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This essay provides a meditation on the field of Caribbean intellectual history. Commencing with a reflection on the second edition of the Caribbean Festival of Arts (Carifesta 1976), the essay proceeds to outline the contours of the field through a consideration of eight relatively discrete though overlapping categories. It argues that the study of Caribbean intellectual history gives us more conscious control over the articulation and reproduction of critical ideas about the region over time and space, alerts us to transformations in the conditions of Caribbean intellectual production, and reminds us of the existential crises the region faces in the third decade of the twenty-first century.

Beyond Coloniality is an extended meditation on Caribbean thought and freedom at the beginning of the 21st century and a profound rejection of the postindependence social and political organization of the Anglophone Caribbean and its contentment with neocolonial arrangements of power. Aaron Kamugisha provides a dazzling reading of two towering figures of the Caribbean intellectual tradition: C. L. R. James and Sylvia Wynter

This introduction opens a special section featuring a series of tributes in homage to Kamau Brathwaite. The author's generational perspective becomes the occasion for a reflection on Brathwaite's legacy, creative voice, and sustained vision of the future of the Caribbean. The essay further presents an account of the author's attempt to shelter and represent this legacy in the form of Kamau at Ninety, a university course in Brathwaite's honor, offered in the surreal months of January to May 2020.

This essay proffers a response to three critical engagements with the author's 2019 Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition. The author contextualizes Beyond Coloniality as a book that seeks to effect a challenging alliance between studies of the anglophone Caribbean's postindependence social and political order and scholarship on Caribbean thought. Ultimately, Beyond Coloniality engages in a quest for freedom beyond neocolonial citizenship.

"Black Metamorphosis," Sylvia Wynter's unpublished manuscript of the 1970s, is premised on the idea that the black experience of coloniality is crucial to comprehending the history of the New World. This essay traces the idea of black experience in "Black Metamorphosis" through the figure of the non-norm, a central category for Wynter throughout the manuscript. The black presence in the New World is subterranean but omnipresent, fugitive but hypervisible, condemned as the non-norm and nonperson but the foundation for the concept of free citizenship in the Americas. Black experience is crucial; without it the ideological fictions of the contemporary world order that consign the vast majority of its population to a subhuman status remain uncontested and grow every generation in weight and power.

This essay introduces Sylvia Wynter's "Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World," an unpublished 900-plus-page manuscript written by Wynter in the 1970s. "Black Metamorphosis" is a remarkable manuscript, and it deserves close study for a number of reasons. It is arguably the most important unpublished nonfiction work by an anglophone Caribbean intellectual and is the major guide to the transition in Wynter's thought between her work mainly on the Caribbean and black America in the 1960s and 1970s and her theory of the human from the early 1980s onward. Not only does the manuscript clarify Wynter's reflections on the process of indigenization and black cultural nationalism, it is her most sustained discussion of the politics of black culture in America. It constitutes a highly significant contribution to the black radical tradition and one of the most compelling interpretations of the black experience in the Western hemisphere ever written by a Caribbean intellectual.

A common theme to the political crisis of the contemporary Anglophone Caribbean is the denial of full citizenship to many persons in the nation state — not primarily in a legal sense but in the variety of practices, tropes of belonging and identity concerns that frustrate and deny the aspirations of many Caribbean people. This `coloniality of citizenship' is a complex amalgam of elite domination, neoliberalism and the legacy of colonial authoritarianism. Independence from British rule did not bring with it a break from existing forms of citizenship and middle-class nationalism left intact the underlying racial order. The consolidation of elite models of development and their concomitant exploitations can be seen in the Caribbean tourism industry, which demands sexual caricatures of the Caribbean similar to those of the colonial project. It can be observed, also, in the Caribbean state's patriarchal and heteronormative policing of gender and sexuality, carried out without any apparent awareness of the colonial provenances of such practices.

Examines the Caribbean popular - an idea that has been an important and contested terrain for exploring the dynamic and oftentimes subversive cultural expressions of the region. The Caribbean popular arts, whether embodied in the hybrid musical genres or vernacular performance and festival traditions, have historically provided a space for social and political critique, the performance of visibility and also articulations of a temporal emancipatory ethos with its attendant acquisition of power and status. Beyond the spaces of the local/regional enactments and the social realities out of which they emerged and continue to circulate, Caribbean popular culture has over time contributed to contemporary understandings of global and diasporic cultures and, at the same time, the dynamics of inter-cultural encounters. The terrain of the popular has been a generative site for the study of Caribbean societies, and has produced enduring theoretical postulations that have been pivotal to the shaping of the intellectual production on the Caribbean. It is also the most powerful force that socializes contemporary Caribbean citizens into an understanding of their identities, the limits of their citizenship, and the meaning of their worlds

This essay argues for an approach to postcolonial Caribbean intellectual history that moves beyond the national archive to rely on a globally dispersed archive. It uses Rastafari repatriation to Tanzania to highlight the intellectual history of the movement and to demonstrate the extent to which the repatriation created a transnational documentary trail with a set of archival imperatives that renders the national archive insufficient for the reconstruction of postcolonial Caribbean intellectual history.