In Fractal Repair: Queer Histories of Modern Jamaica (Duke UP, 2024), Matthew Chin investigates queerness in Jamaica from early colonial occupation to the present, critically responding to the island’s global reputation for extreme homophobia and anti-queer violence. Chin advances a theory and method of queer fractals to bring together genealogies of queer and Caribbean formation. Fractals—a kind of geometry in which patterns repeat but never exactly in the same way—make visible shifting accounts of Caribbean queerness in terms of race, gender, and sexual alterity. 

Drawing on this fractal orientation, Chin assembles and analyzes multigenre archives, ranging from mid-twentieth-century social science studies of the Caribbean to Jamaica’s National Dance Theatre Company to HIV/AIDS organizations, to write reparative histories of queerness. Chin’s proposal of a fractal politics of repair invests in the horizon of difference that repetition materializes, and it extends reparations discourses intent on overcoming the past and calculating economic compensation for survivors of violence.

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By the time of the opening of the Atlantic world in the fifteenth century, Europeans and Atlantic Africans had developed significantly different cultural idioms for and understandings of poison. Europeans considered poison a gendered “weapon of the weak” while Africans viewed it as an abuse by the powerful. Though distinct, both idioms centered on fraught power relationships. When translated to the slave societies of the Americas, these understandings sometimes clashed in conflicting interpretations of alleged poisoning events.

In Poisoned Relations: Healing, Power, and Contested Knowledge in the Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), Dr. Chelsea Berry illuminates the competing understandings of poison and power in the Atlantic World. Poison was connected to central concerns of life: to the well-being in this world for oneself and one’s relatives; to the morality and use of power; and to the fraught relationships that bound people together. The social and relational nature of ideas about poison meant that the power struggles that emerged in poison cases, while unfolding in the extreme context of slavery, were not solely between enslavers and the enslaved—they also involved social conflict within enslaved communities.

Poisoned Relations examines more than five hundred investigations and trials in four colonial contexts—British Virginia, French Martinique, Portuguese Bahia, and the Dutch Guianas—bringing a groundbreaking application of historical linguistics to bear on the study of the African diaspora in the Americas. Illuminating competing understandings of poison and power in this way, Dr. Berry opens new avenues of evidence through which to navigate the violence of colonial archival silences.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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During the era of the Atlantic slave trade, more than twelve million enslaved Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas in cramped, inhumane conditions. Many of them died on the way, and those who survived had to endure further suffering in the violent conditions that met them onshore. Covering more than three hundred years, Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery (U Chicago Press, 2024) grapples with this history by foregrounding the lived experience of enslaved people in tracing the long, complex history of slavery in the Americas. 

Based on twenty years of research, this book not only serves as a comprehensive history; it also expands that history by providing a truly transnational account that emphasizes the central role of Brazil in the Atlantic slave trade. Additionally, it is deeply informed by African history and shows how African practices and traditions survived and persisted in the Americas among communities of enslaved people. Drawing on primary sources including travel accounts, pamphlets, newspaper articles, slave narratives, and visual sources such as artworks and artifacts, Araujo illuminates the social, cultural, and religious lives of enslaved people working in plantations and urban areas, building families and cultivating affective ties, congregating and re-creating their cultures, and organizing rebellions.

Humans in Shackles puts the lived experiences of enslaved peoples at the center of the story and investigates the heavy impact these atrocities have had on the current wealth disparity of the Americas and rampant anti-Black racism.

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In 1980, Charles Wetli---a Miami-based medical examiner and self-proclaimed “cult expert” of Afro-Caribbean religions---identified what he called “excited delirium syndrome.” Soon, medical examiners began using the syndrome regularly to describe the deaths of Black men and women during interactions with police. Police and medical examiners claimed that Black people with so-called excited delirium exhibited superhuman strength induced from narcotics abuse. It was fatal heart failure that killed them, examiners said, not forceful police restraints. 

