to linearity, that is to say, history.

For example, in L’Ange du patriarche (2018), Kettly Mars—much like Montero, Indiana, and Cabrera—opens a space to reflect on history within the transcorporeal realm of African-derived religious practices imbued with Christianity. In her novel, Mars (discussed by Robert Sapp) constructs an imaginary archive that resists the restrictive silences of the State archive. Ancestral remembrance enables the protagonist to open herself and her community to close communion with those who came before her, thus also opening the door to new ways of being Caribbean. Likewise, Mars stresses the role of women in Haitian history, shifting the spotlight from Boukman to Marinette pye chèch, the lesser-known mambo said to have assisted at the Bois Caïman ritual. This work underscores the oppressive, inescapable nature of history against which Mars positions her protagonist Emmanuela and her concept of cohabitation, whereby seemingly irreconcilable views of the past and ways of inhabiting the present coexist. Making possible an intervention into the future, cohabitation maintains the tension of the dialectic, preserving the mystery: it is resistance.

Resistance, in particular when spiritual, is at the core of Erna Brodber’s work too (Sharpe 2012). A trained historian and sociologist as well as a creative writer, Brodber decries the colonizers as “spirit thieves” whose onslaught on potentially subversive African religious practices “stymied the spiritual growth and development of transported Africans” (Brodber 2012a, xii), resulting in a region-wide psychic amputation that leaves Caribbean people, especially the most educated, “torn by the experience of living with two systems of thought that are difficult to reconcile” (xi), or, to use Mars’s terminology, a state of cohabitation that is excruciating because it is not assumed. Brodber responds to the existential threat of epistemic erasure by centering Afro-diasporic practices (see, for instance, Brodber 1974, 2012b, and 2013). Foregrounding Jamaican and African epistemologies such as myalism and fractals (the focus of A. Marie Sairsingh’s chapter in this volume), Brodber’s fiction, scholarship, and community activism thus emerge out of a sense of retribution and can be seen as a set of restorative practices or “sovereign acts,” to use the theoretical frame deployed by Megan Jeanette Myers in her chapter on Julia Alvarez, that empower Afrodescendants to counter colonial denigration and neoliberal assimilation; the reclamation of the 1838 Emancipation in Jamaica is one such sovereign act. Similarly, Hanétha Vété-Congolo (2018) shows how the enslaved were sustained in their resistance to dehumanization by Muntu, a concept from ancestral Bantu philosophy disseminated throughout sub-Saharan Africa that maintains that “everyone is a person” (rendered by the French Caribbean Creole aphorism tout moun sé moun), thereby positing equality as the fundamental basis of interpersonal relations.

In an interview in Bomb Magazine, Mayra Montero likewise claims to have “a great aesthetic, even philosophic affinity” with syncretic belief systems for which she maintains an altar in her house; “this wonderful mixture,” she adds, “gives us depth and spirituality as a people” (Prieto 2000, 2). Montero points to “we” as a community of Caribbean women who are brought together in difference through African diasporic beliefs. Montero (1995) makes an implicit argument for creolizing epistemologies, urging the reader to take into consideration what we can gather from traditions that have been demonized and made invisible, as Carine M. Mardorossian and Angela Veronica Wong’s chapter emphasizes. In a move similar to that of Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, Mayra Montero therefore builds upon the potential of the spiritual archive of rebellious being; this epistemological shift reveals the extent to which the subordination and marginalization of non-Western gnosis, ecology, and femininity proves ethically and logically untenable. Perspectives like Montero’s seek to redefine humans as stewards of the planet. These eco-conscious worldviews, in which spaces and times are infused with sacred meaning, pursue sustainable and reciprocal relations both intra and inter species, and between humans and nature. In her call to embrace the altar, Montero suggests that the first step towards retributive justice for these women’s histories is to recuperate, amplify, and insert ancient traditions of thought into contemporary Western epistemology. The authors analyzed in Chronotropics therefore reject this Anthropocene era by recuperating cosmogonies which de-center Man.

