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"The Long Emancipation is a mediation on the question of freedom for Black people globally. Taking as its starting point emancipation in the US and the British Caribbean, the volume argues that wherever Black people have been emancipated from slavery and colonization that a potential freedom became thwarted. Taking examples from across the globe, The Long Emancipation posits that Black people globally live in the time of emancipation and that emancipation is definitely not freedom"--

"From plantation rebellion and Indigenous land theft to prison labour's super-exploitation, Walcott examines the relationship between policing and property. That a man can lose his life for passing a fake $20 bill, when we know that our economies are flush with fake money, says something damning about the ways in which we've organized society. At the nexus of the current discourse on policing and violence is the unavoidable fact that criminal codes value property more than human life, and thus substantive change isn't possible until we rethink the very idea of private property itself."--

What does it mean in the era of Black Lives Matter to continue to ignore and deny the violence that is the foundation of the Canadian nation state? -- discloses the ongoing destruction of Black people as enacted not simply by state structures, but beneath them in the foundational modernist ideology that underlies thinking around migration and movement, as Black erasure and death are unveiled as horrifically acceptable throughout western culture. With exactitude and celerity, Idil Abdillahi and Rinaldo Walcott pull from local history, literature, theory, music, and public policy around everything from arts funding, to crime and mental health--presenting a convincing call to challenge pervasive thought on dominant culture's conception of Black personhood. They argue that artists, theorists, activists, and scholars offer us the opportunity to rethink and expose flawed thought, providing us new avenues into potential new lives and a more livable reality of BlackLife

This essay suggests that Caribbean studies and Black studies might be constituted as twins, arguing that Blackness and Black people are the foundational instituted terms of both studies. This argument is based in the author's reading of the anglophone Caribbean and draws on Kamau Brathwaite's insights of how a psycho-poetics of thought shapes Caribbeanness.

Abstract
This essay argues that thinking through black diasporic life as birthed through a unique and ongoing relationship with bodies of water (sea, oceans, rivers, creeks) can and does aid in analyses of contemporary art and its engagement with black subjectivity. I am concerned with how bodies of water are foundationally formative of blackness. And secondarily I pursue how this foundational aspect of blackness is both an act of representation worth engaging contemporary art and also a limit on what some representations of contemporary art can do to undo the brutal history of the aquatic birth of blackness and its perpetuation.