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Book Reviews 213 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/ 214 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 Book Reviews 215 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]