Spanning from mid-century Cuban rumberas, to contemporary Dominican trans writers, to Haiti as an “ethno-sexual frontier,” this session shows how intersectional issues of gender and race remain central to both the Caribbean cultural politics and the global consumption of Caribbean bodies. Decolonial thinkers Walter Mignolo and Nelson Maldonado-Torres highlight how cultural institutions like museums, theaters, and publishing houses have reinforced colonialism by erasing minority cultures. Meanwhile, Antonio Benítez-Rojo and Lisa Lowe show that cultural production both sustains colonial legacies and serves as a site of resistance. These presentations explore film and publishing as spaces where these opposing forces intersect both perpetuating colonial histories and amplifying marginalized voices.
The Caribbean has long been a site of global encounters, where individuals exist both here and elsewhere, simultaneously rooted and displaced (Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation). The Caribbean agents explored in these presentations engage with these dynamics, that, despite the growing scholarship on decolonial thought and Caribbean cultural production remain fragmented.
The session will begin with a three-minute introduction, followed by four 13-minute presentations (52 minutes total). The respondent will then lead a five-minute moderated discussion. A 15-minute unstructured discussion will conclude the session.
Presentation Abstracts
Cary Peñate, Tropical Tourism Onscreen: An International Exhibit of Caribbean Blackness
This paper explores the participation of the Afro-Cuban dance troupe Mulatas de Fuego in various Cuban (Rincón Criollo, 1950), Mexican (Salón Mexico, 1948) , and Argentinean films (Una gitana en la Habana, 1950). The group’s mediated rumba and mambo dances helped bring a globalized understanding of Afro-Cuban dance, one deeply embedded in colonial politics and tourism of race between Cuba and other nations.
Damian Deamici, Counterculture and Decoloniality in 1960s Cuba: A Failed Dialogue
This presentation examines the reception of global 1960s counterculture in Cuba and the adoption of its ethos and aesthetics by the young writers of Ediciones El Puente. I argue that their marginalization reflected a deeper failure to recognize the points of contact between the notions of freedom promoted by countercultural movements and those envisioned by anti-colonial projects. The presentation situates this failed dialogue within Frantz Fanon’s reflection on the discontinuity between the subjectivity necessary for decolonial struggle and the one required for its aftermath.
Justo Planas, Coloniality of Love and Haitian Tourism in a Transatlantic Film
This paper analyzes how the film Heading South (Laurent Cantet, 2005), captures the complex interactions between middle-aged white female tourists and Afro-Haitian men, framing the Caribbean beach as an "ethnosexual frontier"—a term coined by Joane Nagel to describe spaces where racial, ethnic, and national divides are navigated through sexual exchanges. Drawing on Kamala Kempadoo’s concept of "sexual-economic transactions," I argue that the film complicates the colonial foundations of Caribbean tourism, revealing how erotic economies sustain transnational dependencies while serving as a means of agency and social repositioning for local individuals.
Vialcary Crisóstomo Tejada, Cantiga Ediciones and the Decolonial Turn: Reimagining Race, Gender, and Sexuality
In 2020, Afro-Dominican trans author Johan Mijail launched the first series of publications from Cantiga Ediciones, an independent editorial project based in the Dominican Republic. In the inaugural title, Mijail introduces its dedication to publishing the work of Black, Afro-descendant, and LGBTQI+ writers. This presentation reads Cantiga Ediciones as an artistic-political intervention that resists the modern/colonial world-system and articulates alternative modes of being. Through an analysis of several of its publications, I argue that Cantiga Ediciones enacts a decoloniality from/for that not only destabilizes dominant categories of race, gender, and sexuality, but also gestures toward new forms of subjectivity and relationality.
Diversity Statement
Bridging linguistic, national, and disciplinary contexts within Caribbean studies, the scholars of the panel address cultural production in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. Moreover, the panel centers on voices that have been historically marginalized within both academic and artistic institutions.