Indeed, the authors examined here challenge positivism with the metaphysical and other-worldly, existential and phenomenological, social and political. Several works discussed in this collection, e.g., Hopkinson’s Sister Mine, provide a lens through which to apprehend diaspora and sacred spaces of not only imagined histories but also as Afrofuturistic divine systems that radically affect women’s twenty-first-century visions of the Caribbean canon. Lord’s cosmological reconstruction of Ananse’s web, Indiana’s reformulations of traditional patakís, or Brodber’s reconfiguration of African fractals into a familial mat similarly affirm the validity of autochthonous conceptions of space, time, and humanity. The blurring of geopolitical and spiritual borders within African/Indigenous/Indo and other cosmovisions, however, also conjures into being a longer history of dispossession and forced displacement—from which many souls are unable to recover. Other forms of ancestral knowledge, most notably alternative histories, are therefore invoked by the writers gathered here. Thus, Brodber’s scholarly and literary work centers Afro-diasporic epistemes—in her words, the Alternative Tradition (Brodber 1997, 72)—by unearthing and preserving Jamaican narratives from the perspective of the enslaved and their descendants, “the half [that] has never been told”—as one character in Myal puts it.5 A. Marie Sairsingh’s chapter discusses how in Nothing’s Mat Brodber advocates to remap the oral tradition (represented by the family history for which the mat stands) in the production of academic knowledge (as illustrated in Princess’s scholarly pursuit to understand the Caribbean family). The same is true of Brodber’s scholarship (1990, 2013).

Deeply invested in oral history projects, Brodber delineates how for local historians “the research process begins, not with the archives of documents but with the very large archive of our minds, imagination and memory” (Brodber 2000, 119). Pointing to “the paucity of records for a conventional history of us [Black Jamaicans],” she further contends that “imagination and meditation” may well be the only avenue to self-discovery for Black people, a point illustrated by her own fiction that also echoes other Caribbean writers, most notably E. Kamau Brathwaite (another historian), Alejo Carpentier, Édouard Glissant, and Derek Walcott, as well as Dionne Brand, discussed by Erica L. Johnson in this volume. Brodber and Brathwaite (1975), however, uniquely apply this methodology and their Afrocentric conception of time to the discipline of history. Brodber’s multidisciplinary research in sociology, history, social psychology, and Afro-diasporic belief systems strives to instil in post-Independence Jamaicans a knowledge of their past and vision of themselves unfiltered by the neo/colonial lens from which can emerge “a new definition of the possibilities of our collective selves” (Brodber 1997, 72). Seeking to “re-engineer blackspace,” Brodber tasks “the intellectual worker” with “the development of philosophy, of creeds, of myths, of ideologies, of pegs on which to hang social and spiritual life, the construction of frames of reference” (73).

To this end, Brodber conceived Blackspace, where what she terms “blackspace reasoning” (John 2012, 74) is collectively generated and circulates far beyond the readership of her fiction and scholarship. Indeed, Brodber’s multidisciplinary research steadfastly promotes what literary critic Rae Ann Meriwether (2012) has called “learning from below” (118), that is, to refrain from over analysis and let the collected data (oral testimonies, questionnaires) speak for itself. Despite its name ostensibly pointing to space, Blackspace is equally, if not primarily, concerned with the survival of the African legacy through time. This makes Brodber’s project a truly chronotropic endeavour. Occurring in the same place (the rural community of Woodside in Jamaica) at the same time (over the two weeks leading to the Emancipation of 1838 celebration) every year, including during the COVID-19 pandemic, Blackspace has emerged since around 2000 as a landmark in its own right for segments of the Jamaican community and the African diaspora (Brodber and Ellis Russel 2001; John 2012; Nixon 2015). During the events that integrate art, lectures, a play by Brodber, a religious service, and youth educational workshops, time is transformed: the past and present are explored from various interdisciplinary scholarly, educational, and artistic angles and the future is optimistically envisioned. Blackspace thus solidifies as a chronotope the 1838 Emancipation, whose status as a realm of memory subsisted among Jamaican folks but had been considerably eroded among the educated middle class subject to a Eurocentric policy of forgetting carried out in the name of national harmony.

For their part, Fabienne Kanor and Mayra Santos Febres insist on the corporeality of the collective memory and transgenerational trauma inherited by Caribbean people and more specifically, women. Ferly discusses in her chapter Kanor’s notion of corps-fossile, or fossil body, which echoes sociologist Roger Bastide’s corporeal geography, or his contention that the epistemic disruption caused by the sudden disappearance with the Middle Passage of the topographical markers that anchored collective memory was palliated with the partial incorporation of this memory into religious rituals and dances (Francis 2016, 280; Bastide 1970). The term “fossil body” points to a layered memory made up of disjunctions and dislocations that resulted in abrupt epistemic shifts for peoples of the black Atlantic. Similarly, the tropes of scars, bodily pain, and—in the case of Santos Febres’s Fe en disfraz—sadomasochistic love, accentuate the imprint left by a violent past on black women’s bodies and psyche, distorting their very essence, as manifested in their intimate relationships. In this sense, while in Arroyo Pizarro’s las Negras and Kanor’s Humus the slave ship emerges as a chronotope of the black Atlantic, as is also true in Dionne Brand (A Map to the Door of No Return, The Blue Clerk), in Santos Febres’s novel the very body, most notably when it is black and female, becomes the chronotope. Fe’s personal chronotope—the titular disguise, or the dress from the past—also features in the text as the avatar of the body. However, donned by Fe every year on Halloween and, centuries earlier, by a light mulatto woman striving to assimilate into Brazilian white society, this time travelling “mask” (understood both in its Caribbean meaning of full carnival disguise and in the way Frantz Fanon uses it in Black Skin, White Masks) turns out to be both illusory and particularly damaging to the black psyche.

