Editorial

Loudreading is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture, WAI Architecture Think Tank, and Loudreaders Trade School supported by the Mellon Foundation, re:arc institute, the Graham Foundation, Producer Hub, Iowa State University, GSA Johannesburg, Universidad de Puerto Rico–Rio Piedras, and the inaugural ACSA Fellowship to Advance Equity in Architecture. It features contributions by Dorraine Duncan and Jhordan Channer, Nadia Huggins, Jason Fitzroy Jeffers, Isabelle A. Jolicoeur and Sébastien Jean Simon, Marakianí Olivieri, Post-Novis, Luis Othoniel Rosa, Julio Ramos, and Roque Raquel Salas Rivera.

Under the colonial construction of time, the Caribbean is now 532 years into loudreading planetary futures.1 Here, radical struggles for emancipation, solidarity, and worldmaking subsist despite the planetary scale destruction and repression born out of its tropical plantations. From this mountain range/archipelago, the imperial blueprint of capitalist spoliation has spread across the rest of the planet in the form of military occupations, colonial debt, and planned precarity, and in the technologies of racialization, surveillance, incarceration, and policing.

To acknowledge the Caribbean is to face the unfolding histories of Haiti (Ayiti), of Vieques, of Barbados (Ichirouganaim), of St. Vincent (Youloumain), of Guatemala and Belize; of the expanse of the Black Atlantic; and of each continental land fed by the rivers/veins that connect the sea to deep inland Abya Yala. To understand the history of this region, these landscapes and peoples, is to consider its connections to Palestine, Congo, Sudan, South Africa, Kenya, Kanaky, Algeria, Brazil, Hawai’i, and other topographies of solidarity and resistance.

Born in the capitalist stronghold of tobacco factories, where formerly enslaved and low-wage workers destemmed tobacco leaves and rolled cigars, the practice of loudreading establishes a framework for sharing anti-capitalist and anti-colonial imaginaries. The traveling performers that read out loud literary works of utopian fiction and theories of workers’ emancipation laid the groundwork for the contemporary practice of loudreading Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Sylvia Wynter, Mahmoud Darwish, Martin Sostre, and Luisa Capetillo into a world torn between the fascist necropolitics of broadcasted genocides and the anti-racist, anti-colonialist movements that chant “no one is free until we are all free.”

In this global panorama, the shapeshifting Caribbean remains—at least in discussions of architecture and spatial practices, with its biennales, festivals, and events—an overlooked, fetishized, and misunderstood region of landscapes and peoples. The recipient of over 40% of the enslaved Africans kidnapped and shipped to Abya Yala, the area is home to the oldest colony (Puerto Rico, with over 531 years of occupation), the first British plantation (Barbados), and a blueprint for radical liberation by the formerly enslaved that was collectively punished with (post-)colonial debt (Haiti).

The Caribbean presents a case study of the cruelties and insidiousness of empire, as well as of the imagination and endurance of half a millennium of anticolonial struggle against the terraforming and earth-spoliating forces of colonialism. Ignoring the rights to reparations, the unscrupulous rule of colonizing powers—including by Spain, France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Portugal, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, and, more recently, the USA—set in place layers of legalistic, linguistic, and mobility barriers that try to fragment the time and space of any form of collective sovereignty in the Caribbean. Against this imposed bureaucratic, political, and economic alienation, a counter-current of critical spatial practices is manifested in poetry, film, photography, agriculture, science fiction, design, and activism that defy discipline and place, exploring ongoing diasporic, Afro-Indigenous, transfeminist, and anti-capitalist histories: narratives of the now and tomorrow.

These radical forms of worldmaking are produced in the multiple creoles spoken, thought, and loudread; in the Afro-Indigenous practices that transmute and refuse to die; in the planetary influence of the Caribbean; and in the combination of ancestral knowledges with evolving technologies that are taken from the grip of the death-machine that is empire. Outside of the tobacco factory, the practice of loudreading becomes mysterious, submarine, untranslatable, confrontational, abolitionist, imaginative, solidary, and subversive. As in the beginning of the twentieth century, loudreading renders obsolete the colonial school as a source of centralized, hierarchical, Eurocentric knowledge. Here, the students are the teachers.