book reviews 167

Lucy Evans Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014. x + 230 pp. (Cloth us$110.00)

Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories marks an important intervention in contemporary (late twentieth- and early twenty- first-century) Caribbean short story studies. Lucy Evans’s book follows from her doctoral research and the collection she edited in 2011 with Mark McWatt and Emma Smith.1 Evans takes as her starting point Kenneth Ramchand’s assertion that “there are no West Indian novelists”2 (1997:21) to examine the role that short stories continue to play in Caribbean writing. While earlier writers have often focused on contributing to a collectively produced regional aesthetic, Evans argues, later writers are concerned with “the more open and complex question of what constitutes a Caribbean community” (p. 16), shifting from imagined nation(s) to the effects of mass tourism, globalization, economic instability, and political corruption in the face of neocolonial dependency. She examines how single- author collections, as opposed to selected, isolated stories, express in various ways notions of Caribbean community that may not necessarily align with more “official” political, academic, and media discourses. Community has always been a vexing question in Caribbean cultural dis- course, and Evans examines how these stories communicate not only with each other in a collection, but with wider discourses to reconfigure these imagined ideals, on micro- as well as macrolevels. Each chapter addresses a particular type of community—rural, urban, national, and global—and demonstrates how different collections intervene in the creation of each of these imaginaries. The contributions these stories make do not provide definitive answers to the question of what constitutes community, but offer various elaborations of the amorphous nature of these communities, which coexist but are not necessarily cohesive. Communities’ chief strength is that it is the first book-length, single-author study of Caribbean short stories. Moreover, it takes the novel approach of addressing collections of short stories, arranged by the authors themselves, rather than edited collections or anthologies. Evans situates her critique of

1 Lucy Evans, Mark McWatt & Emma Smith, 2011, The Caribbean Short Story: Critical Perspec- tives (Leeds, u.k.: Peepal Tree Press). 2 Kenneth Ramchand, 1997. The West Indian Short Story. Journal of Caribbean Literatures 1(1):21–30.

© janelle rodriques, 2016 | doi: 10.1163/22134360-09001041 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported (cc-by-nc 3.0) License. 168 book reviews these texts within various anthropological discourses, and positions the sto- ries themselves as critiques of these discourses. She thus develops a theory of the continued suitability of “interconnected stories” for the expression of the dynamics of Caribbean communities. As such, the book is as much an inter- vention in sociological debates about the nature of Caribbean community as it is in literary ones, and consequently presents a more holistic, interdisciplinary approach to this question. Evans has chosen collections published between 1986 and 2005, by authors born in Jamaica, Trinidad, and Guyana, but whose focus extends beyond the Caribbean to its various diasporas. Olive Senior, Earl Lovelace, Kwame Dawes, Alecia McKenzie, Lawrence Scott, Mark McWatt, Dionne Brand, and Robert Antoni all elaborate their own imaginaries of Caribbean community. The sto- ries by Senior and Lovelace address the rural village and small town in rela- tion to anthropological (colonial) kinship studies of family. The aesthetics of these stories are themselves indebted to both modernist and oral traditions, and show the tensions between them. Dawes and McKenzie position their stories as interrogations of the uptown/downtown dichotomy that is played out in media discourses about Kingston, as well as various geographical and sociospatial hierarchical discourses. Scott and McWatt address postindepen- dence Trinidad and Guyana in their collections, and interrogate not only the racial divisions created by nationalist rhetoric, but also the threat posed to national consciousness by the rhetoric of tourism. Lastly, Brand and Antoni explore the parameters of community in an increasingly globalized world. Evans also builds on the various iterations of Caribbean community and iden- tity first developed by Édouard Glissant, Wilson Harris, and Antonio Benítez- Rojo, which critique the “unity in diversity” model of Brathwaite’s theory of cre- olization. She reads her chosen collections against these models, and explores how their structural dynamics speak to the tensions inherent in any conception of Caribbean community which, while it may be fractured or plural, neverthe- less holds together. Evans’s readings of these collections show that narratives of political cit- izenship and state formation are formed parallel to, but are not integral to, communal and individual notions of personhood and belonging. She identi- fies these “alternative” formations as religious and cultural “folk” traditions, media discourses, party political rhetoric, and global consumerist ideology. Her study does not purport to “solve” the question of Caribbean commu- nity through anthropology, but rather to highlight the parallels and tensions between anthropological and literary discourses on this subject. Although over- elaborated in parts, Communities is thoroughly researched and well argued throughout. It benefits from extensive fieldwork and interviews with authors,

New West Indian Guide 90 (2016) 81–194