Introduction and Table of Contents

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Geoffrey Philp

When I wrote the first post for my blog on 13 December 2005, I began a virtual journey that has taken me to places I would never have imagined. Little did I know that my first foray would plunge me into the midst of a digital revolution that has now placed every relationship in publishing in limbo. But it was not a headless charge. At first, I was apprehensive about the challenges of maintaining a blog, so I read as many blogs as I could—Nalo Hopkinson, Maud Newton, and John Baker—to get ideas about the kind of blog I had imagined. Having witnessed the disappearance of book reviews from newspapers and academic journals that were more concerned with critics commenting on the opinions of other critics of a work based on the theories of Foucault and Derrida, I wanted to create a space where conversations about Caribbean writing could flourish. I also wanted to discover the answer to these questions: What is my role as a writer? What is my relationship to my community? Growing up in a postcolonial culture and influenced by Rastafari, I was deeply distrustful of any solution offered by my teachers and believed that every assumption should be questioned. I was also fearful that blogging would “take away” from my imaginative writing. What I have found, however, is that far from weakening my writing skills, blogging has clarified my ideas about poetry and fiction. (more…)

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert and Ivette Romero-Cesareo

Repeating Islands stemmed from a simple idea—finding a space “out there” through which we could make a small contribution to a pan-Caribbeanist project that, despite its worthiness, has proven resistant to most efforts to bridge linguistic, geographic, and political barriers to increased communication across the archipelago. The immediate inspirations for our blog were news aggregator websites such as the Blaze, the Drudge Report, and the Huffington Post, which created unique information spaces that functioned as personal newspapers and had led to the formation of active and influential cyber-communities of like-minded readers. Lacking the resources of those websites, which can tap on investors’ funds and advertisement revenue to create highly complex internet presences, we rely on the far simpler blog technology, using social media (Facebook, Twitter, RSS feeds, for example) to reach out to readers interested in news and information about the Caribbean and its diaspora. Blogs—which allow for the incorporation of a multiplicity of texts, photos, paintings, prints, video, and audio—had already become important para-literary spaces for Caribbean writers, who used them to explore their culture, politics, literature, and national identities. Our aim was to find a place within that growing community of bloggers as a unique newspaper-like site that could appeal to a broad segment of readers from the Caribbean or to those interested in learning more about the region. Celebrating our second anniversary—we launched the blog on 27 February 2009—we have the opportunity to assess how we fit into that ever-shifting community of bloggers and to consider to what extent the site has begun to fulfill the objectives we had envisioned when we first conceived it. (more…)

Frederic Marc

It is often difficult when talking about the Caribbean to consider the specificities of all its “parts,” the differences, inequalities, between the islands. Even when putting the language differences aside, we still have to face the different economic, political, and historical patterns and rules sometimes governing, and always influencing, the artistic ecosystem and cultural strength and identity of the Caribbean.

History has shown us that the political state of a country or region plays a crucial role in its artistic health. Artistic production can flourish, or it can stagnate if not supported by “the powers” in place.

So, how about finding or creating a place where political favoritism and economic debacle would be irrelevant? Can the online world be this place? Can we revive our culture there? (more…)

Edwin STATS Houghton and Rishi Bonneville

Jammys is not playin’ sound no more, you not gonna see Inspector Willy inna dancehall, he’s a big-ass man. Wear glasses and all that shit. But their sons, and their sons after, is the ones that gonna keep the dancehall going.
—Beenie Man, FADER 23 (Summer 2004)

As the name suggests, dancehall has always primarily been a space (though rarely contained in an actual hall) wherein actors of all sorts—musical and otherwise—interact and perform. But it is also a culture, and is a medium of exchange that connects artists, deejays, dancers, selectors, soundsystem owners and operators, labels, backers, and fans. This culture, and the informal economy arising from it, is roughly perpendicular to the major label music industry, intersecting it and yet operating by a very different logic. This logic has become especially relevant as it has spread from Jamaica and reggae culture to influence soca in Trinidad, Barbados, and other Caribbean islands, as well as international music in West Africa and the United Kingdom. Dancehall music and sensibility play a key role in the cultural life of the diaspora generally and New York in particular. The advent of the internet and web 2.0 culture has irreversibly changed the material nature of this international role and as a result the indigenous culture itself has changed. (more…)

Kelly Baker Josephs

Nicholas Laughlin is a Trinidadian writer and the editor of the Caribbean Review of Books. He is a co-director of Alice Yard, an experimental creative space and network in Port of Spain, as well as a member of the organizing committee for the Bocas Lit Fest, a new literary festival based in Trinidad and Tobago, and the accompanying annual OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. Many of his reviews and essays on Caribbean literature and art, published in various journals and books, are available online at his website, and he writes semi-regularly at his personal blog. He edited a volume of C.L.R. James’s early essays, Letters from London (2003, Prospect Press), and a revised and expanded edition of V.S. Naipaul’s family correspondence, Letters between a Father and Son (2009, Picador). He is also co-editor of the broadside poetry and art magazine Town, and his own poems have appeared in several journals in the Caribbean and elsewhere. He is at work—slowly—on a book about Guyana, part travel narrative, part cultural history. (And he tweets: @nplaughlin.) (more…)