“The motor for change”

June 13, 2010

Walter Rodney addressing an audience in Guyana, late 1970s “Respice, adspice, prospice” is a Latin phrase that roughly means “examine the past, examine the present, examine the future. Very few lived more completely under the embrace of this phrase than Walter Rodney. From the moment that Rodney (the 30th anniversary of whose assassination is being [...]

Read the full article →

In hand: Caribbean Middlebrow

June 11, 2010

The history of leisure culture in the Anglophone Caribbean for the last 150 years is very much the story of the nascent black middle class and the aspiring black middle class, striving to reconcile their origins in black-identified culture with its aspirations for social ascendance and international recognition . . . There are intellectual histories [...]

Read the full article →

Guggenheim times two

June 10, 2010

Marlon Griffith’s Walk into the Night (2009), a large-scale public performance work in Cape Town. Photography by Wendel Fernandez, courtesy the Small Axe blog This morning the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced the 2010 Latin American and Caribbean Guggenheim Fellowship Awards. “Guggenheim Fellows are appointed on the basis of stellar achievement and exceptional promise [...]

Read the full article →

Looking: Young Talent V

June 9, 2010

Di Real Big Man (2010), by Ebony G. Patterson. Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Jamaica One welcome recent development in the Jamaican art scene has been the launch of the National Gallery of Jamaica blog, which finally gives the NGJ a meaningful online presence. (For this we can thank Veerle Poupeye, who was [...]

Read the full article →

South and north

June 9, 2010

Self-portrait by Dhiradj Ramsamoedj, stenciled in an old novel; part of his Adjie Gilas installation. Photograph by Christopher Cozier This week’s additions to the current issue of the CRB look south and north at a fascinating emerging artist and a major player in Caribbean publishing. “A place to stand” is a portfolio of images from [...]

Read the full article →

“I will always be speaking with you”

June 7, 2010

Excerpt from The Terror and the Time, Rupert Roopnaraine’s 1979 film, including Martin Carter’s reading of his poem “This Is the Dark Time My Love” Were Martin Carter still alive, he would be eighty-three today. Carter’s life and work have been much on my mind the past months. They offer exemplary matter for contemplation of [...]

Read the full article →

Reading: tongues of the ocean, June 2010

June 6, 2010

Cover image of the June 2010 issue of tongues of the ocean. Photo by Rachael Whitehouse, courtesy tongues of the ocean A Sudden and Violent Change was a cross-disciplinary art exhibition that ran earlier this year at The Hub, a contemporary art centre in Nassau. This was an exhibition with both a curator, Jonathan Murray, [...]

Read the full article →

Confessions of a judge

June 4, 2010

Image posted at Flickr under a Creative Commons license by Georg Mayer When the Caribbean and Canada regional shortlist for the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize was announced last February, several of my friends and colleagues commented on — indeed, complained about — the fact that only one of the twelve shortlisted books was by a [...]

Read the full article →

In hand: Draconian Switch 12

June 3, 2010

The latest issue of the Trinidad-based art and design e-magazine Draconian Switch was released today. Edited and designed by Richard Rawlins, DS 12 features profiles of fashion designer Robert Young and musician Nigel Rojas, photos by Rodell Warner, plus an essay on “the strangling of Carnival” and coverage of recent artists’ projects. Download the PDF [...]

Read the full article →

Lost in space

June 2, 2010

Finding My Way Home 2, by Tavares Strachan, from Orthostatic Tolerance. Image originally published in the Boston Globe The Bahamian artist Tavares Strachan’s latest project — Orthostatic Tolerance: It Might Not Be Such a Bad Idea If I Never Went Home — opened at the MIT List Visual Arts Centre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, last month. [...]

Read the full article →

Treasure Beach tales

June 1, 2010

The main stage at the Calabash International Literary Festival, photographed in 2007 by Georgia Popplewell/Caribbean Free Photo The news from Jamaica this past fortnight has been overwhelmingly grim. But last weekend, as the situation in Kingston began to simmer down, an opportunity for decompression came along in the form of the tenth Calabash International Literary [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →