Vol. 27 / No. 1 / April 2019 Volume 27 Number 1 April 2019 Rachel L
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Vol. 27 / No. 1 / April 2019 Volume 27 Number 1 April 2019 Rachel L. Mordecai, Editor in Charge Published by the Departments of Literatures in English, University of the West Indies CREDITS Original image: Conversation with Hector H. 2015. Acrylic on Canvas 25 in. x 25 in., by Tessa Mars Nadia Huggins (graphic designer) Carla DeSantis (copy-editor) JWIL is published with the financial support of the Departments of Literatures in English of The University of the West Indies Enquiries should be sent to THE EDITORS Journal of West Indian Literature Department of Literatures in English, UWI Mona Kingston 7, JAMAICA, W.I. Tel. (876) 927-2217; Fax (876) 970-4232 e-mail: [email protected] Copyright © 2019 Journal of West Indian Literature ISSN (online): 2414-3030 EDITORIAL COMMITTEE Evelyn O’Callaghan (Editor in Chief) Michael A. Bucknor (Senior Editor) Lisa Outar (Senior Editor) Glyne Griffith Rachel L. Mordecai Kevin Adonis Browne BOOK REVIEW EDITOR Antonia MacDonald EDITORIAL BOARD Edward Baugh Victor Chang Alison Donnell Mark McWatt Maureen Warner-Lewis EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Laurence A. Breiner Rhonda Cobham-Sander Daniel Coleman Anne Collett Raphael Dalleo Denise deCaires Narain Curdella Forbes Aaron Kamugisha Geraldine Skeete Faith Smith Emily Taylor THE JOURNAL OF WEST INDIAN LITERATURE has been published twice-yearly by the Departments of Literatures in English of the University of the West Indies since October 1986. JWIL originated at the same time as the first annual conference on West Indian Literature, the brainchild of Edward Baugh, Mervyn Morris and Mark McWatt. It reflects the continued commitment of those who followed their lead to provide a forum in the region for the dissemination and discussion of our literary culture. Initially featuring contributions from scholars in the West Indies, it has become an internationally recognized peer-reviewed academic journal. The Editors invite the submission of articles in English that are the result of scholarly research in literary textuality (fiction, prose, drama, film, theory and criticism) of the English-speaking Caribbean. We also welcome comparative assessments of non-Anglophone Caribbean texts provided translations into English of the relevant parts of such texts are incorporated into the submission. JWIL will also publish book reviews. Submission guidelines are available at www.jwilonline.org. Table of Contents Editorial Preface I Rachel L. Mordecai Más Allá del Play: Race and the Dominican Baseball Player in 1 Sugar Raj Chetty Travelling Identities, Virtual Frames: Embodying the Caribbean in 15 Digital Spaces Nicola Hunte Refusing Daffodils: The Resistant Pedagogies of Michelle Cliff’s Abeng 32 Meina Yates-Richard The Erotic Schemes of Angels: Love on the Line in Merle Collins’s Novel 50 Revisioning Asha Tall A “Right to Quiet”: Noise Control, M. NourbeSe Philip and a Critique 70 of Sound as Property Petal Samuel Jamaican String Theory: Quantum Sounds and Postcolonial Spacetime 88 in Marcia Douglas’s The Marvellous Equations of the Dread Njelle W. Hamilton Book reviews Shara McCallum, Madwoman 107 Amrita Bandopadhyay Leone Ross, Come Let Us Sing Anyway and Other Stories 110 Kezia Page Helen Klonaris, If I Had the Wings: Short Stories 113 Kim Robinson-Walcott 116 Notes on contributors I Editorial Preface Rachel L. Mordecai It is with deep pleasure that we present this April 2019 issue of JWIL. Most of the articles published here have their roots in papers delivered at the 37th annual West Indian Literature Conference at the University of Miami in October 2018. The theme of the conference was “Global Caribbean Studies: ‘Scapes.’” It was, as always, a rich and generative gathering, structured, in this instance, around a series of stellar keynotes, including talks by Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert and JWIL’s own Kevin Adonis Browne. While an admirably broad range of topics informed the conversations at the conference, one recurring motif was a sense of urgency regarding the escalating threat of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, whose effects we now see around us in every part of the globe, but whose impacts are disproportionately suffered by regions such as our own: societies with populations clustered at or near coastlines and (for the most part) minimal hinterlands, whose sparse financial resources hamper efforts at preparation for, mitigation of and recovery from environmental disasters. (JWIL foregrounded this threat, and the Caribbean’s particular vulnerability to it, in our special issue, Caribbean Ecocriticism— vol. 24, no. 2, November 2016—guest-edited by Elaine Savory.) While global and regional attention to the problem of climate