Positioning the Caribbean not as a fetishized or overlooked periphery but as the central paradigm for understanding both the brutal machinery of empire and the enduring imagination of anticolonial resistance, this essay introduces The LOUDREADER as a shapeshifting, antidisciplinary platform for worldmaking. For over 532 years—the lifespan of the region's oldest colony—the Caribbean has been ground zero for the colonial technologies of racialization, extraction, and plantation capitalism that now scar the planet. Yet, from the tobacco factories where enslaved and wage workers first gathered to hear utopian fiction read aloud, the practice of loudreading was born: a pedagogical and political act of transforming any space into a classroom, any listener into a teacher. This practice, rooted in the transmission of radical imaginaries from Fanon to Darwish, counters the fragmentation imposed by colonial powers and their linguistic and legal barriers. Today, The LOUDREADER journal and its associated Trade School extend this legacy, operating as an underwater island and a narrative underground where Afro-Indigenous knowledge, science fiction, and abolitionist thought converge. The LOUDREADER documents the planetary flows of solidarity that connect the Caribbean to Palestine, Congo, and beyond, insisting that the region's history of extraction and its poetics of insurrection are inseparable from global struggles for emancipation. In doing so, it posits a "becoming Caribbean of the world," where the tools forged in resistance to the plantation become the blueprints for a future built on social and ecological justice, rematriation, and collective liberation.
Garcia et al. (2025) studied this question.