In Excited Delirium: Race, Police Violence, and the Invention of a Disease (Duke University Press, 2024), Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús examines this fabricated medical diagnosis and its use to justify and erase police violence against Black and Brown communities. Exposing excited delirium syndrome’s flawed diagnostic criteria, she outlines its inextricable ties to the criminalization of Afro-Latiné religions. Beliso-De Jesús demonstrates that it is yet a further example of the systemic racism that pervades law enforcement in which the culpability for state violence is shifted from the state onto its victims. In so doing, she furthers understanding of the complex layers of medicalized state-sanctioned violence against people of color in the United States.

Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús is Olden Street Professor of American Studies at Princeton University and author of Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion.

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe (Knopf, 2025) is the essential biography of the controversial rebel, traitor, and only king of Haiti. Henry Christophe is one of the most richly complex figures in the history of the Americas, and was, in his time, popular and famous the world over: in The First and Last King of Haiti, a brilliant, award-winning Yale scholar unravels the still controversial enigma that he was. Slave, revolutionary, traitor, king, and suicide, Henry Christophe was, in his time, popular and famous the world over. Born in 1767 to an enslaved mother on the Caribbean island of Grenada, Christophe first fought to overthrow the British in North America, before helping his fellow enslaved Africans in Saint-Domingue, as Haiti was then called, to gain their freedom from France. Yet in an incredible twist of fate, Christophe ended up fighting with Napoleon’s forces against the very enslaved men and women he had once fought alongside. Later, reuniting with those he had betrayed, he offered to lead them and made himself their king. But it all came to a sudden and tragic end when Christophe—after nine years of his rule as King Henry I—shot himself in the heart, some say with a silver bullet. Why did Christophe turn his back on Toussaint Louverture and the very revolution with which his name is so indelibly associated? How did it come to pass that Christophe found himself accused of participating in the plot to assassinate Haiti’s first ruler, Dessalines? What caused Haiti to eventually split into two countries, one ruled by Christophe in the north, who made himself king, the other led by President Pétion in the south? The First and Last King of Haiti is a riveting story of not only geopolitical clashes on a grand scale but also of friendship and loyalty, treachery and betrayal, heroism and strife in an era of revolutionary upheaval.

Marlene Daut is Professor of French and African Diaspora Studies at Yale University.

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What happened to culture in 2020? In Like Lockdown Never Happened: Music and Culture During Covid (Repeater, 2024), Joy White, a Lecturer in Applied Social Studies at the University of Bedfordshire, explores the impact of Covid, along with social, community and artistic responses. The book ranges widely, including comparative analysis of the UK and Jamaica, deep dives into contemporary Black music and Black culture on TV, digital modes of making and distributing music, and emerging cultural practices on platforms such as TikTok. Theoretically rich as well as offering detailed media and cultural analysis, the book is essential reading of humanities, social science and public health scholars, as well as for anyone interested in reflecting on the era when Covid first hut society.

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Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons (Wesleyan UP, 2024) recasts the birth of jazz, unearthing vibrant narratives of New Orleans musicians to reveal how early jazz was inextricably tied to the mass mobilization of freedpeople during Reconstruction and the decades that followed. Benjamin Barson presents a "music history from below," following the musicians as they built communes, performed at Civil Rights rallies, and participated in general strikes. Perhaps most importantly, Barson locates the first emancipatory revolution in the Americas—Haiti—as a nexus for cultural and political change in nineteenth-century Louisiana. In dialogue with the work of recent historians who have inverted traditional histories of Latin American and Caribbean independence by centering the influence of Haitian activists abroad, this work traces the impact of Haitian culture in New Orleans and its legacy in movements for liberation.

Brassroots Democracy demonstrates how Black musicians infused participatory music practice with innovative forms of grassroots democracy. Late nineteenth-century Black brass bands and activists rehearsed these participatory models through collective performance that embodied the democratic ethos of Black Reconstruction. Termed "Brassroots Democracy," this fusion of political and musical spheres revolutionized both. Brassroots Democracy illuminates the Black Atlantic struggles that informed music-as-world-making from the Haitian Revolution through Reconstruction to the jazz revolution. The work theorizes the roots of the New Orleans brass band tradition in the social relations grown in maroon ecologies across the Americas. Their fruits contributed to the socio-sonic commons of the music we call jazz today

BENJAMIN BARSON is a historian, baritone saxophonist, and political activist. He is an assistant professor of music at Bucknell University. His work has been published in Black Power Afterlives: The Enduring Significance of the Black Panther Party (2020), Routledge Handbook on Jazz and Gender (2021) and Routledge Guide to Ecosocialism (2021).

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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A note about content:

This episode involves discussion of suicide, specifically in the contexts of slavery, colonization and empire. Please use your discretion and take care if you decide to listen. If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, you are not alone. You can reach out to the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988 or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741. Thank you for taking care of yourself.

This episode is a conversation with Dr. Doyle Calhoun, University Assistant Professor of Francophone Postcolonial Studies in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. He is key academic staff in the Film and Screen Studies Program and a Fellow of Peterhouse. A scholar of African and Caribbean literatures and cinemas, particularly in Senegal, Dr. Calhoun’s first book, The Suicide Archive: Reading Resistance in the Wake of French Empire was published in October 2024 by Duke University Press.

“There is no good way to talk about suicide,” Calhoun says in the opening line of his book. He repeats it early on in our conversation. Studying a topic that is personally and emotionally fraught – no less in history than in the present – and is often left unaddressed in traditional archives and explored by scholars is no easy feat. And yet Calhoun does this with care and caution and respect. The Suicide Archive is a study of suicidal resistance to slavery, colonialism, and empire in the French Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds via an array of aesthetic works (novels, plays, poems, films, photography) that consider the absence of archives as an opportunity to produce new and alternative forms of historical knowledge. In doing so, Doyle provides a nuanced and compelling analysis of the aesthetic treatment of historic suicides that take us from Guadeloupe to Senegal, from Paris to Algeria and Morocco. A methodologically innovative work, the book models how we might explore the historical potential “of reading aesthetic forms as archives,” as he puts it while recognizing the importance of suicide as a form of resistance to the violence and oppression of sub-alternity.

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In Cattle in the Postcolumbian Americas: A Zooarchaeological Historical Study (University Press of Florida, 2024), Nicolas Delsol compares zooarchaeological and material evidence from sites across Mesoamerica and the Caribbean to show how the introduction of cattle, beginning with imports by Spanish colonizers in the 1500s, shaped colonial American society. Before European colonization, cows were vital in European and African societies but were unknown to the Native communities of the Western Hemisphere.

This book traces their impact in the Americas by using a broad range of methods, such as ancient DNA analyses on faunal collections from major postcolumbian sites. Delsol describes the place of cattle in the colonial culture and landscape, beginning with the transportation of cattle across the Atlantic and moving to herding practices in new habitats, butchery techniques, and the production, trading, and use of cow byproducts.

Cattle in the Postcolumbian Americas is the first large-scale regional archaeological study of the introduction of a European domesticated species to the Americas. Using both zooarchaeological and historical data, Delsol argues that the arrival of cattle was a major consequence of European colonization with effects that have often been overlooked.

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Bringing the histories of British anti-slavery and Australian colonization together changes our view of both. Anti-Slavery and Australia: No Slavery in a Free Land? (Routledge, 2021) explores the anti-slavery movement in imperial scope, arguing that colonization in Australasia facilitated emancipation in the Caribbean, even as abolition powerfully shaped the Settler Revolution. The anti-slavery campaign was deeply entwined with the administration of the empire and its diverse peoples, as well as the radical changes demanded by industrialization and rapid social change in Britain. Abolition posed problems to which colonial expansion provided the answer, intimately linking the end of slavery to systematic colonization and Indigenous dispossession. By defining slavery in the Caribbean as the opposite of freedom, a lasting impact of abolition was to relegate other forms of oppression to lesser status, or to deny them. Through the shared concerns of abolitionists, slave-owners, and colonizers, a plastic ideology of 'free labour' was embedded within post-emancipation imperialist geopolitics, justifying the proliferation of new forms of unfree labour and defining new racial categories. The celebration of abolition has overshadowed post-emancipation continuities and transformations of slavery that continue to shape the modern world.

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