Drawn by Abraham Bosse in 1651, the famous frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan portrays ten symbols of authority. Looming above the symbols, anamorphically concentrating the eye’s attention, is the body of the titan Commonwealth. Composed of myriad citizen-subjects and crowned with the head of Charles the second, this giant can be seen spreading sword and scepter over the English countryside.  Abraham Bosse’s titan is the visual form of Hobbe’s observation: “ That by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE, (in latine CIVITAS) which is but an Artificiall Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Naturall, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which, the Soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul.” (Leviathan, pg 9) 

The following projects, though disparate in their scope, methodology, application and subject, have at their common core concern for the art by which the artificial soul of the great Leviathan is made. They will examine the uses and effects of these arts in the Caribbean basin, a region that Walcott once called "the slums of empire." Focusing on the social, the literary, the rhetorical and even the culinary, they seek to illuminate how capitalism, empire, and commodification operated in the anglophone Caribbean at the turn of the 20th century.

Janna Moretti reads The Port of Spain Gazette’s coverage of the Hosay Riots for clues into just how linguistic representations of Trinidadians of Indian and African descent reified and deployed the power of that island’s ruling planter classes throughout the Trinidadian social body. By focusing her analysis on discussions occurring in the Trinidadian newspapers before, during, and after one of the more regrettable incidents in that nation’s history, she seeks to illuminate the nuanced relationship between representation and subjugation, between word and body, and between power and discourse.

Alexis Teyie examines the ties that bind Caribbean subjects to the empires that (mal)administered their islands and isthmi. Her study compares the often surprisingly positive representations of empire in Caribbean newspapers with the even more surprising literary representations of Caribbean bodies forcibly enunciating their status as subjects of empire. In seeking to nuance more 'factual' accounts of the massive labor migrations that occurred in the late 19th and early 20th century with literary analysis, her analysis moves us towards the building of more robust Caribbean mythographies.

Romy Rajan journeys to the belly of the beast in his examination of interplay between diasporic Chinese communities and the formation of Caribbean national cuisines. Romy analyzes Victor Chang’s lucid fictions in order to tease out the valence accorded to authenticity in the figure of the first generation migrant. He then turns to an examination of Jamaican cookbooks, the study which promises to add spice to debates about exactly just how the imagined communities of Caribbean nations were formed, fueled, and fed.

Mario Ariza looks to the metropolitan newspapers in New York during the construction of the Panama Canal and attempting to empirically observe the operation of biological racism as a category of knowledge within the early North American public sphere. His distant reading of over 2,000 New York Times articles from the period tests hypothesis about the representations of racialized colonial subjects in metropolitan spaces and pushes statistical analysis of syntax to the limits of its utility.

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