Polyphonic neoslavery texts such as Arroyo Pizzaro’s and Kanor’s resonate with Pineau’s memoir Mes quatre femmes (see Renée Larrier’s chapter). Pineau subverts the genre’s standard parameters by recounting the lives and voices of four asynchronous female ancestors imprisoned in the jail of her own memory. This “psychic map of the past” (Zimra 1993, 60) attempts to confront the history of enslavement and its legacy, personally and collectively. Pineau’s memory jail thus figures as a chronotope that Larrier identifies as a distinctly gendered lieu de mémoire. Like in many of the works under study here, Pineau’s chronotropic approach to the historically gendered trope of domesticity reflects not only the irrevocable implications of coloniality, migration, and capitalism but also the complicated dynamics of race and color as they intersect with spacetime, not least of which includes women’s struggles for independence and rooms of their own. The narratives and scholarly chapters in Chronotropics are a testament to the fact that bringing Caribbean women into being through literature is “no longer simply or only a practice of resistance or of counter-discursivity but an assertion of subjectivity, agency—in short, of autonomy” (Chancy 2020, 2), an autonomy with the power to disrupt the discursive and sociopolitical hegemonies of “Man’s” time and space.

(Im)Possible Subjects of the Chronotropics

Many of the creative outputs studied in Chronotropics participate in the “geographical and conceptual de/reterritorialization” (Huggan 2008, 26) of the region. Maryse Condé’s entire oeuvre was pioneering in deterritorializing Caribbeanness, expanding spacetime beyond the strictly physical boundaries of the Caribbean and critically examining its historical connection with Africa through the interrogation of the continent’s chronotopal status in the intellectual discourses of the decolonization era. For Condé, redefining collective identity should entail transcending “origin, ethnicity, language or colour” (Condé 2014, 152). Condé’s sobering portrayals of black life, aptly captured in Le fabuleux et triste destin d’Ivan et Ivana and Les belles ténébreuses, call for a reassessment of Caribbean identity and the subject’s position in an age of hyper-capitalism. The author’s depiction of disempowered nomads who often take their frustrations out on women, for instance, cautions us against a chaotic, heedless future fueled by technology and globalization that begets exacerbated poverty, exploitation, intensified violence, as well as religious fundamentalism and militarization, as shown in Valérie K. Orlando’s chapter.

Beyond a serious reflection on geopolitically displaced individuals, Condé, like Julia Alvarez (discussed by Megan Jeanette Myers), evokes “other” types of Caribbean communities, which are not tied to any particular land, but are expanding, archipelagic, and diasporic in their conceptualization. This chronotropic vision anticipates Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel’s call to imagine archipelagos and islands otherwise in her use of the term “terripelagoes”: “it is only when the regional and the diasporic are activated in dialogue and tension that we can fully grasp the multiplicity of dimension of occupied spaces, and how central imagination is to unleashing their many meanings” (Martínez-San Miguel 2021, 120). Through migrant literature we become witness to Martinez-San Miguel’s “dialogue and tension” and how this opens space for the emergence of new modalities of (un)belonging and being.

As Derek Gladwin (2014) indicates, “to map” is not only “to claim territory and ultimately define ownership” but “also a way to experience landscape through memory and imagination” (161). A geographical concentration therefore underscores notions of space as ongoing hybrid productions that shift through time, “for while the closed system is the foundation for the singular, universal opening that makes room for a genuine multiplicity of trajectories, and thus potentially of voices, it also posits a positive discrete multiplicity against an imagination of space as the product of negative spacing, through the abjection of the other” (Massey 2005, 67). Here Doreen Massey highlights the critical position that space-making occupies as a “locus of the generation of new trajectories,” while also positing that an open understanding of space leads to an equally open understanding of time. This heterogeneity stemming from the convergence of multiple narratives rather than an intrinsically coherent site that predetermines human experience thus allows for the concepts of Caribbean time and history to be questioned and reapprehended. Identity and belonging are configured as a process that must be negotiated in the here-and-now, a process that must take place within and between existing spaces, places, and temporalities (140). Thus, in engaging questions of spacetime, the Caribbean women of this volume shift from a historical narrative that seeks to delimit Caribbean space and restrict the movements of certain bodies, towards a new spatio-temporal future, one of “loose ends and missing links,” in Massey’s words (3). This future becomes a heterogeneous space where one is simultaneously able to uncover the past, take power in the present, and forge a new kind of future.

