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). (more…)

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. (more…)

Carter Mathes

Martin Munro, Different Drummers: Rhythm and Race in the Americas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); 280 pages; ISBN 978-0-520-26283-6 (paper).

In his ambitious study of circum-Caribbean sonic cultures, Different Drummers: Rhythm and Race in the Americas, Martin Munro examines the concept of rhythm as it has been negotiated across the racialized contexts of slavery, colonialism, and creolization, as well as in relationship to forms of cultural and political resistance such as Negritude, Haitian indigenism, and Black Power.

Munro blends literary, historical, and ethnomusicological tools of analysis as he examines rhythm as “one of the most persistent and malleable markers of race, both in racist white thought and in liberatory black counter-discourse” (4). For Munro, formations of rhythm in the Americas arise within music and verse (most specifically through the “beats” that structure, underline, and punctuate these forms) while also reflecting complexly felt experiential conditions including temporality, labor, confinement, repression, and resistance. The generative breadth Munro uses to define rhythm as not merely sonic but an equally psychological and physiological orientation compellingly pushes the theoretical scope of the book into addressing the phenomenological, corporeal, and temporal aspects of sound. (more…)

Christopher Ian Foster

Donette Francis, Fictions of Feminine Citizenship: Sexuality and the Nation in Contemporary Caribbean Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); 191 pages; ISBN: 978-0-230-61987-6 (hardcover).

Donette Francis’s important and rigorous work Fictions of Feminine Citizenship: Sexuality and the Nation in Contemporary Caribbean Literature presents a wide-ranging descriptor of contemporary women’s Caribbean writing while offering a critical engagement with the sociohistorical colonial and postcolonial contexts that these writers negotiate and critique. Specifically centered on Caribbean women’s narratives displaced by official history, Francis argues for an expansion of the archives that have historically excluded forms of women’s writings such as letters and postcards and ignored the narratives of women’s own bodies. Often, these marginalized expressions have been silenced by male-centered or patriarchal institutions. Furthermore, they have been doubly effaced by dint of the cultural conquest of Western imperialism. Just as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argues that “between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the ‘third-world woman,’”[1] so Francis tracks displaced counternarratives of “third-world” women’s desire marking a necessary intervention into Caribbean studies. Shuttled between colonial processes and heteropatriarchal national mores, Caribbean women’s voices are often expunged from official history. These narratives, expressed both textually and metatextually (via letters, postcards, and their own bodies), make up what Francis presciently calls the antiromance. This contestatory genre challenges the “romance” as intimately bound to and produced by colonial history and representing the subject-position of white or European males. The antiromance also indicates the ways in which citizenship imbricates sexuality—that sexuality is indeed constructed or controlled by the mores and laws of society. “Sexual citizenship” for Francis denotes these intimate histories between the State and the domestic sphere specifically considering the violence women of color face as a consequence of the management of sexuality in the colonial and postcolonial context. The radical potential of the antiromance, as Francis shows, is the very possibility of alternative modes of community within which female desire is not governed by sexual-patriarchal or racial hierarchies; it presents the possibility of women’s agency within these regulatory and often violent contexts. (more…)

Nicholas Gamso

Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley, eds., Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); 360 pages; ISBN 978-0-19-539442-9 (hardback).

Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley open their new collection Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment with epigraphs by Frantz Fanon and Edward Said, two luminaries who emphasize that colonization and anticolonial struggles have long been rooted in land and locality. They quote Fanon, who writes, “For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity” (3). The editors’ use of these lines to open their volume foregrounds an intellectual tradition in which the literary is inseparable from the social, the material, and the real. (more…)