This essay argues that narco-narratives–in film, television, literature, and music–depend on structures of narrative doubles to map the racialized and spatialized construction of illegality and distribution of death in the circum-Caribbean narco-economy. Narco-narratives stage their own haunting by other geographies, other social classes, other…[Read more]

Drawing on Arabic textual traditions and foregrounding a liminal time and space constituted
by the experience of administrative detention, of the expired visa, of
deportation, and of repatriation, Muslim slave narratives deserve recognitions as generative
forebears of transnational, multicultural literature in both England
and the United…[Read more]

This essay reexamines the figure of Franz Kafka (1883–1924) in light of his
largely ignored, recursive links to circum-Caribbean and Black Atlantic
processes of racialized exploitation and corporal punishment. When we
centre Kafka’s extensive biographical and literary engagements with these
processes, the persistent debate over Kafka’s statu…[Read more]

The media reception of Drown frames Junot Díaz as a voice of the street that denounces the subjugating violence of internal US colonialism. However, Drown itself suggests that this extra-textual critique displaces the reader’s analytic gaze. The stories in the collection intimate that it is not oppressive socio-economic conditions that co…[Read more]