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. (more…)

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.  (more…)

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). (more…)

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. (more…)