The New Negro, Indigenist, and Négritude movements of the 1920s and 1930s constitute the grounded base of contemporary Afro-American, Caribbean, and African literary scholarship. Critics return repeatedly to this textual field as if to embrace a heralded center, familiar and stable. Skepticism regarding presentations of the era as a coherent whole has inspired redefinitions of the period's demarcations, classic works as well as national and transnational intertextualities. Bearing in mind the discontinuities, one must acknowledge, however, that among other achievements, the new letters movements provided an epistemological break away from the predominance of Euro-American influences on black texts, the discursive agendas previously defining textual production particularly in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Caribbean writing. New letters works became communal property to be read and revised across national boundaries. Antilleans and some Hispanics, for instance, embraced texts by Langston Hughes and Claude McKay and were challenged by the Afro-American example to respond in stylistic kind. Unlike any other epoch of African-American expression, new letters shared a common ideology: writing regional, ethnic, and peasant experiences into existence. Their very articulation signified protest directed against cultural repression on the one hand and racial self-hatred on the other. The paradox of such a posture is suggested by Jean Price-Mars's use of the term collective bovaryism to describe in retrospect his generation's capitulation during the American Marine Occupation of Haiti (1915–1934). From the Haitian contradictions emerged defensive political, cultural, and textual agendas as of 1927, which paralleled the black revolts of Harlem and Paris but were determined by the particular circumstances provoking their enunciation.

On 14 December 2007, on what would have been VèVè A. Clark's sixty-third birthday, hundreds of people gathered for her memorial service at UC Berkeley. In the week leading up to the celebration, people from all over the country, including friends, family, colleagues, and students, contributed memories celebrating her life. Poems and testimonies chronicled emotions ranging from triumphant to despairing, yet all affirmed the ase, or energy, she so graciously shared with those around her. As I recall the whirl of activities, one particular element of preparing the program stands out: the accents on proper names and the musical and dance selections had to be properly placed. Drafts were edited, printed, and corrected in order to ensure accuracy. In an Anglophone context, this preoccupation may seem trivial. Yet as her colleagues and former students, we knew that Clark's insistence upon precision was critical to her entire scholarly enterprise; the visual effect of a bodily gesture in a staged or ritual context or the pinpointing of the exact timing of a historical event had tremendous meaning and importance to her. Her precision was a formative aspect of her conceptualization of diaspora literacy, a hallmark of a research methodology and teaching pedagogy grounded in multilingualism, historical contextualization, and respect for the specificity of other cultures. This attention to detail endowed her work as an interdisciplinary scholar of the literature and performance traditions of the African diaspora in the Americas with nuance and complexity.

Anyone who has staged a show has an idea of the numberless odd things that can go wrong. We expect, of course, that they will go right. From experience and knowledge, we can conceive the contingencies in categories; they range from the personal to the institutional and the natural (as in a force of nature). Contingencies of performance are the many variables that could impact performance in any number of ways, mostly unforeseen, and even if foreseen, mostly unpredictable in effect. Of course, contingency factors are time and space dependent, as what is contingent in one context or time may be completely under control in another context or time. We need to conceive of performance as fundamentally “a changing function of multiple variables,” as Barbara H. Smith once said of value. This changing function is a concept we need to hold tightly as we navigate common challenges of performance: What is our purpose or goal? What should we perform? What are the mechanics of the performance? Where should we perform? When? And for whom? These challenges are theoretically of indeterminate and indeterminable chronological sequence, and beginning from and working diligently through any one of them is bound to lead us into the others.

This is a tale of two directors. The setting is the Republic of Cape Verde, a former Portuguese colony and a tiny archipelago nestled off the coast of Senegal in West Africa. Framing the story is Cape Verde's annual Mindelact International Theatre Festival, which since 1997 has invited Lusophone theatre artists from three continents to perform a wide array of theatre genres on a mainstage program alongside Cape Verdean troupes. João Branco, a Portuguese director who moved to the islands in the early 1990s, is the artistic director of both the Mindelact Festival and the veteran Cape Verdean theatre troupe GTCCPM (Grupo de Teatro do Centro Cultural Português do Mindelo/Theatre Group of the Mindelo Portuguese Cultural Center). For Mindelact 2003, GTCCPM performed an abridged version of King Lear rendered in Cape Verdean Crioulo, a mix of Portuguese and several West African languages. Beyond bolstering Branco's cherished goal of creolizing Shakespeare's plays by transporting them to Cape Verde's Afro-European cultural milieu, Rei Lear worked in concert with the festival's media blitz to extol local spectators in Mindelact's host city, Mindelo, for their good taste. Two years later, Herlandson Duarte, a young Cape Verdean director and Branco's former theatre student, staged a Crioulo-language Midsummer Night's Dream at Mindelact with his new theatre company, Solaris. Duarte's production transformed Bottom's play-within-a-play into a searing critique of Mindelense audiences and the structures of authority that prop up the festival itself.

