Introduction & Guide

Fresh.

Fresh as in raw.

Fresh as in new.

Fresh and fast.

Fresh and forward.

Fresh-up.

Bold.

Unapologetic.

To start fresh. Wheel-and-come-again.

In the nation languages of the English-speaking Caribbean, “fresh” indexes recentness, and newness, but also the opportunity to come again, harder than before. It connotes boldness, impertinence, and promiscuity-a shameless disrespect for propriety, for knowing one’s place. Across the artwork and articles in the Frontiers print journal and the essays in Frontiers Augmented online, we center public scholarship, serving up fresh voices and perspectives. We seek to both offer something new and to return to well-worn themes with a clear and unfaltering voice.

Contemporary resurgence of nationalisms, militarization, violences, economic inequities, and emboldened white supremacy unmask the turn-of century hype over hyperconnectivity, globalization, diversity, and gender equality. The reconfiguration of the human as human capital, with its attendant metrics, preoccupies individuals and developing countries clutching to the cruel optimism of the postcolonial promise of development.^[1] On the frontlines of climate change, the threat of and political inertia toward rising sea levels call in to question our very survival. For Sylvia Wynter, these are not separate developments but rather interconnected and symptomatic of the problem of Man—or a single way of being human—mis- and over-representing itself as the human.^[2]

This collection confronts urgent contemporary political questions, harnessing feminist perspectives and centering the experiences, strategies, and thinking technologies from the Caribbean, Americas, and Africa. Fresh is a movement text for our hyper-connected world. This hybrid collection of personal essays, creative nonfiction, and scholarly writing for a popular audience convenes artists, activists, writers, troublemakers, scholars, and everyday people living on the frontlines of intersecting relations of power to confront issues not adequately addressed in the existing scholarship. Fresh features urgent feminist and queer mediations on migration, erotic autonomy, violence, gender, race, feminist movements, knowledge, and how we make life in light of, in spite of, and beyond the multiple and interconnected prisms/prisons of power which constrain the majority. Fresh is uncompromising in claiming space for thought, action, and change from the perspectives of racialized women, girls, and gender expansive people; doing so by harnessing the power, spirit, value, and complexities of feminist networking and solidarities.

This is not without its challenges. We three editors (Tonya, Halimah, and Andrea) are located in the academy as tenured faculty at universities in the Anglophone Caribbean and in the US. This is also the case for the majority of authors of the scholarly essays contained herein. The location within the academy comes with a set of affordances out of which we write, create, disturb, and experience the politics and tensions that arise from decades of institutionalizing feminism. That being said, we edit this volume as three colleagues and friends committed to performing our ancestral duty of shifting inequalities. We do this work as women in feminist movements, in feminist organizations, as part of both privileged and marginalized communities and in service of those with whom we learn and grow.

This collection begins with the spiritual meditation of m. nourbeSe Philip on circular breathing. So fundamental is breath to human existence, that it is here we must turn for an alternative universality outside of a patriarchal and ethnocentric Western humanism. The demonic ground, this subjunctive potentiality to radically shift the order to knowledge, this monstrously powerful potential (to use Catherine Johns formulation in this volume), is imagined in the significance of someone, a woman, breathing for each of us, until we could breathe for ourselves. In this spirit of a search for liberatory alternatives, Andrea N. Baldwin offers up the brackish possibilities of Caribbean feminist ecologies for enacting new worlds. The space where saltwater and freshwater meet is teeming with life, Caribbean feminisms too are brilliantly alive and incandescent, Baldwin argues. “I could almost see different worlds,” says visual artist Simone Asia who offers emotional landscapes and dreamscapes. Lindsay Joan’s dreamscape explores Afro-Surinamese identity, healing, and cultural retrieval. Here the circuit between the visual art and the writing enacts this circular breathing which opens up alternative possibilities.

