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Abstract
In the early 2000s, Dipesh Chakrabarty powerfully defined the historical terms at stake in the shift from the postcolonial to the Anthropocene era, arguing that the posthuman image of a world without us profoundly contradicts historical practices for visualizing time. The notion of history that his essay foregrounded, however, can itself be historicized as a fantasy of modernity, one Édouard Glissant described as "History [with a capital H]." Using Glissant's psychoanalytically inflected insights as a starting point, this article argues that our dominant modes of historical thinking are always already colored by the anxieties and neurotic symptoms of the colonialist viewer. The argument then traces experimental hypotheses regarding the near and deep history of the human by key figures from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries—such as Sigmund Freud and Octave Mannoni, Paul Gilroy and Sylvia Wynter, and Frank Wilderson and Bruno Latour—as they grapple with two intimations: that the subject picturing a "world without us" is neurotic and that alternative historical sensibilities may lie on the other side of our apocalyptic imagination of the "end of the world."

This essay provides a cultural analysis of the work of Trinidadian-born artist Nicole Awai and is derived from a collaborative process between author and artist, including a studio visit in 2014. This discussion presents the author's reflections on the deeper philosophical implications of Awai's work, as an artist striving to represent her Caribbean and diaspora experience in an art practice that moves between mediums. This movement is interpreted as a way of figuring the slippery relationship between multiple perceptual dimensions and real worlds.

"Defacing the Gaze and Reimagining the Black Body: Contemporary Caribbean Women Artists" examines works by visual artists Oneila Russell, Holly Bynoe, Patricia Kaersenhout, and Ebony Patterson, exploring how these contemporary artists wrestle with the terms in which we see black bodies. Together they share a fundamental interest in defacing and deforming the gaze—both a gendering and a racializing gaze—as it has rested upon both the black male and female body and the black face. Comparisons with visual works by an old European master, Édouard Manet, and twentieth-century American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe reveal how Russell, Bynoe, Kaersenhout, and Patterson question prior visual epistemologies for the ways they have understood and represented the modern subject more broadly in such canonical genres as the portrait and the nude. All point to the ways in which the black body in art has been displaced by its surrogate: a facialization of the black body as pure surface, the phallicization and epidermalization of the black subject as nothing more than his or her skin. To destabilize this body, these artists seek to get back to what Hortense Spillers describes as a black body of the flesh, a flesh that reveals the markings of the symbolic order on and beneath its skin.

This assessment of Leon Wainwright's recent monograph, Timed Out: Art and the Transnational Caribbean (2011), focuses on the temporal dimensions of Caribbean art production and reception, including the reception of Caribbean art in the United Kingdom and United States as being "out of time" and behind the pace of modernity. In contrast, Wainwright's text argues for an understanding of Caribbean art as reflecting the immediacy of a Caribbean present, with its particular relation to the circulation of Caribbean works and artists between home and diaspora.

Looking back at the dialogue between Black British Cultural Studies and African American Studies that occurred during the 1980s and 1990s, when Stuart Hall first asked the question, "What is this black in black popular culture?" this article explores how that conversation has evolved in the context of current discussions of black cross-culturality and diaspora. New concerns have emerged about the relevance of US notions of race and blackness for describing the cultures, experiences, and identities of members of other diasporic populations. Also, gender and sexuality still function as theoretical categories of lesser priority in the discussion of a racial diaspora imaginary, despite the hypervisibility of certain notions of black masculinity and femininity in popular cultural forms that travel between home and abroad. With readings of one canonical diaspora text, Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, the article teases out what is at stake in making US based comparisons when discussing racial dynamics in the colonial world. This article ultimately argues that only a broad and complex understanding of modernity's racial unconscious can address both the hypervisibility of the US and the undefined role of gender and sexuality in contemporary conceptions of race and black culture.