sx salon 9

Our May issue of sx salon features a little bit of everything. We have a mix of reviews that showcase the cultural mélange that is the Caribbean. First, we have Tzarina Prater’s review of Kerry Young’s Pao, a novel that charts the life of a Chinese immigrant against the backdrop of mid-century political and social change in Jamaica. The other three reviews in this issue consider nonfiction texts: Faith Smith reads Raphael Dalleo’s comparative monograph on Caribbean literature and the public sphere; Jeremy Glick reads Laurent Dubois’s new offering on Haitian history; and Yvette Fuentes reads the seminal collection of writings in The Afro-Latin@ Reader.

Our discussion in this issue returns to the topic of the “in-between” that we considered in February, but this time through the fiction of Elizabeth Nunez. Stephen Narain and Donette Francis discuss what could be called Nunez’s diptych novels—Anna In-Between and Boundaries—reading Anna from the different vantage points offered by the two novels. Nunez completes the discussion with a response to both essays.

In our interview section of this issue we publish a conversation with Sandra Paquet Pouchet, the second installment in Sheryl Gifford’s series of interviews with female scholars of Caribbean literature. We also publish a lively interview with Earl Lovelace, recent winner of the 2012 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. In prose and poetry we have new poems from Arturo Desimone, Summer Edward, and Erika Jeffers, as well as part 2 of our excerpt from Diana McCaulay’s forthcoming novel, Huracan. 

We hope you have a lovely summer. If you’re looking for something short to read while traveling, visit our prose and poetry archives or our previous discussions. Or, if you’re trying to decide on a longer read, peruse our reviews section. We suggest Earl Lovelace’s Is Just a Movie, Rahul Bhattacharya’s The Sly Company of People Who Care, and Karen Lord’s Redemption in Indigo. For stop-and-go reading, try Anton Nimblett’s Sections of an Orange or Caryl Phillips’s Color Me English. We’ll be back with a new issue in August. In the meantime, enjoy your summer and sx salon 9 (table of contents below).

Kelly Baker Josephs

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Table of Contents

Introduction and Table of Contents—Kelly Baker Josephs

Reviews

Pao, by Kerry Young—Tzarina T. Prater
Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere, by Raphael Dalleo—Faith Smith
Haiti: The Aftershocks of History, by Laurent Dubois—Jeremy M. Glick
The Afro-Latin@ Reader, edited by Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores—Yvette Fuentes

Discussion—Elizabeth Nunez’s Anna Novels

The Resolution Will Not Be Theorized—Stephen Narain
The Boundaries of a Space In Between—Donette Francis
The Two Anna Novels: A Response—Elizabeth Nunez

Poetry

Arturo Desimone
Summer Edward
Erika Jeffers

Prose

Zachary’s Arrival, Part II—Diana McCaulay

Interviews

“This Is How I Know Myself”: A Conversation with Sandra Pouchet Paquet—Sheryl Gifford
An Interview with Earl Lovelace: Reflections on the 1970 Trinidad and Tobago Black Power Movement in Earl Lovelace’s Is Just a Movie—Sophie Megan Harris