Considering identity as a simultaneous breaking and braiding in relation to mobility and space is also a major preoccupation of Indo-Trin-Can writer, filmmaker, and visual artist Shani Mootoo (2008, 83). Like Ingrid Persaud, Mootoo regards the Kala Pani as “an opportunity [for her Indian foremothers] to reinvent themselves in new landscapes where their histories were unknown, where caste, for instance, could be shed or, for the enterprising and daring, changed” (83). Indeterminism thus leads Mootoo to emphasize women’s agency during the indentureship period. In the open, fluid, and undefined future, women can redefine not only their being-in-the-world but also “dis- or re-order” the world itself (Mootoo 2000, 109). Mapping onto her personal experiences, Mootoo’s literary works routinely take up queerness as a means to interrogate heteronormative spaces such as the street, the restaurant, or the family home. In both the region and the diaspora, she has sought “Permission to exist as a woman, a woman of color, as a lesbian, within–not on the out-side of–the everyday world of society” (110). Accordingly, one finds across Mootoo’s artistic productions examples of exile or debilitating trauma, when one cannot escape the prejudices of her time and place, especially rigid national demarcations or identity markers that are either seemingly immutable or hierarchized according to traditional binaries that Other women and minorities.6

Mootoo’s fiction He Drown She in the Sea (discussed by Vivian Nun Halloran) suggests there might be a radical potential for reinventing the self if one is unknown and/or unmappable. This contrasts with several of the works studied in this collection such as Condé’s, Pineau’s, and Indiana’s that illustrate the link between enslavement and present-day immigrants and refugees, both legal and undocumented. Mootoo, on the other hand, advances a cartography that seeks neither a return to nor a romanticizing of an ancestral homeland, the Caribbean, or its diaspora (Mootoo 2008, 83). Instead, hybridizing factual and fictional spaces with past and possible temporalities, Mootoo explores how new opportunities for a transnational identity and community might be coordinated. The intense focalization of Othered, queer, or monstrous selves further demonstrates the writer’s desire for a Caribbean that might not exist in facticity or even its mimetic copy, but in italics, just beyond the horizon, in the achronotopic, outside physical spacetime, those pages left blank at the end of the text.

As Gladwin contends, “Historically European countries perceived and steadily charted so-called ‘blank spaces’ of the globe” in an attempt to extend their empires and to solidify power (Gladwin 2014, 160); thus, topographical blank spaces reflect an official discursive absence that as many of the writers in our collection affirm cannot always be revived, not even by literature. Critic Kaya Fraser suggests in connection to Dionne Brand that “To believe that [one can make a new space through language, that is, the writer’s ‘own shadow’] is to swallow another myth, created in and by language, which effectively forgets ‘the history of harm,’ the truth of suffering” (Fraser 2005, 16, quoting Brand’s No Light to Land On, 45). This “own shadow” is precisely the relation Brand develops through her eponymous blue clerk and her poem’s speaker—reinforced by the inclusion of several blank pages throughout the text. One of Brand’s chief concerns is to explore how the black woman’s being is (un)realizable through language. As with many of Brand’s texts, in The Blue Clerk (2018) black bodies in the archipelago and its diaspora are simultaneously made and unmade. Paraphrasing Makeda Silvera, Leslie C. Sanders poignantly asserts: “History resides in language, which in turn inscribes it on to landscape, translating space and place into lived genealogy” (Sanders 2009, xi). Resonating with Condé’s cynicism, Brand offers a bleak vision of the world, one in which racialized, gendered bodies are violently displaced: “Our inheritance in the Diaspora is to live in this inexplicable space. That space is the measure of our ancestors’ step through the door toward the ship. One is caught in the few feet in between. The frame of the doorway is the only space of true existence” (Brand 2001, 20, emphasis Zimmerman’s). Brand and the other authors examined in Chronotropics routinely return to the question of how literature might be redeployed to navigate identity and inhabit spacetime differently. Their work signals new ways of Caribbean knowing and being and in doing so directly challenges “Man’s” ever-increasingly dystopian, imperialistic, and secularized future.

