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Critical Perspectives on Caribbean Literature and Culture. Dorsía Smith,
Tatiana Tagirova & Suzanna Engman (eds.). Newcastle, U.K.: Cambridge
Scholars, 2010. vi + 228 pp. (Cloth US$ 59.95)
Critical Perspectives on Caribbean Literature and Culture sets out to “explore
the Caribbean as a diasporic space” through the prism of “literary and cultural systems” (p. 2). Deriving from the proceedings of the 2008 “Caribbean Without Borders” conference held in Puerto Rico, this collection of
twelve essays examines work by a range of Caribbean writers, covering
issues such as creolization and cross-cultural identity, migration, tourism,
U.S. imperialism, political activism, and gender and sexuality. The unifying
theme, argue the editors, is the hybridity of Caribbean culture and the way
in which it defies borders. Most of the subsequent essays, however, would
seem to complicate this assertion. Indeed, if there is a unifying theme to the
volume, it is the difficulties posed by borders of all kinds when it comes to
the negotiation of individual and collective identities.
The collection is split into three sections, the first of which opens with
poet and artist Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming asking whether, in a Caribbean
without borders, we will be “together yet separate and distinct as in fruit
salad or blended together like fruit punch” (p. 7). Having added this new
metaphor to the lexicon of terms used to describe Caribbean cultural identity (alongside, for example, the image of callaloo soup and Derek Walcott’s
reconstructed vase), Manoo-Rahming goes on to explore the various barriers that continue to frustrate such utopian visions.
The remaining three essays in this section analyze the impact of pressures around gender and sexuality on identity formation. Chihoko Matsuda
offers a reading of Walcott’s 1983 play, A Branch of the Blue Nile, while Margarita Castromán considers the representation of homosexuality in Puerto
Rican diasporic literature. Castromán’s primary focus is Luisita López Torregrosa’s 2004 memoir, The Noise of Infinite Longing, which, she argues,
depicts a silenced and suppressed female voice but is unable “to fully speak
and embrace the queer Diaspora” (p. 46). Rafael Miguel Montes’s essay,
“Jockeying for Position,” is a thoughtful engagement with the portrayal
of sexual and political economies in Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s Dirty Havana
Trilogy. Montes’s central claim is that through Gutiérrez’s novel, we gain a
sense of how the rise of sex tourism in Cuba during the período especial has
impacted on the population’s understanding of, and approach to, sexual
© 2013 Michael Niblett
DOI: 10.1163/22134360-12340037
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, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
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Book Reviews
and social relationships more generally. In contrast to some of the celebrations of a borderless condition elsewhere in the volume, this article is notable for the way it highlights how a lack of borders—in this instance borders
to prevent the influx of foreign capital—can itself be problematic.
The second section addresses issues of creolization, hybridity, and the
representation of subaltern identities. Josune Urbistondo considers the
role of music in Earl Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance and Peter Henzell’s
film The Harder They Come, while Tatiana Tagirova analyzes the influence
of nineteenth-century Russian literature, and in particular the work of Tolstoy, on Claude McKay’s fiction. Her essay offers some intriguing commentary on how McKay drew on and reworked Tolstoy’s ideas in his effort to
create an original literary voice, but it does not move much beyond pointing out how both authors placed an emphasis on taking pride in native or
peasant roots. Similarly, both Suzanna Engman’s article comparing Wilson
Harris’s Jonestown with Erna Brodber’s Louisiana and the article by Karen
Sands O’Connor and Caroline Hagood on the representation of the Caribbean (and especially Vodou) in U.S. popular culture deal with fascinating
subject matter but might possibly have gone further in their analyses.
The final section, “Deconstructing the Diaspora,” is orientated around
questions of political activism and responses to state violence. It begins
with Dorsía Smith’s examination of the use of nation language in the work
of Louise Bennett and Linton Kwesi Johnson. This is followed by a strong
essay from Karen Mah-Chamberlain on the different kinds of power relationships at play in Sam Selvon’s Those Who Eat The Cascadura. Marta S.
Rivera Monclova’s article on Edgardo Vega Yunqué’s The Lamentable Journey of Omaha Bigelow . . . touches on a range of issues related to the historical experience of the Puerto Rican diaspora in New York City’s Lower East
Side, including struggles over public housing and the social impact of the
built environment. The collection closes with Mary Jo Caruso’s essay on
Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of the Bones and Brother I’m Dying, which
she reads in relation to Danticat’s commitment to political activism.
Overall, this is something of an uneven book. Despite the editors’ emphasis in the introduction on defying borders and offering a “comprehensive”
perspective on the Caribbean region, the essays focus almost exclusively
on Anglophone and Hispanophone works. Aside from the article on
Danticat and Haiti, there is nothing on the Francophone or Dutch Caribbean. A longer introduction might also have taken a more critical look at
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the discourses around hybridity and the dissolution of borders, not least
because, as several of the essays demonstrate, these discourses can be used
to prop up or mask exploitative power relations just as much as they can
serve emancipatory ends. As a whole, the collection does not really place
any new hermeneutical or methodological frameworks on the table (the
hybridity paradigm is no longer the “novel perspective” the editors claim
[p. 3]). Nevertheless, there are some interesting individual articles here that
help bring to attention some currently understudied writers and texts.
Michael Niblett
Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies, University of Warwick
Coventry, CV4 7AL, U.K.
[email protected]