R.I.P. Édouard Glissant, 1928–2011

February 3, 2011

Édouard Glissant, Martiniquan poet, novelist, essayist, and thinker, one of the Caribbean’s towering literary figures, died this morning in Paris, at the age of 82. Described by Le Monde as “the champion of métissage and exchange” — “le chantre du métissage et de l’échange” — Glissant was a major proponent of the Antillanité movement, articulating [...]

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“You are involved”

February 2, 2011

I really wish al-jazeera could call on CLR James right now. That was a comment made on Twitter three days ago by The Public Archive, a small collective of historians based at Vanderbilt University. Like them, like many people, I’ve spent much of the past week observing from afar the astonishing events in Egypt, where [...]

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Looking: Wrestling with the Image

January 25, 2011

Detail of I Am Not Afraid to Fight a Perfect Stranger, by John Cox (2009, acrylic on canvas). Image courtesy Nadia Huggins Wrestling with the Image: Caribbean Interventions, an exhibition of contemporary Caribbean art, curated by Christopher Cozier and Tatiana Flores, opened on 21 January, 2011, at the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, [...]

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“Blessing instead of complaining”

January 24, 2011

Derek Walcott He has won almost every other poetry award he’s eligible for, and this evening in London it was announced that Derek Walcott has won the 2011 T.S. Eliot Prize for his latest book, White Egrets. From the UK Guardian’s report: The winning collection . . . was described by the chair of judges, [...]

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“Up, out, and beyond”: talking about ARC

January 20, 2011

Cover of the first issue of ARC; image courtesy the publishers Creative work can’t thrive in isolation. Every artist, writer, musician, performer, or filmmaker needs contact with creative peers, a creative tradition, and an attentive audience, but also access to a critical space, a forum for sharing and discussing ideas. To put it more simply, [...]

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Calabash farewell

January 18, 2011

The 2007 Calabash International Literary Festival winds down with a reggae jam session. Photograph by Georgia Popplewell/Caribbean Free Photo Between its founding in 2000 and its tenth anniversary in 2010, the Calabash International Literary Festival — based in Treasure Beach, on the south coast of Jamaica — grew into one of the major events on [...]

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The CRB in 2010: your favourites

January 4, 2011

“The Wake”, photograph by David Spinks, posted at Flickr under a Creative Commons license Happy new year, dear readers, from your Antilles blogger. I hope 2011 is pleasant, productive, prosperous, and provocative (in the best way) for all of us. The CRB’s most recent issue, November 2010, wrapped up just before Christmas, and the magazine [...]

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The talented Mr Bridgens

December 8, 2010

Detail from West India Scenery (1836), by Richard Bridgens This week the CRB publishes Jonathan Ali’s review of Moloch Tropical, the most recent film by the Haitian director Raoul Peck; as well as an essay by Judy Raymond on the nineteenth-century Trinidadian artist Michel Jean Cazabon. “He’s considered a pioneer,” Raymond writes, and indeed in [...]

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“Nouns wet and fragrant and salty”

December 7, 2010

Last Friday, 3 December, Derek Walcott gave the annual Robert B. Silvers Lecture at the New York Public Library, on “Hemingway and the Caribbean”. The library has been kind enough to post video footage of the lecture online for those of us in other cities or on other continents.

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’im bounce right back

December 2, 2010

Earlier this week, the CRB published F.S.J. Ledgister’s review of Edward Seaga’s two-volume political memoir, My Life and Leadership, plus historian Patrick E. Bryan’s monograph Edward Seaga and the Challenges of Modern Jamaica. Seaga, prime minister of Jamaica from 1980 to 1989 and leader of the opposition for a cumulative two decades, was the last [...]

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“One of those moments you live entirely alone”

November 30, 2010

Mervyn Morris Do you know those moments when nothing has happened; nothing that you can talk about — yet you feel that some tremendous change has taken place? It is like the spinning and prickling in the limbs that you can feel at night when your bones are growing; except this other kind of change [...]

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