Archival Specters: Caribbean Women in the Harlem Renaissance

Abstract It may seem strange nowadays to talk about the Caribbean as spectral—as both here and not here—insofar as we are in the wake of groundbreaking scholarship tracing the transnational contours of Black interwar literary production. It now seems a given to think in terms of an international New Negro movement spanning in and beyond the streets of Harlem. And yet the Caribbean women architects of the era often fade to the edges of the picture that scholars have most readily envisioned. Rather than a comprehensive account of Caribbean women’s participation in the New Negro Movement, this article charts the extensive reach of two dramatists, activists, and community feminists: Eulalie Spence (Nevis) and Amy Ashwood Garvey (Jamaica). That much of their work is largely out of print, lost, or scattered throughout various archives testifies to both the ephemerality of Black performance and the relatively scant attention to Caribbean women’s art. To consider them together is to acknowledge how they created conditions of possibility not only for each other, but for a generation of Black artists who connected politics of the everyday to the sweeping questions of anticolonial struggle.