Though a few scholars have discussed the transnational engagement of Caribbean thinkers with China, hitherto unknown is the imaginative alliance Left-wing Chinese writers crafted with the Caribbean via their works on the Haitian Revolution. This paper explores writings by four Chinese Marxists—Li Chunhui, Wang Chunliang, Lu Guojun, and Mao Xianglin—who engaged with Caribbean intellectuals, like Eric Williams, and used the history of the first anti-colonial revolution to rethink China’s own decolonial experiment. During the Maoist era, these thinkers argued for the independence of the Haitian Revolution from the French Revolution, imagining Haiti’s revolutions as prefigurations of Third-World Revolution. In the deradicalized Deng era, these writers held contradictory stances towards capitalism, stressing how old and neocolonialism plundered Haiti. By reducing Sino-Caribbean relations to the Chinese diaspora in the Caribbean, or to the recent Belt and Road Initiative, scholars overlook lost revolutionary solidarities that aimed to dismantle world white supremacy.

In this paper, I argue that macro-theorizing in the field of Caribbean sociology is going through a crisis of transition from the third to the fourth major period in its 100-year-old process of historical development. It is a transition from a period in which the houses of earlier Caribbean macro-theorizing in the social sciences, such as creole theory, cultural pluralism and dependency theory, were blown from the center and displaced by the simultaneous arrival of two re-colonizing intellectual hurricanes from the temperate north: American neoliberalism and French poststructuralism. Battered by these two imperial storms, macro-theorizing in Caribbean sociology was caught in what the paper calls a neocolonial squeeze. After unleashing their destructive and seductive winds, Neo and Post, these two intellectual hurricanes, have been receding for some time. Their departing has been creating what the paper calls a post-neoliberal/post-poststructuralist opening. It then takes up the issue of what we should be doing in this opening to repair fallen intellectual houses and revive our tradition of macro-theorizing in Caribbean sociology.

This paper critically examines the pervasive colonial myth that associates whiteness with cleanliness and blackness with dirtiness, a myth often perpetuated through media, especially soap advertisements. Through an analysis of Frantz Fanon’s contributions to psychoanalysis and phenomenology, the paper elucidates how racial constructs are sociogenically constructed and internalized, shaping the collective unconscious. Focusing on Fanon’s phenomenological exploration of the white gaze, the paper highlights its role in overdetermining the black man, reducing them to an object embodying racial myths. The paper demonstrates the enduring influence these entrenched myths have on racialized habits of perception and advocates for their disruption. The ongoing presence of colonial mythologies in modern soap advertising demonstrates the need for a concerted effort to dismantle these sedimented habits. The conclusion focuses specifically on challenging the myth of whiwhiteness as cleanliness as it continues to operate.