Charles V. Carnegie

Rahul Bhattacharya, The Sly Company of People Who Care (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011); 278 pages; ISBN 978-0-374-26585-4 (hardcover).

Rahul Bhattacharya has given us a sweet, magical lime of a first novel. Lush with the irony and warmth squeezed into its paradoxical title—The Sly Company of People Who Care—this travel narrative set in Guyana rewards at every turn. The narrator is a young man in his twenties who has “walked all the way from India” (86) and gotten caught up with the spirit of the place. As a journalist he once covered an international cricket tour in Guyana, and now he has returned for a year of exploration and self-discovery. This “slow ramblin’ stranger” (3) plunges into the everyday lives of his Guyanese hosts, illuminating all he experiences with keenly sympathetic ethnographic insight and rendering these adventures into lyrical description.

With deftness and empathy the narrator sketches the social and spatial-temporal coordinates of the Guyanese imagination: the often cruel local mythologies of race; the sensuous and varied texture of days and nights and seasons of heat and rain; the qualities of light; the intimacies of place. Read the rest of this entry »

James Davis

Eric Walrond, In Search of Asylum: The Later Writings of Eric Walrond, ed. Louis J. Parascandola and Carl A. Wade (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2011); 224 pages; ISBN 978-0813035604 (hardcover).

When the New York based writer Eric Walrond (1898–1966) published Tropic Death, a 1926 collection of stories set in the Caribbean, it was not universally acclaimed, but both critics and proponents recognized it as new and significant. Its modernist narrative techniques and its refusal to sentimentalize or propagandize prompted frequent comparisons to Jean Toomer’s Cane, which it outsold two to one, and Walrond was heralded as one of the most promising of the New Negro writers in Harlem.[1] Cane is now required reading for students of American modernism and African American studies, while Tropic Death has been out of print for decades, and few know about its eccentric, peripatetic author. In Panama, the country of which Walrond considered himself “spiritually a native” and whose West Indian migrants figured prominently in his fiction, he is unknown outside of specialized academic circles. Read the rest of this entry »

Marcela Echeverri

Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Slavery, Freedom, and Abolition in Latin America and the Atlantic World (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011); 204 pages; ISBN-13 978-0-8263-3904-1 (paper).

Christopher Schmidt-Nowara’s approach to slavery’s history in Latin America is commendable for various reasons. First, because it highlights and demonstrates that variability was the essential character of the institution in the region. Second, as noted in the title, it illuminates the Atlantic dimension of African slavery and gives a full representation of the factors that over time determined slavery politically and economically, beyond Latin America. It is of course a daunting task to attempt to cover the history of slavery and colonialism in Latin America, and the challenge is even greater when doing so with a careful eye on the slavery’s Atlantic connections. Schmidt-Nowara fulfills both with erudition and clarity. Read the rest of this entry »

Anthony Bogues

Colin Grant, The Natural Mystics: Marley, Tosh, and Wailer (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011); 305 pages; ISBN 978-0-393-08117-6 (hardcover)

Over the last twenty years or so since the passing of Bob Marley and of Peter Tosh in the 1980s, there has been a veritable industry about the Wailers: Bob, Peter, and the only living Wailer, Bunny. Academic texts on Marley abound, and range from those that examine Marley’s life alongside the lives of Ralph Ellison and Frederick Douglas to the 2004 Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright: The Bob Marley Reader.[1] Then of course there are the numerous books by music journalists and others, including Timothy White’s biography on Marley, Rita’s Marley’s No Woman No Cry: My Life with Bob Marley, and Roger Steffens et al.’s Bob Marley and The Golden Age of Reggae, and last year Cedella Marley published the children’s book One Love, based on one of Bob Marley’s most popular singles.[2] It can be said that many of the books about the Wailers pay enormous attention to Bob, and that the iconic “screw-face” of the dreadlocked Rasta Man is recognized by millions all over the world.[3] Marley became, after the split of the Wailers—he is reported to have said long after the split, “Up to now, I still don’t know why we is not together”—the international iconic figure of rebel reggae music and Rastafari. Read the rest of this entry »

Bastian Balthazar Becker

Caryl Phillips, Color Me English: Migration and Belonging Before and After 9/11 (New York: New Press, 2011); 339 pages; ISBN 978-1-59558-650-6 (paper).

Called a “chronicler of displacement and precarious belonging” [1] by critics, Caryl Phillips—born on St. Kitts, raised in Leeds, and educated at Oxford—moved to the United States in the early 1990s and currently lives in New York City and teaches at Yale University. His literary oeuvre, which primarily consists of ten novels, the latest being In the Falling Snow (2009), has indeed dealt with notions of home and displacement for the past three decades.

In his collection of essays Color Me English, Phillips reflects on the style of his fiction. “I like to hide in the wings and turn the stage over to my characters,” he writes, “an occasional whispered prompt is all that I permit myself” (177). Anxious not to judge the protagonists of his novels, Phillips renders his personal commentary invisible. It is this elusiveness of his authorial voice, which has traditionally prompted readers of Phillips’s novels to search for his more explicit statements elsewhere. Phillips’s critical essays, his reviews of other writers’ works, and the interviews he has granted over the years have always served as a supplement to his fictional texts. Read the rest of this entry »

Kristina Huang

Jane G. Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); 352 pages; ISBN 978-0674035911 (paper).

