Since the turn of the twentieth century, U.S. practices of colonization, military occupation, extractive capitalism, and neoliberal structural adjustments have profoundly impacted Caribbean peoples, environments, and economies. As current world politics take an overt turn to right-wing policies, U.S. interventions across the Caribbean region are intensifying. This is evident in recent colonial-capitalist approaches to the ecological landscapes of Puerto Rico, military interventions in Venezuela, and U.S.-generated socioeconomic and humanitarian crises in Cuba. Within these political landscapes, the Caribbean emerges as a pivotal site for resistance against imperial and colonial forces across the hemisphere. In line with the MLA Presidential Theme on Emancipatory Narratives, this panel examines how contemporary Caribbean literary and cultural production—including performative and sonic forms—articulate geographic imaginaries grounded in an emancipatory “poetics of landscape” (Glissant 1989). In so doing, this panel positions Caribbean literature and culture as critical terrains for theorizing spatial struggle and liberation across the Americas.

Elizabeth Russ offers an examination of Rita Indiana’s novel Hecho en Saturno (2018), where she attends to the novel’s depiction of revolution, its failures, and its possible futures, with a focus on the aesthetics of revolution and its aftermath in two different urban spaces: Santo Domingo and Havana. Russ’s presentation considers how, as the novel’s protagonist travels between these Caribbean capitals, the distinct built environments of each city reflect the different sociopolitical paths taken by the Dominican Republic and Cuba, even as they point to undergirding similarities. She pays special attention to detailed descriptions of paintings, prints, graffiti, masks, and other visual artifacts that are both observed and created by the protagonist, who is a painter. Such images, Russ argues, permeate the novel in ways that underscore linkages as well as breakages between the cities in question and the disparate histories of revolution they represent.

Drawing upon Yarimar Bonilla’s notion of “non-sovereign politics” (2015), Jaden Morales theorizes the concept of non-sovereign performances to describe how Puerto Rican performances expose the epistemic and material constraints of state power and colonial capitalism that continue to drive the world deeper toward ecological collapse. Analyzing the extended-play Tierra (2024) by the Puerto Rican band Chuwi and activists’ beach parties as a form of “land/rescue occupation” (Zambrana 2021), Morales highlights the longue durée of environmental struggle against tourist-oriented development and demonstrate how, against the non-future heralded by colonial capitalism, Puerto Rican performances offer visions of a decolonial future for the archipelago.

Coraline Kandassamy expands this discussion on performance to the landscapes of Jamaica. Building on Sylvia Wynter’s concept of the “plot,” a space cultivated by enslaved populations for survival and autonomy within plantation systems, she argues that dancehall gatherings function as nocturnal urban plots, where overlooked and under-resourced environments are transformed into sites of collective life-making. Focusing on roadside rehearsals and late-night parties staged in streets, yards, and vacant lots, this paper analyzes how dancehall mobilizes infrastructures that are often marked by historical neglect. Drawing on ethnographic and ethno-choreographic research, alongside frameworks from Black geographies and political ecology, Kandassamy demonstrates how dancehall produces alternative environmental relations by activating these spaces through rhythm, repetition, and collective presence.

Yafrainy Familia serves as respondent for the panel, offering a reflection that expands on the interventions by Russ, Morales, and Kandassamy and considers what is at stake when we attend to Caribbean spatial and cultural practices from an archipelagic perspective. Each panelist will present for approximately fifteen minutes, with about ten minutes reserved for the respondent’s reflections, and an additional fifteen minutes allocated for audience discussion at the end. By bringing together scholars at different career stages—a doctoral candidate, a postdoctoral researcher, and faculty at the assistant and associate levels—this panel amplifies diverse methodological and theoretical approaches in literary and cultural studies while highlighting the potential and constraints of emancipatory geographic practices in the Caribbean today.