Recognizing the theorizing of the street, the yard, the kitchen table, and queer and feminist gathering spaces online and off, the contributors assembled here such as artist Ada M. Patterson, whose exploration of trans identity makes a singular contribution to the collection and Trinidadian writer Atillah Springer who explores sacred power, recalibrate the vulnerability and exposure of the personal and spiritual into modes of collective strength. Feminist and queer organizing is a central theme across the collection with explorations of women’s rights in Rwanda, online feminisms and women’s organizations in Barbados. Activist Ifásínà Efunyemi chronicles Productive Oganisations of Women in Action of Belize in the tradition of storying the movements, which as Alissa Trotz insists, keeps them alive.^[3] We are offered a fresh reading of the 1970s and 1980s feminist and women’s organizing in Barbados by Tonya Haynes who demonstrates the fraught process of demands for social transformation by women. For Haynes, what might be regarded at first glance as adherence to middle-class normative femininity by women organizing for change, often masked the enactment of patriarchal privilege and violence by men intended to derail women’s claims to bodily autonomy and an end to gender subordination. Offered up here is a fresh look at the operation of race, class, and gender in feminist organizing in Barbados and the Caribbean. Haynes goes beyond signaling the presence of these systems of power and difference to say something new about how they in fact manifested for women in activism.

Intentionally and politically written in the language of the everyday and everywhere, it is refreshing and a refresher that as feminists our work does not have to be dense and inaccessible. How can we make demands for gender justice and social justice more broadly unless we are in dialogue with diverse communities? What about the voices of those doing the work on the ground, those catching hell, those on multiple frontlines, those who want to share their experiences? Those like Shamelle Rice who writes vividly about her experience as the founder of Jabez House, a nonprofit organization devoted to working with women sex workers, connecting the labor histories of her mother and grandmother to those of the women with whom she works daily. Rice details not only her experiences with sexual harassment and assault but how both she and the sex workers she serves, have had to negotiate these spaces of violence every day. Rice, like Baldwin who also tells her story of sexual violence in this issue, provides a fresh view which is an unapologetic telling of her story.

Rice and Baldwins telling is significant in a Caribbean society where survivors of sexual violence have been reluctant, for various reasons, including fear of backlash, to share so openly. It is a risk! DeShong insists that gender itself is a site of violence and her essay opens with a reminder of the very real risks of breaking the silence: Andrea Lallan, a thirteen-year-old Trinidadian girl is killed in her sleep days after reporting rape to the police. In a society where young girls often get accused of being “force ripe,” marked as “fresh” and are punished for the sexual violence of others, to do fresh work, generative of realizing our “imagined lives,” is necessary.^[4] In fact, Catherine John argues in this volume that everyday Black women, whose bodies are often read as excessive, shift between invisibility and a disruptive power, pondering what it would mean to read Black female excess as symbolic, insurgent possibility rather than absence. In the essay, John opens up the possibilities of a fresh view toward thinking about contemporary sources of feminine power but also those sources traditional and ancient.

As Andaiye notes, “the story of each of us, if we tell it true, carries in it everyone’s story; and our collected stories carry in them the power relations of the whole society.”^[5] Anna Gibsons’ cover art, Cassandra Fegert’s, Carla Moore’s, and Soyini Ayanna Forde’s writing exemplify these personal stories-fleshy, embodied, written in our skin and psyche-which carry the power relations of the whole society. This is work which recognizes both that “society is inscribed in our nervous system and in our flesh before it appears in our consciousness,”^[6] and that as Sylvia Wynter insists, we need to be at war with consciousness.^[7] Deftly working the contexture of the very personal, intimate and embodied, and the structural and systemic, Daniele Bobb explores how Caribbean women from St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, and Barbados navigate neoliberal ideals of what pregnancy should look like.

The essays in this volume also boldly open up traditional rights-based spaces of resistance and cooperation to critique as a way to urge a reset and push for renewed perspectives and strategies, not focused solely on rights, but a fresh demand for justice. Régine King is clear that the rights-based laws and policies in Rwanda, along with the new sociopolitical orientation, and technological development have created opportunities for some women to claim and assert their rights but not others. King argues that further interventions are necessary to address the impacts of entrenched histories of domestic violence and extreme poverty.