change, and the necessity of a swift transition away from fossil fuels, is on the rise, none of us can deceive ourselves that this is a solved problem, or even that a solution is yet within our collective grasp. It is therefore essential that we who live in, come from and study the Caribbean continue to put our heads together to think, write and speak urgently about our current precarity, even while calling into being sustainable and salutary Caribbean futures. While not directly addressing climate change, the articles gathered in this current issue answer this imperative via their collective engagement with Caribbean timescapes. They all—through their arguments, their methodologies or their object texts—are thinking and rethinking Caribbean histories (cultural and political) and the contemporary Caribbean in ways that chart, or at least gesture towards, emancipatory Caribbean futures. Without dishonouring the particularity of each of these scholarly pieces, we can see them clustering in pairs around three central themes or projects, the first of which is interrogating transnational iterations of Caribbean identity and questions of (self-)representation in popular culture. Raj Chetty’s “Más Allá del Play: Race and the Dominican Baseball Player in Sugar” reads a 2008 film about Dominican Republic baseball players in the US minor leagues through C. L. R. James and Sylvia Wynter, tracking filmic techniques and symbolic language to elucidate the film’s nuanced treatment of racialization and racial self-identification among and between black Dominican men and their US counterparts. Nicola Hunte’s “Travelling Identities, Virtual Frames: Embodying the Caribbean in Digital Spaces,” meanwhile, examines what Hunte calls “virtual performances of Anglophone Caribbean identity” in three online videos that rework artefacts from North American II popular culture (such as Cinderella and Sesame Street) in a Caribbean mode. Counterposing these new- media texts with earlier, print-based Caribbean texts—novels by Samuel Selvon, Andrea Levy and Austin Clarke—Hunte demonstrates how the modes and aesthetics of Caribbean cultural production in digital spaces call for us to not only deploy but also rethink the insights yielded by both postcolonial and diaspora-studies frameworks. A second pair of articles takes on the project of looking anew at canonical Caribbean women’s writing to reveal insufficiently explored dimensions of these texts and their investments—enacted, in part, at the level of form and structure—in advancing women’s freedom. Meina Yates-Richard’s “Refusing Daffodils: The Resistant Pedagogies of Michelle Cliff’s Abeng” enjoins us to return our gaze to Cliff’s novel because its “forms of resistant and insurgent pedagogy” have thus far been largely overlooked in the critical scholarship. Situating the novel within a postcolonialist understanding of education as site of imperialist/anti-imperialist contestation, the essay argues persuasively that Cliff uses a variety of textual strategies which ultimately cohere into a “text-book” for the refusal of colonial hegemony. In “The Erotic Schemes of Angels: Love on the Line in Merle Collins’s Novel Revisioning,” Asha Tall guides us through a different kind of textual return: Collins’s revision of Angel, her 1987 novel about the Grenada Revolution, reissued in 2011. Tall’s careful examination of Collins’s changes and additions to the novel supports her contention that, despite the marginal position of the novel’s romantic plot, Collins is centrally interested in figuring the transformation of interpersonal relationships and the expansion of erotic autonomy as essential to emancipatory projects. Finally, we present a pair of articles which think through the politics and potentialities of Caribbean and black-diasporic sound. Petal Samuel’s “A ‘Right to Quiet’: Noise Control, M. NourbeSe Philip and a Critique of Sound as Property” summons Philip’s work—specifically, the prose-poem Looking for Livingstone—to ground its critique of efforts to extend property-rights claims into the sonic dimension, thereby driving sound-makers (often Afro-Caribbean people) out of public spaces by portraying their expression as “noise” which putatively invades the private property of those who are, as Samuel notes, “often otherwise the privileged subjects of rights.” This phenomenon, which Samuel identifies in sites across the hemisphere, is examined and discursively countered via Samuel’s deployment of Philip’s poetic engagement with silence and figuring of “sound as a shared natural resource.” And Njelle W. Hamilton’s “Jamaican String Theory: Quantum Sounds and Postcolonial Spacetime in Marcia Douglas’s The Marvellous Equations of the Dread” elucidates for us that novel’s richly productive symbolic territory, where theoretical physics (string theory), colonial monuments (the Halfway