Jane G. Landers’s latest work, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions, echoes the conceit that C. L. R. James offers at the end of The Black Jacobins: “There is no drama like the drama of history.”[1] By examining the lives of Africans and their descendants, Landers constructs a history that is energized by individual and collective action, geographic movement and promises of freedom. Atlantic Creoles were polyglot actors defined by their mobility and dexterity on the political stage. By carefully reading their political climate, Atlantic Creoles simultaneously helped to configure the revolutionary politics between 1760 and 1850 while striving for freedom. Undoubtedly, Atlantic Creoles is first and foremost historical scholarship. Yet the merit of this work rests not only on its contribution to the vibrant regional history surrounding the Caribbean and southern locales of North America. In addition to analyzing intriguing personal histories of Atlantic Creoles, Landers is attuned to spaces of social interaction, formations of political identity, and the power of narrative exchange—all of which make Atlantic Creoles a rich and useful work to consider across disciplines.  Read the rest of this entry »

Toni Pressley-Sanon

Kate Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); 448 pages; ISBN-13: 978-0226703794 (hardcover)

In February 2010, Lawrence E. Harrison, former USAID director and author of The Central Liberal Truth: How Politics Can Change a Culture and Save It from Itself (2006) was a guest on The Agenda, with host Steve Paikin. When asked why Latin America is in the state that it is in today, Harrison states that as director of USAID he “started with the assumption that Latin America was in trouble because ‘we’d’ neglected it.” He continues: “I never believed we imperialized it or exploited it. But over the years, as I worked my way through five countries I increasingly got messages that the people that I was trying to help do not see the world the same way I did. I concluded . . . that behind Latin America’s problems principally were a set of values and attitudes that got in the way of democratic governance, social justice and prosperity. Its cultures, values, beliefs and attitudes are powerfully influenced by Vodou.” Finally, he concludes that “Vodou is a religion that has no ethical code, therefore no encouragement to abide by the ethical code.”[1] Kate Ramsey’s Vodou and the Spirits (2011) is the perfect response to people like Harrison who do not believe that “we” imperialized or exploited Latin America and that Vodou is the cause of Haiti’s problems. In fact, Ramsey seems to be directly addressing Harrison and those of his ilk who “make assumptions about Haitian popular culture that rationalize disempowering development programs and perpetuate the conditions that, among other ills, give rise to such accusations” (256). Read the rest of this entry »

Kaiama L. Glover

Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism Between Women in Caribbean Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); 288 pages; ISBN 978-0-8223-4777-49 (paper).

Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s insightful study Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism Between Women in Caribbean Literature considers the multiple ways in which women’s erotic love for other women pushes against regional phenomena ranging from the aggressive heterosexuality of slaveholding colonial society to the more subtle gendered constraints of contemporary postcolonial discourse. Exploring in particular women’s relationships to various insular landscapes, Tinsley sets out to highlight and, ultimately, to undermine the “interlocking fictions of power” (2) so constitutive of Caribbean identity. Read the rest of this entry »

Anton Nimblett

Earl Lovelace, Is Just a Movie (London: Faber and Faber, 2011); 353 pages; ISBN 978-0571255672 (paper).

Earl Lovelace hands over narration of Is Just a Movie to kaisonian/poet King Kala, one of several Lovelace alter-egos to take the stage in the author’s first novel since his Commonwealth Prizewinner Salt. King Kala’s opening verse, brandished in the style of the traditional Trinidadian masquerade character Midnight Robber, establishes him as “recorder” and “revealer.” King Kala is Lovelace on a mission: “I show people who they really is. I show them they bigger and more grand, that they have more heart and guts and stones than what people give them credit for. I show them what nobody else show them” (17–18). Read the rest of this entry »

Nick Nesbitt

Kaiama Glover, Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2010); 262 pages; ISBN 978-1-84631-499-5 (hardcover).

Kaiama Glover’s Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon examines the underappreciated corpus of Haitian Spiralist literature, offering a series of close readings against the background of better-known francophone writers such as Aimé Césaire, Jacques Stephen Alexis, and Edouard Glissant. Glover argues that Spiralism—the extraordinarily original Haitian literary movement of the Duvalier and post-Duvalier period that pushed literary expressivity to its farthest limits—stands as perhaps the richest and most vivid development of the Caribbean surrealist aesthetic to date. While Spiralism has received little attention in studies of Caribbean literature (the work of J. Michael Dash is the most notable exception to this oversight), and while Frankétienne in particular is the subject of Rachel Douglas’s monograph Frankétienne and Rewriting: A Work in Progress,[1] Glover’s book is notable for its encompassing critical analysis of the three principle authors of Spiralism: Frankétienne, Jean-Claude Fignolé, and René Philoctète. Haiti Unbound thus stands as the first book-length analysis of the movement as a whole, examining both the convergences and often-startling dissonances of a literary movement that has always refused the subsumptive identity politics of the programmatic, theoretical manifesto à la créolité. Read the rest of this entry »