The plays and performances of French Caribbean women, which have mostly been examined in the French language and in the field of French literary studies, require a new theorization of postcolonial theatre. Highly influenced by what I call French universalism, French Caribbean women's theatre moves continuously between evoking Caribbean and gender difference and mobilizing the concept of the human universal. Their work enacts a restorative postcolonial women's agenda that is specific to the cultural context of the French overseas departments of Martinique and Guadeloupe.

On 30 June 2006 at the annual National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, South Africa, two giants of South African protest theatre, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, performed as the original cast of the landmark struggle drama Sizwe Banzi Is Dead (1972). The revival marked the first production of the play in over twenty-five years. After its brief stint at the National Arts Festival (30 June–5 July 2006), the play transferred to the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town (11 July–5 August) and then entertained a monthlong run at the State Theatre in Pretoria (17 August–17 September). After its turn at the State, the production stopped shortly at the Hilton College Theatre in KwaZulu Natal (19–23 September) before settling into an extended engagement at Johannesburg's Market Theatre (28 September to 22 October). In March 2007, the original cast revival of Sizwe traveled to the British National Theatre before finally ending its tour at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in April 2008.

When a group comprised primarily of African-derived “people”—yes, the scare quotes matter—gather at the intersection of performance and subjectivity, the result is often not a renewed commitment to practice or an explicit ensemble of questions, but rather a palpable structure of feeling, a shared sense that violence and captivity are the grammar and ghosts of our every gesture. This structure of feeling is palpable even in the place-names “Africa” and “the Caribbean,” names whose articulation (grammar) and memory (ghosts) would not be names at all were it not for the trade in human cargo. The promise of sense and meaning, when these place-names are spoken, is imbricated in the syntax and morphology of structural violence. Isolation of its performative and episodic instances (the violent event) often robs us of our ability to see it as a grammar of emergence and being: the Maafa, or African Holocaust, as the condition for the emergence of African being, just as grammar conditions the emergence of speech. We know the apparitions: ghosts of lost ancestors whom Ghanaians mourn each year at the sea when they mark the Maafa on their side of the Atlantic; the strange surnames on this side, haunted by the memory of names unknown; that empty space between children and their grandparents where the scourge of AIDS walks in silence; civil wars and famines induced by “natural” disasters like World Bank policies and U.S. intervention—one need not name each and every ghost to remind oneself of their omnipresence.

The fact that live performance is unrepeatable is both its greatest attribute and a constant worry to theatre historians. How is it possible to study an art form that is fleeting, short-lived, ephemeral? Nowhere is the challenge more acute than with Carnival, a popular art form that comes from the grassroots and is acknowledged as an art of resistance. Initiated by newly emancipated Africans in British colonies in 1834, Caribbean-derived Carnival struggled against endless confrontations with governmental authorities for its survival. In 1962, when Trinidad and Tobago achieved independence from Britain, the country's first prime minister, Eric Eustace Williams, recognized Carnival as the national art form. Despite this recognition, Carnival artists continue to struggle because of lack of funding, misrepresentation in the press, and lack of appropriate credit for their role as artists. So it is particularly gratifying to find the National Library of Trinidad and Tobago leading the way by making the work of Carnival artists available digitally on its Web site. This essay examines this new online resource and considers issues related to studying and researching Carnival.

All I seem to be able to read about recently is war. Some of that reading is predictable—I read the New York Times and the local paper every day—but lately it has seemed to me that in each book I pick up, no matter what the subject or purpose, passages about war leap out at me. Until I realized this, I made no conscious attempt to select books about war, but over this past spring and into the summer, I have been choosing to read about war.