Using scholarly research on Caribbean literature conducted in the Caribbean Collection at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, we will discuss source materials that have been collected from the center on Caribbean studies and address "Howard University and the Archives: Reconfiguring the Diaspora in Afro-Caribbean Studies."

Alick Lazare’s Kalinago Blood (2013) brings a new understanding of the Kalinago people and the narrative of their past. This new framing is demonstrated in the book title, which addresses the indigenous people by their ancestral name, Kalinago, and not by the name “Carib,” which suggests “cannibals” and after which the region was named (Knight 20). Hilary Beckles argues that the Kalinago were intentionally targeted “to be enslaved, driven out, or exterminated” (Beckles 80). The novel begins with the real event in 1626, when the English and French settlers on Saint Kitts executed a genocide, motivated by colonial expansion and resource exploitation. Kalinago Blood offers ways of witnessing the dwindling numbers of the Kalinago people as well as their fight to survive. Today, Dominica is the only Caribbean island with a significant population of Kalinago people.

Next we discuss Grace Nichols, specifically via her collection of poems, I Have Crossed an Ocean (2010). Early poems include the Long-Memoried Woman, whose memory preserves her kidnapping across the Atlantic and eventually her decision to use her herbalist skills to brew rebellion against her enslavers. As such, the Long-Memoried Woman represents Black people’s indigeneity as a continuation of their own traditions in spite of colonization and enslavement. In later poems, Nichols presents a second, perhaps coterminous form of Black indigeneity via syncretism with other Indigenous people, and specifically the Mexica people of what is now central Mexico. The narrator of “Sunris,” for example, increasingly identifies with Mexica history and individuals, such as her interlocutor, Motecuzohma, which gestures to a shared Indigenous past, present, and future. Ultimately, Nichols’s various poems demonstrate that routes to indigeneity for African and Diasporic Black peoples are a constellation as diverse as they are.

Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak! considers meanings of indigenization in the aftermath of the Duvalier dictatorships by connecting contemporary life to centuries of Haitian history, as exemplified in the opening narrative. “Children of the Sea” recalls histories of the Middle Passage by depicting one narrator’s exit from Haiti via boat. The text references marronage practices with the other narrator’s migration from Port-au-Prince to the fictitious Ville Rose. The recurrences of these and other histories in a scene set in the 1990s show indigenization to be a continual process shaped by inter- and intranational migration. Danticat shows through this narrative how storytelling serves as a form of indigenization of culture and history.

Caste, however, is a covert phenomenon that we get to observe in the Caribbean only when scrutinized closely enough to sieve through the layers of culture integration across generations. Rooted in Brahminical virtues and ways of being/non-being, the Brahminical hierarchical structure of rigid stratification of people on the basis of labor, caste becomes a blunt reality that also divides the laborers, as said by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. In The Swinging Bridge, Espinet shares the story of Mona Singh, a Trinidadian woman of Indian heritage living in Montreal, tracing back the story of her great-grandmother Gainder, who fled from the Brahminical hegemonic Sati system only to end up on an indentured ship crossing Kala Pani to reach the Caribbean. Espinet skillfully intertwines various timelines through Mona’s dual role as both a documentarian and a daughter, employing themes of intergenerational trauma, silences, and linguistic echoes to gradually reveal a repressed matrilineal history. This journey through time and space allows Espinet to examine the impacts of colonial violence and the complexities of cultural identity and caste structures, framing storytelling as a vital act of survival and resistance. The novel presents diasporic identity as a process of reclamation—one that is often incomplete and painful, yet crucial for achieving historical justice and personal emancipation.