By Jonathan Pugh and David Chandler

This book is about a distinctive ‘abyssal’ approach to the crisis of modernity. In this framing, influenced by contemporary critical Black studies, another understanding of the world of modernity is foregrounded – a world violently forged through the projects of Indigenous dispossession, chattel slavery and colonial world-making. Modern and colonial world-making violently forged the ‘human’ by dividing those with ontological security from those without, and by carving out the ‘world’ in a fixed grid of space and time, delineating a linear temporality of ‘progress’ and ‘development’. The distinctiveness of abyssal thought is that it inverts the stakes of critique and brings indeterminacy into the heart of ontological assumptions of a world of entities, essences, and universal determination. This is an approach that does not focus upon tropes of rescue and salvation but upon the generative power of negation. In doing so, it highlights how Caribbean experiences and writings have been drawn upon to provide an important and distinct perspective for critical thought. "How is it that ontology has come to be seen as the antidote for modernity? While Foucault denigrated ontology as a mistaken and parochial exercise, contemporary social theory holds out the promise that new modes of planetary knowledge will save us from our own excesses. Drawing together long traditions in Caribbean scholarship with Afro-pessimist thought, Pugh and Chandler illustrate how the search for more emancipatory ontologies - relational ontologies, indigenous ontologies, non-human ontologies, etc. – not only misunderstands the problem of modernity but (more importantly) works to veil the negative force that marks both the limit and cause of all such knowledge practices: what they term the abyss. To engage in abyssal thought – as they lay out – is to inhabit a site of refusal: a determination not to be drawn into the lure of ontological ‘correction’ and to recognise that the practice of world making cannot not bear the imprint of colonial violence.

Westminster, UK: University of Westminster Press, 2023. 122p.

By Barry Hough and Howard Davis

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is best known as a great poet and literary theorist, but for one, quite short, period of his life he held real political power — acting as Public Secretary to the British Civil Commissioner in Malta in 1805. This was a formative experience for Coleridge which he later identified as being one of the most instructive in his entire life. In this book, Barry Hough and Howard Davis show how Coleridge's actions whilst in a position of power differ markedly from the idealism he had advocated before taking office — shedding new light on Coleridge's sense of political and legal morality. Meticulously researched and including newly discovered archival materials, Coleridge's Laws provides detailed analysis of the laws and public notices drafted by Coleridge, together with the first published translations of them. Drawing from a wealth of primary sources, Hough and Davis identify the political challenges facing Coleridge and reveal that, in attempting to win over the Maltese public to support Britain's strategic interests, Coleridge was complicit in acts of government which were both inconsistent with the rule of law and contrary to his professed beliefs. Coleridge's willingness to overlook accepted legal processes and personal misgivings for political expediency is disturbing and, as explained by Michael John Kooy in his extensive introduction, necessarily alters our understanding of the author and his writing. Coleridge's Laws contributes in new ways to the current debates about Coleridge's achievements, British colonialism and its engagement with the rule of law, nationhood and the effectiveness of the British administration of Malta. It provides essential reading for anybody interested in Coleridge specifically and the Romantics more generally, for political and legal historians and for students of colonial government.

Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2010. 405p.

Edited by Zeb Tortorici and Neil L. Whitehead.

Ethnopornography collects essays that both develop and critique the concept that gives the book its name. Ethnopornography, a term first coined by British anthropologist Walter Roth in the late nineteenth century, refers to the often eroticized observation—for supposedly scientific or academic purposes—of those deemed “other” by the observer. In Roth’s case, he was concerned that the descriptions and images he recorded of the bodily and sexual practices of the Aboriginal people he studied were inappropriate for lay readers who might find them vulgar—or worse, titillating. The editors of this collection focus on what it is that creates the slippage between the pornographic and the scientific. In particular, they attend to the importance of race within the colonially created and maintained worlds of both research—ethnography in particular—and pornography.

Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2020. 281p.