Re-engineering Community

Literature serves as a vehicle to annihilate borders and construct a region that seeks to address the legacy of genocide, ethnic discrimination, and ecosystem tampering while countering centuries of imperialist capitalism and Western notions of the self. Yet beyond their creative and intellectual productions, the writers gathered in Chronotropics suggest that also central to these goals is a commitment to community, cooperation, and social justice. They actively engage in efforts to create a sense of “we” (or in the Rastafari formulation, “I and I”) rather than “I.” For example, the assertion of Caribbean epistemologies is an important political aim for Erna Brodber, Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, and Mayra Santos Febres. Brodber is invested in her grassroots educational project Blackspace, while Arroyo Pizarro works to uncover hidden histories of Black women from the archives of enslavement and reconstruct their lives in literature through her groundbreaking oral history project, the collective Cátedra de mujeres negras ancestrales; for her part, Santos Febres was instrumental in formalizing the first program in Afro-Diasporic and Racial Studies at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, inaugurated in 2021. Santos Febres sees the uno múltiple harnessed in the creative response to hurricane María in Puerto Rico in 2017 seeking to re-engineer community: the artists “told [their] stories together in camps” and “proposed dialogues of multiple agencies,” while “publishing books alongside videos and movies, and editorial practices and artistic political interventions, and community-based programs that reinscribe knowledge” (Santos Febres 2019). These voices ruptured the official narrative of María, the death count as publicized by governments both on the island and in the US, and pointed out how the environmental disaster was manufactured by years of imperial capitalism. They created together a complex, mangrove-like web of relations in which each participant worked from a specific contextual space to add their voice to the larger movement—a singularity that became multiple, encompassing contradiction while demanding a new type of future. This artist collective fully aligns with the activism of many women authors featured here; in this sense, Caribbean fractality shares deep affinities with mangrove poetics (Ferly 2012) and the chronotropics.

Echoing Shani Mootoo’s multidisciplinary artistic projects, Rita Indiana is an outspoken advocate for LGBTQ PLUS_SPI rights in the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and other Caribbean nations, and created an anthem of protest through her album Mandinga Times (Indiana 2020). Likewise, Fabienne Kanor’s journalistic, scholarly and creative work, most notably her film Des pieds, mon pied and her novels Humus and Faire l’aventure (Kanor 2009, 2006, and 2014, respectively) document and convey the psychic cost of human trafficking across space and time. The works studied in this volume thus recuperate and revise local stories, cosmologies, and philosophies to defy totalizing notions of time and space and to conceive Caribbean women in the twenty-first century anew. Whether revisiting the past or envisioning the future, the possibility for social change, resistance, and/or new homelands therefore remains powerfully present in the pluriverse of the Caribbean and beyond. Chronotropics calls and responds to the need for a turn toward new spacetimes and towards solidarity and reparation through archival disruption, radical remapping, and epistemic marronnage.

Notes

  1. 1.

    For the Indigenous populations, confinement on reservations quickly followed dispossession; by contrast, maroon camps defied colonial control and its concomitant spatial logic.

  2. 2.

    A case in point is the Western calendar, which purports to impose the birth of Christ as the universal origin; the compression of time zones in countries as extensive as Canada, Russia, or the United States, for instance, also sheds light on the artificial nature of the time we live by.

  3. 3.

    In her Mayaya Rising, Dawn Duke cites Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro as an example among others of Caribbean and Latin American Afrodescendant women who are “both creative and philosophical producers… driven to design discourses that highlight the deeper ideological agendas behind such poetic production” (Duke 2023, 8, 12). Fabienne Kanor’s essays La poétique de la cale: Variations sur le bateau négrier (2022) share the same intention. Duke further discusses the theoretical positioning of Mayra Santos Febres in detail (22–24).

  4. 4.

    Most often credited for coining the term, Bakhtin defines the chronotope as “intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (Bakhtin 1981, 84). For a contemporary adaptation of the chronotope, see, for instance, Vaara and Pedersen 2013.

  5. 5.

    This spin on Bob Marley’s lyrics in “Get Up Stand Up” is a good illustration on how Brodber fuses the vernacular and oral popular culture with the written intellectual tradition. See also O’Callaghan (2012, p. 65).

  6. 6.

    Having been born in Ireland, Mootoo inadvertently lost her Trinidadian citizenship when she became Canadian.