“A love of freedom and a hatred of oppression”

July 19, 2010

Claudia Jones, editor of the West Indian Gazette The black press has a long and courageous history. The first newspapers in the form of leaflets in prose and poetry, protesting against slavery, economic exploitation and global injustice appeared in the early part of the 19th century. This continued sporadically throughout that century and well into [...]

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“A compulsive urgency to tell stories”

July 16, 2010

Edgar Mittelholzer For the past thirty years Mittelholzer disappeared totally, his books obtainable only second hand, and his reputation solidified as at best being that of a literary ancestor, a pot-boiling writer obsessed with sex and race-mixing and given to right-wing, authoritarian views . . . — At the Caribbean Literary Salon blog, Peepal Tree [...]

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“Another shrug”

July 15, 2010

Jean Rhys . . . then there is the usual problem of fragmentation . . . which raises the question of whether a group of individuals linked to the same geographical area who nevertheless write independently of each other and without each other’s work in mind really form a common tradition. Which reminds me of [...]

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Brain food

July 14, 2010

Installation view of Karyn Olivier’s ACA Foods Free Library. Photograph courtesy the artist The latest issue of the CRB — dated July 2010 — began publication yesterday (and will continue for the next six weeks, with new reviews and other pieces appearing every week). We kick things off with three reviews. First, Ian Dieffenthaller tackles [...]

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R.I.P. Sugar Minott, 1956–2010

July 12, 2010

Lincoln Barrington “Sugar” Minott, Jamaican reggae and dancehall musician, died on Saturday 10 July in Kingston. The Jamaica Observer reports: Minott . . . earned for himself the moniker Godfather of Dancehall. He is credited with being the pioneer, who, by laying vocal tracks over the original tapes from the 60’s, rather than using a [...]

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(Taking a breather)

July 7, 2010

The first bimonthly online-only issue of the CRB — no. 21, dated May 2010 — wrapped up publication last week, with the third and final part of Vahni Capildeo’s vivacious essay on visiting India, “Questions of approach”. You can see the full contents of this issue here, just in case you missed something. And now [...]

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“Absent presences”

June 19, 2010

Lower Potaro River, Guyana, with Kaieteur Falls just visible in the distance. Photograph by Nicholas Laughlin Deeply influenced by the “mythic method” of high modernists like Eliot and Joyce, Harris set out to redescribe his society sub specie eternitatis — through the lens of an historical consciousness which reached back several centuries and encompassed the [...]

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“It’s Ruth, what else?”

June 18, 2010

Jamaica Kincaid. Photograph courtesy Farrar, Straus and Giroux Jamaica Kincaid is surprised that many people still wonder at the fact that she converted to Judaism. It seems natural to her to be Jewish — and even to have served as president of her synagogue in Vermont. “Yes and I’m black and I’m a woman. Oh [...]

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Reading: Town, June 2010

June 17, 2010

During the CRB’s break in publication last year, your Antilles blogger put his head together with two writer friends — Vahni Capildeo and Anu Lakhan — and started a modest little publishing project, the literary and art journal Town. Each issue contains just a few short pieces of writing, poems mostly, and two or three [...]

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Arise, Sir Wilson

June 16, 2010

Wilson Harris. Photograph courtesy Faber Sir Vidia is no longer the Caribbean’s sole literary knight. As many Antilles readers have probably heard, Wilson Harris has been granted a knighthood in the latest British honours list. “It is a great moment in Guyanese literary history,” says David Dabydeen. Though your Antilles blogger is not keen on [...]

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“A species of autobiography”

June 15, 2010

André Alexis. Photograph courtesy the CBC Reviewing is, by its nature, the chronicle of a small community: writer, book, reader. It is, for the brief time it exists, a community of equals. A reader/reviewer who fails to appreciate or understand a book tends to blame the book or the writer. And, in fact, it may [...]

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