The centerpiece of this issue of sx salon is the special book reviews section, curated by Ronald Cummings, celebrating the work of Stuart Hall on the tenth anniversary of his passing. The five review essays that comprise the section take on books about Hall’s remarkable intellectual project and its legacies, as well as books (posthumously published) authored or coauthored by Hall himself. I will leave it to Cummings’s masterful introductory essay to map the territory of the section and will note here only how much I admire the range of insight and thoughtful engagement that it encompasses, managing to offer us critical and capacious reflections that honor the significant impact of Hall’s work without ever shading over into hagiography.

And it is far from the whole of this issue’s riches. In our discussion section we are delighted to offer two interviews with established Caribbean writers. First, Ronald Cummings talks with Pamela Mordecai about her 2022 poetry collection de book of Joseph: a performance poem—a reimagining in Jamaican patois of the life of the biblical figure and the third in Mordecai’s series about the lives of Jesus’s family. Then Mario Laarmann interviews Earl Lovelace about the themes and preoccupations that have animated his work over a literary career of almost six decades’ duration. (The interview is, accordingly, quite lengthy, and we present it here in two parts.) We are delighted to round out the section with a brief excerpt from Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s forthcoming biography Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde.

Our Poetry & Prose section, as always, offers the joys of new Caribbean creative writing: a selection of poetry by Keith Jones and short fiction by Malica S. Willie and Morgan Christie.

Enjoy, stay well in these tumultuous times, and let us know what you think: rlm@smallaxe.net.

Rachel L. Mordecai

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Table of Contents

Reviews

Introduction: “After Stuart Hall (After Marx)”—Ronald Cummings

“Conversations between the Closer Kin”—Tzarina T. Prater
Review of bell hooks and Stuart Hall, Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue (London: Routledge, 2018)

“Matters of Formation and the Queer Afterlives of Stuart Hall”—Christopher G. Smith
Review of Stuart Hall, Familiar Stranger: A Life between Two Islands, with Bill Schwarz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); and Annie Paul, Stuart Hall (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2020)

“Stuart Hall, Race, and Black Diaspora Memory”—Sam Tecle
Review of Stuart Hall, The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation, ed. Kobena Mercer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); and Stuart Hall, Selected Writings on Race and Difference, ed. Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021)

“Culturing the Conjuncture”—Annie Paul
Review of Julian Henriques and David Morley, eds., Stuart Hall: Conversations, Projects, and Legacies (London: Goldsmiths, 2017)

“The Conjunctural Imagination”—Gökbörü Sarp Tanyildiz
Review of Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity and Diaspora, ed.David Morley (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019)

Discussion

“de book of Joseph: A Conversation with Pamela Mordecai”—Ronald Cummings

Interview with Earl Lovelace, part 1: “Let me see how we could heal this to start again at another level of life”—Mario Laarmann

Interview with Earl Lovelace, part 2: “I never looked down—I looked across!”—Mario Laarmann

“legacy—hers”—Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Poetry & Prose

“santurce, green bay, crete”—poetry—Keith Jones

“Mr. Everton’s Cat”—short story—Morgan Christie

“Blue Shoes”—short story—Malica S. Willie