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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)