Similarly, Eudine Barriteau and Patricia Mohammed and Asha Maharaj in their essays ask us to look deeper into the discursive as a means of mapping different gendered movements across both physical and online spatial temporalities. For example, Barriteau in her article examines how the concept of the social relations of gender has migrated through historical and contemporary migration studies and the ways in which the porosity of disciplinary methodology distorts language such that gender is mistakenly perceived as disappearing and emerging, relevant and irrelevant in understanding the mass movements of gendered people into, out of and across the Caribbean. Like Barriteau, Mohammed and Maharaj engage in their own mapping of feminist movements in our digital age. In their article, they explore the question of whether the digital age and the attendant feminist advocacy in the online space has strengthened global and/or regional solidarities in reaching feminist goals of transcending borders through intersectionality and expansion of virtual feminist platforms. These conceptual mappings demonstrate that relations of gender acquire new manifestations in different phases of Caribbean development, even as we understand that these new manifestations do not obscure the old, enduring hierarchies of inequalities of power that are mapped onto the politicized sexualized bodies of minoritized and marginalized peoples.

Akae Wright in their article acknowledges these complexities while extolling what they refer to as Big Pot Methodology and the ways in which communing and inviting others to commune over a big pot of freshly cooked food is an intimate act, an act of communal healing by bringing folks into kitchens to cook and break bread while navigating our relationship to food, acts of survival, care and world making practices. For Wright, as we sit around the “big pot” we hold tight to our own visions for the future such that food goes beyond simple nourishment and helps us to understand community building, cultural work, and personal identity and becomes a spiritual, decolonial act. Like Wright, Flynn writes about the ways in which she was fed intellectually and found a community of Black and Caribbean feminists across the geographical borders of Jamaica, Canada, and the US.

In Caribbean countries such as Grenada, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago, fresh is also used to describe fish which is “rank and unpleasant smelling… in need of lime juice to cut’ the smell.”^[8] Fresh work demands a confrontation with the rank and unpleasant, the intolerable, and the unconscionable. The writers, scholars, artists, and movement leaders assembled here are doing such work. Their skillful wielding of tried and tested tactics-both sacred and profane-and the invention of new ones, opens up spaces for solidarity, for dreaming and for collective action. And when we falter or fail, are co-opted and complicit, there is always the possibility, the imperative, to start fresh. Wheel and come again.

Author Biographies

Tonya Haynes is a lecturer at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies: Nita Barrow Unit, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus. Her research examines Caribbean feminisms and Caribbean feminist thought.

Halimah A. F. DeShong is senior lecturer and head of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies: Nita Barrow Unit at The University of the West Indies (The UWI), Cave Hill Campus. She recently served as ambassador and second deputy permanent representative at the Permanent Mission of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines to the United Nations for her country’s tenure on the UN Security Council. An experienced feminist researcher, she specializes in gendered violence, feminist methodologies, anti-colonial feminisms, qualitative interviewing, and the analysis of talk and text. She is co-editor of the books Interdisciplinary Perspectives on COVID-19 and the Caribbean, Volume 1: The State, Economy and Health; Interdisciplinary Perspectives on COVID-19 and the Caribbean, Volume 2: Society, Education and Human Behaviour, both published Palgrave Macmillan in 2023; and Methodologies in Caribbean Research on Gender & Sexuality (Ian Randle Publishers, 2021). In addition to her published research on violence and feminist methodologies, she has advised Caribbean governments on gender-based violence (GBV) policies and laws, is the author of the Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG) National Gender-based Violence Action Plan and has jointly designed a GBV/HFLE curriculum for post-secondary school students in SVG. She was the lead researcher and author of the qualitative component of the UN Women/CARICOM/Caribbean Development Bank Womens Health Survey on violence against women in Grenada. She currently chairs Barbados’ National Advisory Council on Gender. Animating her teaching, research, and outreach is a concern for ending the enduring effects of complex systems of violence in Caribbean societies.

Andrea N. Baldwin is an associate professor in the Divisions of Gender and Ethnic Studies in the School for Cultural and Social Transformation at the University of Utah. She is an attorney-at-law who holds a master’s degree in international trade policy and a PhD in gender and development studies from the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill campus in Barbados. Dr. Baldwin’s research interest includes Black, decolonial, and Caribbean feminist theorizing.

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