Antilles – ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY

Here is not “West India”: Roi Kwabena

A production of “West India,” a musical spoken poem of my late friend and collaborator, Dr. Roi Kwabena, from his Y42K album. This video plays on the weight of Eurocentric constructions of Caribbean history and identity, a zone where hegemonic European and American fantasies were played out. In response, Kwabena calls for a reclamation of […]

Restoration: More Indigenous than the Ancestors, in the Poet’s Eye

I was struck by this passage from Derek Walcott‘s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. I had read this at the time it was released and had forgotten this passage until I accidentally found it again in the last few weeks. Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments […]