The culinary history of America has erased the true contribution of African Americans to American cuisine in every phase of its development, and continues to pigeonhole African American cuisine in the category of soul food, used as a type of cultural and culinary shackle. Moreover, there are numerous African American women and men who have served in the capacity of chefs and cooks in America’s kitchens and against all odds made indelible marks on the cuisine of this country.

One such narrative surrounds the resort town of Saratoga Springs, New York, home to African American residents who were largely hotel service people in the early to mid 1800s, working in the capacity of chefs, cooks, waiters, and maids. Black musicians were employed at the hotels as well. While serenaded by Francis (Frank) Johnson’s very own music compositions at Congress Hall Hotel and United States Hotel in Saratoga Springs, you could experience wonderful dining treasures supplied by Mrs. Anne Northup. She and her husband Solomon Northup, who became a familiar name in African American history, were year round residents and both worked at the United States Hotel, which opened in 1824.

Having garnered a reputation as an outstanding cook, Anne Northup had been hired to take charge of the “culinary department” at Sherrill’s Coffee House in Sandy Hill, twenty miles away. In the latter part of March, 1841, on one of her days there, her husband Solomon was approached on the street by two slave dealers pretending to be interested in hiring him as a violinist to play for a circus. Solomon Northup, a free African, was drugged, kidnapped, and sold into slavery – a common occurrence in America. His riveting narrative, Twelve Years A Slave, published in 1853, chronicles his life and some of the lives of Africans with whom he suffered, on plantations in Louisiana. After Mr. Northup’s rescue, he returned to his family at Glen Falls, in Warren County, where his wife was in charge of the kitchen at the Carpenter’s Hotel.

For many diners–including a number of senators, governors, wealthy financiers, and presidents–Saratoga had its legendary waiters and chefs. George Crum, the African/Native American chef at Cary Moon’s lake house, was particularly celebrated for his fish dinners. His most famous creation came into being when he responded to a customer complaint that the fried potatoes served were cut too thick. Crum prepared some new ones by shaving some potatoes paper thin and dropping them in hot oil. Salting them first, he sent them out to the customer never expecting to receive approval. The customer loved them. Crum’s “Saratoga chips,” i.e., potato chips, received rave reviews and were soon on menus throughout the country. The man who invented the potato chip and launched a multi-billion dollar snack business died on July 22, 1914, and was said to have left behind a small fortune.

If you could afford to have your meals professionally prepared, New York City was the place to eat. Black caterers were numerous in New York, and their services have a long history. According to Booker T. Washington, catering in New York City began with Black women. Between 1780 and 1820 Cornelia Gomez, great-grandmother of Dr. P. W. Ray of New York, was among the most recognized of Black women caterers. She catered for the most prominent families in the city and was succeeded by “Aunt” Katie Ferguson, who stayed in business until about 1820. Washington states that catering had been almost totally in Black hands, and that Black men “[took] it up where the women left it.”

Some early to mid-nineteenth century Blacks in Brooklyn responded to their exclusion from the labor force, or their status as “outcasts and indigent sons of Africa,” by selling oysters and crabs about town on Sundays. Late nineteenth and early twentieth century Brooklyn’s small group of Black businessmen, whose businesses centered on food service included William Pope, owner of the Square Café, and John Connor, who operated the elite Royal Café, which only a few white cafés could surpass in beauty or in up-to-date service. In addition, Professor B. H. Hawkins owned the New National Hotel and Restaurant.

Cato’s Tavern (or Roadhouse), in New York City, was an early version of a sports bar. Cato’s clientele included numerous horse race fans. Situated midway along the Harlem speedway, on Post Road at what is now 59th Street and 2nd Avenue, this African American barkeeper served “unadulterated brandy,” Cuban cigars (shipped direct), and a woodcock and toast for breakfast.

Whether in the occupation of bartender, cook, caterer, or chef, Blacks in New York dominated most of these positions for generations and were uncontested in their quality of service. Nor was there dispute that the best food that could be procured in New York City was that furnished by “coloured” caterers. During the decades preceding the Civil War, Thomas Jackson, who serviced the most exclusive parties and fashionable weddings, and Henry Scott, who launched one of the most successful pickling establishments in New York, helped to prove the point. Thomas Jackson was considered the arbiter of all things gustatory in New York in his day. Scott and Company, by 1839, was open for business and warehoused a large stock of, among other items, pickles, preserves, and jellies that were in constant demand.

While Cato established himself as the famous purveyor of cocktails and woodcock for breakfast, and the sale of oysters and crabs became the livelihood of Brooklyn’s “outcasts and indigent sons of Africa,” over six million dollars worth of oysters were sold in New York each year by 1850. The 1866 Guide to New York City reports, “The consumption of oysters in New York is immense; it having been computed that the daily consumption is valued at $15,000, and that some 1,500 boats are constantly engaged to obtain the supply for this city alone.”

A settlement of free Black folks living in the area of Staten Island known as Sandy Ground, also referred to as “Little Africa,” and called this country’s oldest existing community of free blacks in the nineteenth century, was a supplier of oysters for New Yorkers. Most of the residents of Sandy Ground were in the oyster business and first occupied the area in the 1830s and 1840s and were known for their high quality of oysters.

Oystering as a trade was all but finished in Sandy Ground by 1916 due to industrial pollution from New Jersey, the town’s inability to compete with corporate-run agriculture and aquaculture, and ultimately, competition with whites. Black residents sought other occupations, such as wrought iron mastery, midwifery, well-digging, and some grew crops for self-consumption and sale, such as strawberries, sweet potatoes, melons, and tomatoes.

The nineteenth century demand for oysters had been a tremendous one and made a fortune for some in the business. In the early 1800s Boston Crummell, father of future African American intellectual leader, Alexander Crummell, was one of many who met the demand, as he was a New York caterer and oysterman who harvested and sold the bivalves.

In the 1830s and 1840s, for the tradesmen and businessmen of the district, oyster cellars provided breakfast, lunch, and dinner. A “Canal Street Plan” was offered, which was an all-you-can-eat for six cents setup. It was said that if the establishment thought that you were getting too much for the money, a bad oyster would turn up to curb a glutton’s appetite. For the proprietor, the bigger the oyster the more servings it would provide. Some oysters could be cut into three or four pieces, depending on size. A plain array of condiments accompanied raw oysters: lemon juice, vinegar, oil, salt, pepper, and mustard. Another fifteen cents added to your bill would purchase a bowl of stew, normally served for dinner, containing at least three dozen oysters, together with a generous slab of bread and butter, salad, and a relish or two.

Now, the menus at most cellars were limited to raw, fried, or stewed oysters. Well, there were cellars, and then there were cellars. Thomas Downing’s oyster cellar on Broad Street was said to be the very model of comfort and prosperity with its mirrored arcades, damask curtains, fine carpet, and chandelier. Oysters were considered an epicurean delight and Downing made them his specialty. His menu established and sealed his reputation by offering unusually elaborate dishes, such as scalloped oysters, oyster pie, fish with oyster sauce, and an especially delectable poached turkey stuffed with oysters. His award winning pickled oysters, together with his boned and jellied turkeys, were particularly popular during the holidays.

Thomas Downing’s restaurant, which occupied the basements of two small buildings, was in the financial and shipping section of the city. There were also three other Black owned eating houses in this same district: Henry Johnson’s, Lawrence Chloe’s, and Stephen Simmons’s. But it was Thomas Downing, George T. Downing’s father, who became and remained the most famous African American caterer and restaurateur in New York between 1830 and 1860.

Thomas Downing’s Oyster Bar, located at 3, 5, and 7 Broad Street at the corner of Wall Street, became famous as one of the best eating establishments in New York. Not only was Downing’s the only house to attract the aristocracy as well as ladies in the company of their husbands or chaperones, it was also the favorite haunt of a regular crowd of distinguished businessmen from the Merchants’ Exchange, nearby banks and custom houses, as well as leading politicians of the day and others who believed in the marked superiority of “colored” cooks.

Downing shipped raw, fried, and pickled oysters to the West Indies and to Europe. In 1847 Downing prepared and shipped a barrel of very lovely pickled oysters to Queen Victoria. The Queen responded to his gift by asking Joseph Comstock to deliver to Mr. Downing a letter accompanied by a gold chronometer watch engraved with her initials.

The American culinary narrative continues to assert that this country’s cooking and cuisine were founded by Americans of European ancestry and are rooted in so-called Western civilization. In doing so it fails to acknowledge the African American contribution, and thereby adheres to the theory of white supremacy. The roles of Downing, Crum, and many other “sons and daughters of Africa” are mere microcosms of the Black cook’s rightful place in the nation’s history.

Diane M. Spivey, author of The Peppers, Cracklings, and Knots of Wool Cookbook: The Global Migration of African Cuisine, has also written articles for the Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History and Scribner’s Encyclopedia of World Food and Culture, among others. Born and reared in Chicago, she resides with her family in Palmetto Bay, Florida.

This article originally appeared in ASAP/Journal.

I’ve always thought that the problem with the literary and cultural politics of the Anglophone world was that we’ve never had an actual, formal surrealist movement. Yes, there are writers and thinkers in the English-speaking world that are verifiably surreal (though not members of the official movement) and many that are described as surrealist, for example the writer who is the focus of this essay, the recently deceased Guyanese novelist, critic, and visionary, Wilson Harris, who passed away in March of this year. And yes, the impact of the Surrealist International was global. As I will discuss, it had a significant impact in the Caribbean, which is partly what justifies discussing Wilson Harris in this context. Though seen as a minor or cult figure, or an example of “art brut,” I’d like to help make clear his standing in a richer tradition of thinking and writing than previously acknowledged. I’d like to also suggest ways that his legacy can and should make a difference.

I’m also not ignoring the final impact and commodification of Surrealism as it made its way first to New York City and then to Hollywood only to become as much a feature of advertising and cinema as it would become a tool of now mundane representations of the human mind. Surrealism as an artistic and literary style, and a mode of psychological inquiry, was present in England as early as 1935 and its influence was felt in American art in the 1940s in advance of the arrival of actual surrealists as refugees from World War II. However, as an open and ongoing critical tendency with specific habits and practices, it hasn’t gone as far politically in English as in other linguistic worlds. This is particularly the case in its fetish for wild juxtapositions and radical combinations meant to jar or shock the viewer/reader into new perceptions of reality, in which differences and oppositions seemed less alien to each other and their hierarchies questioned if not suspended. It is also the case in the movement’s assumption that “reality” was itself constituted by radical juxtapositions and wild combinations—which is to say, as post-structuralist thinkers later would, an endless play of differences. These techniques have become fundamental to artistic and media practice; but the political assumptions behind them have not translated widely. Because it is the surrealist politics of cultural difference that matters here and its implications for power relationships. Though the impact of surrealism on the wider Caribbean or the black world in general is woefully understudied, it is this awareness of poetics and power that will manifest most strongly in the colonial Caribbean, and the broader archipelagic context that introduces Wilson Harris to the Anglophone world.

The surrealist commitment to juxtaposition and difference is best articulated by the movement’s foundational notion of beauty as produced by “the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table,” sourced from Les Chants de Maldoror by Uruguayan-French poet (and innovative plagiarist) Isidore Lucien Ducasse (Compte de Lautréamont). The founders of surrealism would hail him as prophet. This fact of their methodology has been much discussed and researched, but that scrutiny has focused on the relationship between metaphor or metonym (the former suppressive and the latter combinatory, as Jacques Lacan would have it), the role of the unconscious in making object relationships, and the implications of a radical decentering of knowledge that is made possible by juxtaposition and collage. What has been missed are the implications of Lautremont’s definition—of decontextualized mixture—for cultural politics in a world made by colonialism and slavery.

That surrealist founder André Breton would be so inspired by the work of Martinquan poet, Aimé Césaire, presaged the movement’s increasing interest in the broader cultural productions and cosmologies of native and indigenous peoples in Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Oceania. This “exotic” material enabled their leveling of cultural value by juxtaposing a seemingly random display of items, images, and artifacts—a process emboldened by new technologies such as photography, film, and to a lesser extent sound. This reminds us that the surrealists saw race and colonialism as central to their logic and poetics of difference; and they would manifest through these techniques a critique one could legitimately describe as “cross-cultural” (it’s not clear that those neo-surrealist movements in England or those influenced by surrealism in America fully grasped that aspect of the ideology, just as it’s not clear that the generation of Structuralist bricolage—from Levi-Strauss to Derrida to Deleuze and Guattari and British Cultural Studies—could make much of the racial implications of this mode of production or see in it alternative methods of social arrangement or definitions of cultural identity).

Race as central to surrealist method may have veered deeply into racial romanticism or romantic racism—examples of this are legion, so much so that it’s no surprise to encounter those who will describe much of the movement as actually racist, especially since it was flagrantly primitivist; but anti-colonialism at least was firmly and openly doctrine, as was a desire to problematize the European subject or psyche as the “center” of knowing if not power. Describing the intent of the work as “cross-cultural” is in no way to neglect the fact that it did privilege European subjectivity while attempting to decenter it, and its fascination for non-Western or non-White cultures were manifestly patronizing, paternalistic and from our vantage point cringeworthy.

Aimé Césaire and the Negritude movement of which he was a signal part would share that primitivism and that racial romanticism. It would also not be without a similar degree of cringe when compatriots of his like Léopold Sédar Senghor dug too deeply into an alleged racial essence. Despite his own considerable essentialism, Césaire would seize on cross-cultural juxtaposition as a fully realized anti-colonial poetics from the perspective of the colonized. Juxtaposition or blending or contrast in this work was deployed against the racial modes of knowing and racist social arrangements established by French colonialism and white supremacy.

Forms of Negritude continue to be primary fallback positions for much of the Anglophone black world; but in the Francophone world it would eventually become an obstacle for the generation of Caribbean writers and thinkers after Césaire. This is truly important. The rejection of Negritude needs more attention beyond the Francophone Caribbean because it enabled possibilities we are sorely in need of exploring. Harris himself spoke of such a need when he argued that juxtaposition could or would transform racial essentialism: “the rubbing together which we may visualize between endemic malaise and Surreal vessels of the imagination provides a residue in depth which becomes I think the potential seed and branch and tree of a black creativity beyond negritude to deepen resources of memory and imagination in a plagued humanity.”

The “rubbing together” of Negritude and Surrealism would allow the Caribbean to transform both into something else—a distinct conceptual space that will clear the way for, most notably, an Édouard Glissant in the Francophone world but also a Wilson Harris in the Anglophone. The work of these two writers and critics manifests—or perhaps straddles—both Surrealism and its transcendence; and given that Negritude was a movement rooted also in anti-colonial racial nationalism, both writers would side-step that as well whilst continually reminding us of its perils.

But to the rejection of Negritude: famously it was manifest in the manifesto, Éloge de la Créolité (In Praise of Creoleness) by Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau, Jean Bernabé, and Raphaël Confiant in 1989. It dared challenge Negritude (and Césaire), partly for a racial romanticism that would edify Africa and thereby anchor Caribbean identity in a singular root. In philosophical terms current with the manifesto, Negritude prioritized an essential being over a far more dynamic becoming. “Africa” became a barrier, and the identity claims necessary for anti-colonial resistance became the burden of political independence, particularly in composite societies in the New World.

The race-consciousness of Negritude may have emerged from dehumanization, racial violence, and the deracination of slavery, and it may have led to an overwhelming desire to return to or reconstruct a fixed past; but for the Créolistes it occluded and prevented the necessary embracing of an already transformed and multiply rooted present, one present in their creole language. Though he may have been the great poet of neologism, of creating novelty in language, Césaire remained committed to French. And as an elected official, that commitment was viewed in line with his support for the departmentalization of Martinique rather than independence from its colonial power.

It is through Édouard Glissant, however, that we’ve come to discuss if not embrace the poetics and politics of creolization in the literary and cultural politics of the Anglophone world in the wake of Negritude. It is through him that we can then make sense of Wilson Harris in an Anglophone world that is without the historical superstructure or intellectual continuum to support or acknowledge him, save for post-colonial notions of “hybridity” fashionable a decade or two ago. Harris was of the same generation as Glissant but produced his work on the margins of the literary and cultural history sketched above. He was clearly aware of Negritude and was a critical but enthusiastic reader of the work of André Breton, Michel Leiris, and other surrealists who he engaged first from the intellectual distance of a colonial Guyana and then from the heart of empire itself, England. Just as the landscape of the Guyanese rainforests utterly dominate much of his fiction—he was a government surveyor for some years—it’s hard to ignore the cultural politics of his country. After all, despite its postcolonial history of inter-ethnic tension, Guyana lacks the cultural resources or raw numbers to be ultimately defined by any of its specific ethnic groupings. That he himself was radically mixed—indigenous Caribbean/South Asian/Black/European—perhaps also made a “consolidation of identity,” to use his words, difficult to politically achieve.

Creolization and what Harris would call “the cross cultural” are deeply related. They address the process by which oppositions allow for juxtaposition, collage, and bricolage but then inevitably blend and blur while reshaping the very memory or intentions of what initially brought them together. In Harris’s words, oppositions and differences enact a cross-cultural dialogue in which they consume their own biases, because within them —in a phrase that should be tattooed and spray painted everywhere—is “a curious half-blind groping” towards alternate modes of community and/or modes of being or knowing “beyond static cultural imperatives.” Because self and other are twins not oppositions—“carnival twinships” as he once put it—because they are performances not identities, they are each other’s destiny, hence the endless mirrors, rivers, streams and reflective surfaces that suffuse his fiction rendering reality much like as through a prism. The goal was to explore and enact a model of cultural difference in which elements were not negatively opposed as was/is the case in colonial and racist modes of apprehension and social arrangement.

This is what lies beyond Negritude. As both Glissant and Harris note, Negritude merely consolidated and reified those modes of apprehension and social arrangement, even if it reversed their value or position. This is at the root of my initial complaint that the Anglophone world has yet to produce a politically valid (not self-hating) anti-Negritudist movement or a legitimately black anti-essentialist or ultimately anti-identitarian sensibility. Yes, we critique essentialism, problematize identity, and reject totalizing racial assessments; yet we ever revert to a blackness that cannot function without endless defense and justification and is rooted in totalizing racial assessments of our own. However, that endless defense might be its own justification. It’s clearly the engine behind the commodification of blackness that proliferates in our knowledge industries.

An Anglophone surrealism and a post-Negritude response would likely have helped free racial thinking from the endless and oftentimes narcissistic thickets of this extreme identitarianism and would have impelled us to reimagine fundamental notions of community. Because of this lack, those attending to racial transformation and cultural becoming have Wilson Harris to represent such a break. And in a moment when whiteness, capital, and colonial power have furiously retrenched and “consolidated,” the temptation for us to respond with consolidations of our own—the Negritude response—can only be avoided with effort and legitimately radical alternatives. Harris’s attempt to narrate a world without centers or borders or identities was therefore prescient, far more so than Glissant, who despite his hostility to nationalism and colonial power dynamics has been easily recuperated by critics who ignore or evade his hostility to notions of fixed identity, historical “roots,” or conventional notions of resistance.

Harris, however, is patently and gloriously irrecuperable, at least so far. Though his work does allow for the same amount of “post-colonial” critique as Glissant’s, it is also explicitly focused on the complex process of renewing and reimagining community across cultural, racial, and historical barriers. Our notions of resistance aren’t enough here. They are radically challenged in that they can feed the consolidation of identity, that “conquistadorial habit,” he’s called it. And his decentering of subjectivity—all subjectivity, not just that of the colonizer—was not just an attack on the hierarchies of European knowledge as it was with surrealism. It was a necessary prologue to enabling that “curious half-blind groping” mentioned earlier.

Now the consensus is that Harris’s irrecuperability and his minor or cult status is largely due to his prose. It’s true that its complexity and density, whether fiction or non-fiction, regularly ban him from course syllabi and the rituals of literary culture, even in the Caribbean. But considering that he was first introduced to many of us at the high point of post-structuralist theory when we were also introduced to Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, and then via postcolonial thought, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, and given that we would then engage Judith Butler and now Sylvia Wynter and Edouard Glissant, it’s hard to merit his critical prose with such intractability. And in the wake of radical modernism his fiction isn’t any more challenging than Faulkner’s, Woolf’s, or Joyce’s. It really is that assault on identity, that challenge, one that goes so far in his work that the very environment as well as myth, dream, fantasy, and artistic creation are all given an equality of perspective and sentience, and therefore render knowledge, history, and resistance difficult to fathom much less claim. And his habit of rendering the other as partial self, or seeing the self partially in the other; in his civilizational perspective that renders our struggles against the staggering vistas of History; these work against the narcissism of those who comb his work for specific evidence against specific oppressions.

But it’s really all about the admittedly inelegant term, “groping,” which is hard to articulate in our contemporary cultural and political climate, without its suggestion of impropriety and unwelcome sexual advances. This only emphasizes just how rooted creolization is in the notion of unwelcome physical and cultural border crossings and also how such transgressions have regularly been policed or exploited.  In Harris’s mythopoeia, as a historical and metaphysical process this “groping” must be “half-blind” and uncertain since knowledge, like subjectivity, is endlessly partial yet forever seeks its own reinvention. That dynamic process is central to the work, so much so that the term is arguably the most notable word in his oeuvre, possibly second only to “quantum” in its frequency. The latter is similar in that it implies probability, chance, and uncertainty, Werner Heisenberg—he of the “uncertainty principle” in physics—being an influence. But that restlessness characterizes his prose, and is what makes it difficult to settle on a specific character or setting or to fetishize specific situations or power dynamics. It’s all partial, shifting, and evanescent and difficult to appropriate for specific political ends, particularly those rooted in race or identity.

Or, again, in the “rubbing together” of sex. As others have argued (Robert J.C. Young most prominently), metaphors of blending like creolization or hybridity are always rooted in sex—heterosexual sex to be clear. Speaking in metaphorical terms, cross-racial sex and desire have long been narrative clichés for cross-cultural intimacy and of course the “birth” of something different from foundational elements. The torrid plantation soft-core melodramas of Edgar Mittelholzer, the other major postcolonial Guyanese author, are far from Harris’s vision. Harris is the least sexual writer one can imagine, unless one describes the sensual excess of his landscapes and language as pornographic, or argues that his ontology was libidinal in its promiscuous drive towards fecundity in both the natural world and the infinite, possible worlds of cross-culturality.

There is, though, a radicalism in that ontological promiscuity, in submitting to its breathless uncertainty. It was perhaps too quiet for the nationalism that initially surrounded Harris’s work and the anti-colonial fervor that continues to feed much of the cultural and literary work of the Anglophone Caribbean; it certainly can seem a hyper-mystical or quasi-religious quietism. But when we realize that reducing meaning to binaries is not enough, and that rejecting them has largely led to reversing not transcending them; when the relationship between humans and the environment demands to be replaced by a greater mutuality, a distinctly non-human centered one; or when we realize that cultures themselves do hunger for otherness and transformation and intimacy, and that there are ways to encourage those heretical or even perverse movements that reject the inhuman logic of centralized power; when the old rhetoric of self and other has once again failed, perhaps then we will be truly ready for the Palace of the Peacock.

Louis Chude-Sokei is the Editor in Chief of The Black Scholar.

Since its premiere in 2016, the Marvel series, Luke Cage has used the comic book genre of storytelling to examine the impact of interlocking systems of racial, gender and economic oppression on Black Americans’ relationships to each other. In season one the show focused on the conflict between the heroes, Luke Cage and Detective Misty Knight and the villains, Cornel “Cottonmouth” Stokes, Mariah Dillard née Stokes and Cage’s estranged brother, Willis “Diamondback” Stryker. In season two, American-Jamaican antihero, John “Bushmaster” McIver enters the fray and disrupts what was previously an exclusively Black American battle to dominate Harlem.

Most reviewers have only briefly discussed this season’s subplot around intra-racial Black American-Black Jamaican conflict. However, the ethnic/national conflict in the storyline is one of its most crucial contributions to the series’ ongoing interrogations of Black diasporic experiences.  In an interview with Angelica Bastién of Vulture, showrunner, Cheo Hodari Coker stated that he pursued this storyline because he saw it as an opportunity to recognize Jamaican contributions to the development of U.S. Black popular culture (in particular, hip hop music) and explore different forms of race consciousness among Black Americans and Black Jamaicans. The fact that Luke Cage became a popular topic of discussion this summer among Jamaicans, is testament to the importance of exploring these transnational Black connections, including conflicts.

The show has received widespread praise for featuring the most Jamaican characters ever seen on a U.S. television show, as well as criticism from Jamaicans and non-Jamaicans for the clearly uneven accents among the Black American actors who played Jamaicans. Many viewers, like me, enjoyed season two, while agreeing that it would have been stronger aesthetically with better accent work and subtitling that accurately reflected Jamaican language. For others, the accents were completely unrepresentative of Jamaican speech and inexcusable. The discourses around intra-Black conflicts and hierarchies therefore operate within the storyline as well as the space of public opinion about the show’s Jamaican accents and limited casting of Jamaicans.

Critics of Luke Cage’s casting decisions have mostly focused on the producers’ oversights, without a larger effort to probe the mostly white-controlled U.S. television industry as a whole. As in the fictional storyline where Black people battle to dominate Harlem, white supremacy looms in the background as the initiator of intra-Black creative hierarchies in U.S. television and film. Some critics of Luke Cage have argued that the series has not focused enough on white anti-Black racism. I agree that there is room for stories that more closely examine structural racism in the U.S., such as gentrification in Harlem. However, the series’ current focus on intra-racial conflicts is also crucial to an understanding of anti-Black racism. I therefore want to offer the following insights:  First, Luke Cage contains important commentary about white supremacy’s fundamental role in the characters’ intra-racial tensions. This is discernible in the backstory of the McIver/Stokes-Dillard feud, which involved the American Stokes’ collusion with white people to betray the Jamaican McIvers. In order to analyze the effects of anti-Black racism, we must not only examine its direct manifestations through white and Black conflicts, but also its latent impact on intra-Black relationships. Second, to engender a deeper conversation about the accent/casting controversy, we should assess the broader context of creative hierarchies in the U.S. television and film industries. This includes examining the historical misrepresentations of Jamaicans/Caribbeans, including by Black Americans. These misrepresentations are the root of the cynicism which many Jamaicans have for American producers. Here, the opinions of Jamaicans in the film and TV industries can add a crucial insight into their positioning within these industries globally. Both the series’ juxtaposing of Black American and Black Jamaican racial experiences; as well as the conversations about flawed accents and casting are important to assessing Luke Cage’s contribution to candidly highlighting ethnic/national conflicts among Black people. This is unprecedented on U.S. television. Luke Cage season two could therefore serve as a useful popular cultural reference for Black studies’ ongoing project to deconstruct Blackness in all of its manifestations, and question the limits of the discipline’s current emphasis on U.S. Black experiences.[1]

The turf war that defines most of Luke Cage season two is very similar to the civil war that takes place in its Marvel movie counterpart, Black Panther (2018). In both cases, the intra-racial battle to control physical space and military and socio-economic power indexes wider struggles for Black self-determination that have existed since the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans. Harlem is an excellent place in which to explore these contentions given its centrality in Black/African Diasporic history as a main site for internal U.S. and global Black immigration during the twentieth century. Though its historical title, “The Black Mecca” is not often used today, Harlem remains significant to studies of Black diasporic mobilities.

Each of the show’s major characters have staked a claim on Harlem in different ways. Following her murder of her cousin, Cottonmouth (Mahershala Ali) in season one, Mariah Dillard née Stokes (Alfre Woodard), has asserted that she is queen of Harlem and is on a mission to “keep Harlem Black,” while John “Bushmaster” McIver (Mustafa Shakir) sees the control of Harlem as his birthright, which was stolen by Mariah’s family. Detective Misty Knight (Simone Missick) and Luke Cage (Mike Colter) endeavor to keep Harlem safe from the criminals who would destroy it, namely Dillard and McIver. The main personal conflicts are between Dillard, McIver, and Cage,[2] with control of the nightclub, Harlem’s Paradise, serving as a prerequisite for control of Harlem. Bushmaster—a moniker taken from his family’s brand of rum[3]—is a U.S.-born, Jamaican-raised don who heads Jamaica’s main gang with plans to conquer the Black criminal enterprise in New York as well. Like Cage, he has superhuman abilities of strength and regeneration. He harnesses his power through a fictional herbal mixture called nightshade, and practices the Afro-Brazilian martial art of capoeira. The producers’ choices to make McIver Jamaican (and not from an unnamed Caribbean country as in the comics), credit Afro-Caribbean naturopathy as the harnesser of his strength, and designate capoeira as his characteristic fighting genre indicates a conscious engagement with Black culture that is limited in the comics.[4] These creative choices also underscore McIver’s assertion of a Black identity that is very reflective of continental African influences in the Americas and a Black radical tradition forged within a Black majority context. As I discuss later, the different forms of Black consciousness articulated by the Jamaican and American characters are key to how their conflicts unfold.

Harlem’s Paradise, Bushmaster Rum and the Stokes-Dillard wealth are John McIver’s birthright since the Jamaican McIver and American Stokes patriarchs founded the businesses decades ago, before the Stokes family colluded with Irish and Italian gangsters to murder John’s parents. McIver is not a classic villain; he mostly kills characters the viewers dislike, and his major objective is to enact vengeance on Dillard. Most accurately, he is the antagonist to Cage’s protagonist, and the only character who can beat Cage in a fair fight. Unsurprisingly, he sees an affinity between himself and Cage, uttering more than once, “We cudda been bredren (brothers/friends),” and suggests that they join forces. Cage’s humiliation at being bested by McIver and his obsession with distancing himself from him, ultimately leads him to almost strangle his antagonist in the final episode.

Eventually, Dillard is murdered by her own daughter and Cage becomes the new owner of Harlem’s Paradise, which she has cunningly willed to him. He is about to meet with the Italian crime family and attempting to reconcile between his need to be Harlem’s law-abiding hero and traversing the criminal enterprise that is linked to that place’s power hierarchies.  Meanwhile, McIver is back in Jamaica recovering from his defeat. His tragic flaw was that he underestimated his outsider status. Though he is American by birth, his Jamaican parentage and upbringing mark him as an alien. This is represented mostly in hilarious comments made by the Black American characters about Jamaicans, but this hilarity is accompanied by a more pernicious animosity. Essentially, McIver and his family become symbols for the othering of Jamaicans by U.S-born and raised Blacks, and in effect un-American Blackness. They also forcefully resist this othering.

In episode ten, the conflict between Jamaican immigrants and native-born Black Americans get articulated in an argument between Paul “Anansi” Mackintosh (Sahr Ngaujah), John McIver’s uncle, and Mariah Dillard. Referencing the Stokes family’s betrayal of his own, he declares that Black Americans are “lazy” and complicit in white imperialism. This is an insult commonly used by Africans and Caribbeans against Black Americans. Dillard hits back: “Every Jamaican likes to talk that maroon shit!” and states that the country got “enslaved by the World Bank.” This is essentially a debate about which Black person is more liberated. Caribbeans’ history of Black radicalism was forged through resistance to slavery and British colonialism. Within this Black majority context, self-government is a major source of pride. McIver asserts several times his admiration for Jamaican historical icons like global Black nationalist leader, Marcus Garvey and Ashanti/Jamaican warrior queen, Nanny of the Maroons. The fact that he is incapable of distinguishing between his quest for vengeance on the Stokes-Dillard family and Jamaican anti-colonial activism, underscores that he considers his Black enemies to be tools of the larger white power structure.

Dillard, like Luke Cage and the other Black American characters, assert a Black consciousness borne from survival of direct domination in a white majority country, including slavery, Jim Crow segregation and current manifestations of anti-Black racism. Cage struggles between being a respectable Black man in America and releasing his anger at systemic racism, while Dillard’s experiences with colorism, sexism, and racism become key motivators in her mission to rule Harlem. She has chosen to cooperate with whites in order to accumulate wealth and power while “keeping Harlem Black”. Of course, the characters’ choices are not bound by their different expressions of race consciousness, and Black radicalism in Jamaica and the United States is far more nuanced than what is portrayed on the show. However, the Stokes’ betrayal of the McIvers in collusion with white people, is amplified because of the two families’ different ethnicities/nationalities. Dillard continues this racial betrayal when she conspires with Asian gangsters to frame John McIver for producing a deadly strain of heroin as part of her plan to get rid of him. Similarly, the feuds between McIver’s hero, Marcus Garvey, and other Black leaders went beyond ideology; it was also a contention between a native-born U.S. Black leadership and the influence of a foreigner, though not all of Garvey’s Black detractors were American. The “Garvey Must Go” campaign formed by prominent Black American men in the 1920s and the Black spies that infiltrated the Universal Negro Improvement Association worked parallel to and with the white U.S. government to have him imprisoned then deported – exploiting his foreign status.

Fans will likely sympathize with McIver, and many, including me want the character to return in season three. This might indicate the show’s successful exploration of the intersections of race, ethnicity, and nationality in Black people’s marginalization.  However, the producers may not have expected that they would be accused of marginalizing Jamaicans through their casting choices and representations of the accent.

Luke Cage has inadvertently added another dimension to an ongoing debate about creative hierarchies among Black people in the U.S. television and film industries. An example of this is the 2017 controversy following Samuel L. Jackson’s critique of the casting of Black British actor, Daniel Kaluuya as the star of the American film, Get Out (2017), and Hollywood’s purported privileging of Black British actors over Black American ones. Jackson was called out by Kaluuya and others for being ethnocentric. For some commentators, his statement was also oblivious to the representational advantages Black American actors have, and the numerous chances they get to depict African and Caribbean people.

As an American TV show, it follows logically that most of Luke Cage’s actors would be American, and for the scenes filmed in Jamaica, Jamaicans  were cast in speaking roles. However, the central Jamaican characters, most supporting roles and limited-speaking roles were played by Americans, and there were obvious inconsistencies in their accents. I disagree with the broad critical position some people have taken in scrutinizing all of the non-Jamaican actors; and some of these criticisms border on cultural policing.[5] My own opinion is that while some accents were appalling, others like those of the actors playing McIver and his aunt and uncle (Mustafa Shakir, Sahr Ngaujah, and Heather Alicia Simms) were satisfactory or very good. Having had my Jamaican play produced in the U.S. with mostly American actors I know how difficult it is for Americans to sound Jamaican. I have also had to do foreign accents a few times as an actor. It is grueling, which is why the ideal is to cast native speakers.

There were open auditions for the speaking roles, including for the lead Jamaican character, John “Bushmaster” McIver. However, filming takes place in New York where there are many Jamaicans and Jamaican-descended actors, raising questions – particularly regarding the casting of speaking extras like the members of the Brooklyn-based Stylers posse. The presumed oversight generated a Twitter thread between disgruntled viewers, showrunner, Cheo Hodari Coker and Mustafa Shakir, who plays John “Bushmaster” McIver. This thread adds an important dimension to the controversy by displaying how viewers/fans spoke back to the producers and got responses. The viewers asked why the producers did not work harder to develop the accents and/or cast more Jamaicans. In their responses, Coker and Shakir emphasized the positive visibilities that Luke Cage has provided around Jamaica’s history of Black radicalism, including its discussions of historical figures like Nanny of the Maroons and Marcus Garvey. These responses appeared dismissive and were called out as such. Shakir and Coker subsequently apologized for the unintentional offense in their previous responses and emphasized their love and respect for Jamaicans. Consequently, each side seemed to be using different notions of what constituted proper Jamaican representation.

Many shows have been critiqued for flawed accents. However, there are racial-national implications when people of color are being depicted. For a long time, Hollywood and the TV industry have reinforced exotic notions of Caribbean people,[6] which the region’s tourism industry has also reproduced. This exoticism has roots in transatlantic slavery and colonialism, and Europeans’ racist obsession with consuming the Caribbean Other for economic gain, sexual pleasure and entertainment. The development of modern theatre and film throughout the Americas is marked by these racialized legacies that were most clearly manifested in blackface minstrelsy, and carnivalesque and popular theatre traditions that both subverted and reinforced stereotypes. The influences of historical racial caricaturing even appear in some Caribbean plays, films, and TV shows.

Most criticisms of Caribbean exoticism in the media have been directed at Hollywood.[7] However, the TV industry has arguably been more offensive. The random Jamaican characters on U.S. television, including shows produced by Black people, have usually bordered on, or displayed explicit caricaturing. This includes the character, Russell Montego on the Black sitcom, Living Single and the famous parody of Jamaican dancehall artiste, Shabba Ranks on the Wayans’ In Living Color. Jamaica also occasionally emerges as a punchline in standup comedy, like Chris Rock’s Netflix special, Tamborine (2018). The character of Lester Tibideaux on The Cosby Show, played by Jamaican actor/director/writer, Dennis Scott, is an exception to the rule because he was not the butt of the joke and Scott’s real accent added another layer of complexity to the role. Within this historical context, authentic-sounding accents come to serve as criteria on which to measure producers’ interest in the country’s complexities. Even actors who try but fail to develop good accents might be equated unfairly with those who intentionally distort it.

In the above-cited Twitter discussion, Shakir stated that the producers put significant thought into the Jamaican representations including trying not to “play into past stereotypes.” This wasn’t entirely successful, particularly in a scene where McIver misuses what seems to be an obeah ritual. However, in many ways Luke Cage subverts the norm of other American TV shows by creating fascinating Jamaican characters. The character of John McIver, despite the violence he commits, is emotionally layered and this nuance is accentuated by Shakir’s performance. Additionally, the show’s juxtaposition of McIver’s criminality with the respectability of his law-abiding aunt and uncle introduces a story of Jamaican immigrant ingenuity which is not usually visible in mainstream U.S. media. Coker is correct that the show also provides a glimpse into Jamaican history, with which most Americans are unfamiliar. Luke Cage also engages Jamaican language. The Jamaican characters’ code-switching between English and Patwa and use of distinctly Jamaican/Caribbean terms, indicates to me that the producers aimed to connect affectively with Jamaican/Caribbean viewers. But these transnational connections are fraught with tensions, buoyed by Americans’ relative cultural, economic and other privileges in global mass media. If they further explore the Jamaican element of the storyline in season three, this might provide an opportunity for Luke Cage’s producers to engage more profoundly with Jamaica, including through accent work and casting.

With the aim of obtaining a Jamaican actor’s perspective on the accent/ casting controversy, I spoke with Karl O’Brien Williams, a New York-based Jamaican actor and playwright who began his career in Jamaican theatre and film. Williams cannot represent the entire Jamaican acting community in the U.S., but his experiential insights are important. He didn’t audition for any of the roles in Luke Cage because he had another job. He is also unperturbed by the show’s accent/casting issues, because the Jamaican accent is hard to master, and he thinks by fixating on it critics risk reducing Jamaicanness to speech. We discussed structural factors that determine Jamaican actors’ visibilities globally, including casting networks, actors’ unions and color/racial typecasting; and the need for more opportunities for Caribbean writers, producers and casting agents in regional and global film and TV industries. He also stated that in the white-controlled Marvel Cinematic Universe, Cheo Coker may not be as powerful as his critics believe him to be. The conflict about creative authority is therefore fundamentally a clash about which Black people have the most real or imagined proximity to predominantly white-controlled power structures. It is the root of the McIver/Stokes feud in Luke Cage and of ongoing intra-racial ethnic/national/economic tensions throughout the world.

The previously discussed argument between Luke Cage’s characters, Mariah Dillard and Paul Mackintosh offers a glimpse into how unpacking ethnic/national conflicts, instead of ignoring them, can ultimately enable a more penetrating view of white supremacy as a global superstructure. When Dillard disparages Jamaica’s anti-colonial project in response to Mackintosh’s disparaging of America’s racial integration project it is primarily a retort to his efforts to shame her. However, at its core the insult asserts that no Black community/ethnicity is immune to white hegemony. As I write this, Jamaicans and other Caribbean people are confronting the rapid privatization of our beaches and sale of beachfront property to European hoteliers; in cities worldwide, gentrification is displacing mostly people of color; and the abuse of Black people in penal systems is globally normalized. There are emotional, psychic, and material stakes involved in a transnational understanding of Black experiences. This is why our intellectual project within Black studies to deconstruct intra-racial ethnic/ national conflicts and hierarchies is so urgent.

Notes

[1] As part of this project, the 4^th Symposium of the Dakar Institute of African Studies held in Senegal this year, had as its first objective, the need to “consider the limits of the U.S.-centered Black studies model” and its geographic, and epistemological constraints.

[2] Misty Knight (Simone Missick) has outgrown the series in my opinion and needs her own show. Not only do we need a Black woman protagonist in a superhero TV show, she is one of the most compelling characters and often upstages Cage. The writers are obviously aware of this and poked fun of it in a hilarious dialogue between the two characters in one episode where they debated who was whose sidekick.

[3] I am aware that Bushmaster is the name of a type of gun, and has connotations within the rudeboy/gangster culture of the late 1970s to early 1980s in Jamaica. However, I don’t know whether this influenced the moniker, Bushmaster, which originated in the comics.

[4] They also do this through the character of Tilda Johnson, Mariah Dillard’s estranged daughter and owner of a herbal pharmacy.

[5] One of these is the notion that it is implausible for McIver to be a capoeira practitioner, which is of African/Brazilian origin, and that this is an indication of the producers’ lack of research into Jamaican culture. This undermines the work of the capoeira community in Jamaica and the character’s trait as a man who consciously grounds himself in transnational Black culture.

[6] Jamaica is sometimes conflated with the rest of the Caribbean in U.S. films.

[7] For a critical discussion on Jamaican representations in Hollywood, see Tanya Batson-Savage, “Through the Eyes of Hollywood: Reading Representations of Jamaicans in American Cinema” Small Axe (2010) 14 (2 (32): 42-55; Kevin Frank, “‘Whether Beast or Human’: The Cultural Legacies of Dread, Locks, and Dystopia.” Small Axe 11 No. 2 (2007): 46-62.

Nicosia Shakes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Africana Studies at The College of Wooster, Ohio. She earned her PhD in Africana Studies in 2017 from Brown University. Her book manuscript, Gender, Race and Performance Space won the 2017 National Women’s Studies Association/University of Illinois Press First Book Prize and is under contract with UIP. www.nicosiashakes.com