Soyica D. Colbert

Derek Walcott, Ti-Jean and His Brothers. Directed by Megan Sandberg-Zakian; Central Square Theater, Cambridge, Mass.; 3 March 2011.

The Underground Railway Theater and Playwrights’ Theatre at Boston University production of Noble Prize winner Derek Walcott’s Ti-Jean and His Brothers takes the viewer on a journey to a place and time where animals talk, spirits negotiate with the living, and a murdered child comes back to life. The play, which takes place somewhere in the Caribbean, has been produced several times since 1957, when Walcott wrote the play over three days in a New York City hotel room. The lack of geographical specificity leaves the play open to several different interpretations.

Hampton Sterling Fluker (Gros Jean), Cedric Lilly (Mi-Jean), Sonya Raye (Mother), and Kervin George Germain (Ti-Jean) in Ti-Jean & His Brothers, Central Square Theater, Photo by A.R. Sinclair Photography.

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Erin MacLeod

Sonjah Stanley Niaah, DanceHall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2010); 232 pages; ISBN 978-0-77660-736-8 (paper).

During the day, Kingston, Jamaica, is bustling, alive with commerce in the markets and conversation on the corners. At night, the city is no less alive, its soundsystems and street dances ring out through the darkness. This is dancehall, and its music, according to Sonjah Stanley Niaah, is “creating space through rhythm” (119). (more…)

Asha Jeffers

Austin Clarke, More (New York: Amistad, 2010); 300 pages; ISBN 978-0887623530 (paper).

More is the latest novel from Austin Clarke, one of the most prominent and prolific Caribbean Canadian writers. After the critical success of The Polished Hoe (2002), which won several high-profile awards, Clarke has returned in his new novel to a Toronto setting, as well as returning to several themes that are central to his body of work. A timely text, More was first published in 2008 when the infamous “Summer of the Gun”—the period in 2005 during which there was a massive amount of media focus on gun violence in Toronto’s mostly Caribbean-descended black community—was still fresh in the minds of Toronto residents. With More, Clarke responds to the mainstream media’s sensationalist reading of the community by foregrounding the voice of one of those who has until now only been seen weeping and gesturing over the bodies of dead children: a mother. (more…)

Milagros Ricourt

Michaeline A. Crichlow, Globalization and the Post-Creole Imagination: Notes on Fleeing the Plantation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); 305 pages; ISBN 978-0-8223-4441-4 (paper).

The twentieth century witnessed the anxiety of Caribbean scholars to grasp the authentic local epistemology of the Caribbean. In the search for knowledge, the region’s sociocultural practices, identity, and nationalistic discourse, as well as the relation of metropolis and colonies, have been approached from different angles: from Aimé Césaire’s Une tempête and Caliban as a cultural signifier, to Patrick Chamoiseau, Jean Bernabé, and Raphael Confiant’s Elogé de la creolité, to Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s analysis of creolization, to Edouard Glissant’s Poétique de la Relation. Glissant’s and Trouillot’s works, specifically, fuel the postmodern understanding of the Caribbean as a complex site with multiple local histories and multiform cultures where differences relate the region to the rest of the world. In Creolization and the Post-Creole Imagination, sociologist Michaeline Crichlow uses Glissant’s relationally kaleidoscopic gaze and Trouillot’s concept of creolization to study the sociocultural transformation of the Caribbean, engaging herself successfully in the scholarly conversation about the meaning of Caribbean societies. In so doing, Crichlow makes an invaluable contribution to the analysis of Caribbean society and culture earning a place in the vanguard of historical development of Caribbean knowledge and within the present growing academic bibliography on this subject. (more…)