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1 / Nevis, Caribbean“Federation Records Its 19th Homicide for 2015,” Nevis Pages, August 26th , 2015
Griffin, G.A.E. In the Penumbra of the Antillean Hallucination (2017)
Small Axe: A Caribbean Platform for Criticism, Issue 53
This intervention in the problem of representation and postcoloniality examines the proliferating newspaper photographs of accused criminals in the former British colony of Nevis. These images instantiate what Frantz Fanon describes as an “autoscopic” hallucination, the effect of a mirror that disorders Antillean imagination and governmentality. However, one finds that Fanon's formulation of the “Antillean hallucination” and the resulting negative assessment of the prospects of an Antillean postcoloniality are the effect of a sticky/tarring alignment with the sensory schisms and epistemic rifts that constitute Lacanian psychoanalysis as an extension of French colonial politics. Recognizing how Jacques Lacan “prepares his own snout” and makes himself a “tar-baby,” Griffin offers the grave citation as a ruse for escape. He examines a point of separation in the Lacanian/Fanonian union by identifying in the Antillean hallucination a voice that is not ventriloquized and names that picture an achievable Antillean postcoloniality.
2 / Antigua, Caribbean“Woman Charged with Attempted Murder.” Observer News, 2012. 2012
Griffin, G.A.E. In the Penumbra of the Antillean Hallucination (2017)
Small Axe: A Caribbean Platform for Criticism, Issue 53
This intervention in the problem of representation and postcoloniality examines the proliferating newspaper photographs of accused criminals in the former British colony of Nevis. These images instantiate what Frantz Fanon describes as an “autoscopic” hallucination, the effect of a mirror that disorders Antillean imagination and governmentality. However, one finds that Fanon's formulation of the “Antillean hallucination” and the resulting negative assessment of the prospects of an Antillean postcoloniality are the effect of a sticky/tarring alignment with the sensory schisms and epistemic rifts that constitute Lacanian psychoanalysis as an extension of French colonial politics. Recognizing how Jacques Lacan “prepares his own snout” and makes himself a “tar-baby,” Griffin offers the grave citation as a ruse for escape. He examines a point of separation in the Lacanian/Fanonian union by identifying in the Antillean hallucination a voice that is not ventriloquized and names that picture an achievable Antillean postcoloniality.
3 / Trinidad and Tobago, Caribbean
“GUNMEN KILL FOUR FROM ONE FAMILY.” 2010. Trinidad and Tobago News, 23 February. 2010
Griffin, G.A.E. The Emergency of Trinidad: Late Colonialism and the Work of the Sovereign Mimic. Caribbean Quarterly. June 2016.
Nobel Laureate Sir Viadhar Surajprasad Naipaul is identified here as a primary agent in the unwitting and paradoxical reproduction of a necrosanct and disruptive Afro-Caribbean figure, a ‘sacred man’ (homo sacer), to use Giorgio Agamben’s widely utilised term. Through his anti-black formulas of exclusion, repulsion and negation, he has traced a black subject who stands anterior to the originative formulation of sovereign power in the colonising West and now marks the limit of late colonial sovereign power in Trinidad. Naipaul’s colonially mimetic travelogues, histories, novels and journalistic excursions instantiate Trinidad’s current colonial governmental sensibilities; it is in accordance with this same racial discourse that Trinidad understands its ‘black’ filicidal crime, structures an internal colony, and finds itself in a chronic emergency and normative state of exception.
4 / St. Lucia, Caribbean
“Prominent St. Lucian doctor murdered allegedly by son.” 2009. RadioJamaicaNewsOnline, 21 January. 2009
NOTABLE CASES
Dr. Griffin's experience as a clinical forensic psychologist has afforded the opportunity to contribute to several notable cases as an expert witness in criminal and civil court proceedings. He has provided expert testimony and consultations in cases involving mental health evaluations, competency to stand trial, criminal responsibility, and other related matters. His work has been critical in ensuring that legal proceedings are based on accurate and objective information. Forensic expert testimony in a growing number of community-disrupting criminal cases has produced a body of theoretical studies based in the particulars of these shocking crimes made more understandable through meticulous analysis. Below are abstracts from articles published in scholarly journals elucidating the cultural and political forces impacting crime, punishment, and forensic evaluation in the Eastern Caribbean.
2017
Griffin, G.A.E. Parricidal Son: The Murder of Cassia Rivulet and the Collapse of Postcolonial Time.
In this essay Glenn A. Elmer Griffin adopts a January 2009 parricidal attack in St. Lucia as an instantiation of the escalating problem of fratricidal crime in the postcolonial Eastern Caribbean. Following the work of Kamau Brathwaite, Griffin argues that this violence constitutes the nonarrival of postcoloniality as it is anticipated by Frantz Fanon's periodization of fraternal violence. The familial murder embodies an unbroken period of self-killing that warrants a critical reexamination of the provisions of our postcoloniality and the terms of West Indian identity formation. The case resurfaces (m)other, ressentiment, hybridity, exile, and the notion of postkilling as the terms of this reexamination. Using Homi Bhabha and Achille Mbembe, Griffin reconsiders C. L. R. James' construction of West Indian identity as the preparedness for violence and victory in terms of an irreducible temporal relation to the colonial, something more complex and reparative than the after-killing or “postcolonial.”
5/ St. Lucia, Caribbean
“Men Attack Worshipers at St. Lucia Cathedral, Killing One.” 2001. Associated Press. 1 January. 2001
2012
2010
2009
2001
Griffin, G.A. E. (2006). Come, We Go Burn Down Babylon: A Report on the Cathedral Murders and the Force of Rastafari in the Eastern Caribbean. Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 10.3 (2006): 1-18.
On Old Year’s Day, Kim and Francis walked directly under the billboard-sized picture of Walcott, which points his thoughtful gaze beneath the giant Saman tree into the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. They entered the back of the cathedral and doused the threshold with the gasoline they had purchased the day before. They set the door aflame and then began to make their way up the central aisle, soaking and igniting horrified parishioners in the pews. left and right. By the time their ten-minute siege of the holy building was over, thirteen people were scorched, Father Charles Gaillard was dying, and Sister Teresa Egan was dead. Together, these two Rastafarians committed what have come to be recognized as the worst (and most significant) murders in the postcolonial history of St. Lucia. Murder, we know, “prowls the confines of the law, it establishes the ambiguity of the lawful and the unlawful . . . it posits the relation between power and the people stripped down to the essentials.” These killings, ambiguously described as the “Rasta killings” or the “Cathedral Murders,” attacked directly the symbols of an equivocal postcoloniality, and then reignited the awareness of Rastafari as a forceful resistance ideology and the problematic hope of West Indian militancy. Despite the vilification, police brutality, shearing of locks, Dominica’s “shoot on sight” law, and a general persecution that surprises those who think of these as Reggae Islands, Rastafari has become the foremost Pan-Afro-Caribbean movement since the United Negro Improvement Association. It has already disseminated and supplied a culture of resistance in Anguilla, Barbados, Antigua, Dominica, and all the craggy hills of the Eastern Caribbean. Now it confronts its limits.