Tzarina T. Prater

Kerry Young, Pao: A Novel (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2011); 270 pages; ISBN 978-1608195077 (paper).

Kerry Young’s first novel, Pao, opens in 1945 at the close of World War II, with a romance. The central protagonist is the titular Pao, a Chinese Jamaican who emigrates with his family to Jamaica during the interwar period. The narrative action begins with Pao and his “boys” hanging out in his shop, when in walks Gloria Campbell, a black prostitute and madam, seeking help to avenge her sister who has been savagely beaten by a white American sailor. Pao’s attraction to Gloria is immediate, and despite their differences they embark on a lifelong relationship. The strength of Pao’s feelings for Gloria is not enough to challenge the edicts of his father figure/mentor, “Uncle” Zhang, who is the leader of illegal activity in Chinatown. Pao is forbidden to marry a black woman who does not do “honourable” work and is instructed to find a “proper” Chinese woman who can give him access to respectability and old world patriarchal power. Marriage, Pao is told, “is not for celebrating. It is something you do to give your children a name” (6). Eventually Pao does just that. He finds a woman who embodies what is “proper”—Fay Wong, daughter of Henry Wong, a Chinese supermarket owner, and Cicely Wong, a black Jamaican woman. (more…)

Faith Smith

Raphael Dalleo, Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere: From the Plantation to the Postcolonial (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011); 320 pages; ISBN 978-0813931999 (paper).

This is an ambitious, original study of the literary public sphere that moves across Barbados, Cuba, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico with confidence, keeping multiple literary histories in play simultaneously, while helping to forge a vital sense of a regional history. Any lingering idea of the postcolonial as a largely, if not solely, anglophone preoccupation is vigorously challenged here, as, for instance, when the testimonio’s robust ties to Latin American studies and South Asian subaltern studies are utilized to reflect on Cuba and Jamaica in the 1960s and 1970s. In this study the United States is part of a sustained conversation with the regional Caribbean—as succeeding and partnering with European imperialism; as offering competing visions of modernity; as making concerns about the capitalist marketplace more explicit, more hysterical, and more nuanced. (more…)

Jeremy M. Glick    

Laurent Dubois, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012); 448 pages; ISBN 978-0805093353 (hardcover).

One of the many extraordinary mise-en-scènes framing Laurent Dubois’s Haiti: The Aftershocks of History initiates “Sacrifice,” a chapter in the book that begins with an examination of the failure of the United States and the Vatican to diplomatically recognize Haiti:

In December 1859, an elaborate official funeral was held in the cathedral of Port-au-Prince. The Haitian president, Fabre Geffrard, oversaw the proceedings, while the head Catholic priest of Port-au-Prince officiated a high mass. In the nave of the church was the coffin, draped in black, lit up by candles, and decorated with an inscription naming the deceased as a “martyr for the cause of the blacks.” After a rousing eulogy, it was carried to a cross at the edge of town by a large procession that brought together many of the town’s most prominent citizens. But the coffin was never placed in the ground, for it was empty. (135) (more…)

Yvette Fuentes

Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores, eds., The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); 566 pages; ISBN-13 978-0-8223-4572-5 (paper).

In the recent PBS series Black in Latin America, the renowned African American scholar Henry Louis Gates travels through various Latin American countries to trace the history of the 11.5 million Africans who were brought to this region as slaves.[1] In every episode, the eminent Harvard professor appears surprised when encountering solid evidence showing the important role Africans and their descendants have played in the history and culture of Latin America. Gates learns about such important figures as Vicente Guerrero and José María Morelos, in Mexico, and Antonio Maceo, in Cuba—Afro-Latin Americans who fought tirelessly for their nations’ independence from Spain. Early in the series, Gates admits that he knew little about Latin America and the region’s significant African heritage. And he adds that prior to conducting this research, he, like many in the United States, made distinctions between African Americans and Latinos as if the two were distinct ethnic or racial categories. One of the most poignant moments in the series occurs while Gates is visiting Mexico’s Costa Chica region, an area with a vibrant and marked Afro-Mexican presence. While there, Gates discovers that Mexico isn’t just a “mestizo” nation, a mix of Spanish and Native American, as many scholars have claimed; it is also black, despite the apparent erasure of the millions of African slaves and their descendants from official history. During his visit, Gates makes an extraordinary declaration, “If the ‘one drop rule’ was applied to Mexico, all of these people would be black.”[2] (more…)