In this issue of sx salon four young editors and reviewers discuss the art of writing and editing book reviews. Raphael Dalleo, current book review editor for the journal Anthurium, writes about the vital links between book reviews and academic scholarship. Charmaine Valere, known to many as Signifyin Woman (of the Signifyin Guyana website), considers the tricky balance in blog reviewing, particularly in the immediacy and interactive nature of reviewing online. Douglas Field, former book review editor at Callalo, examines the impact of reviewing on James Baldwin’s career, highlighting the influence that reading and critiquing others’ writings can have on a young author’s work. Closing out the discussion we have Nicholas Laughlin, editor of the Caribbean Review of Books, exploring the importance of book reviews to not just writers but also the community they write for, in this case, a Caribbean community of readers.

Of course, we also have a fresh batch of reviews in this issue, all on nonfiction publications. We begin with a review of Caryl Phillips’s latest collection of essays, Color Me English: Migration and Belonging Before and After 9/11. In this issue we also carry part 1of an extended companion interview with Phillips about this new collection (part 2will run in our February 2012 issue). Our other nonfiction reviews are on academic texts: Kristina Huang reviews Jane Landers’s Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions; Toni Pressley-Sanon reviews Kate Ramsey’s The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti; and Kaiama L. Glover reviews Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism between Women in Caribbean Literature.

In addition to the interview with Caryl Phillips, we are pleased to publish an interview with Jan Carew in this issue. In this interview, Carew, now in the process of writing his memoirs, revisits his time in Prague and the Soviet Republic.

To balance our emphasis on nonfiction in this issue, we have new poems from Fred D’Aguiar, Kemar Cummings, Nicolette Bethel, Yannick Giovanni Marshall, and dub poet Malachi Smith (with an audio sample of Smith performing “Papine”). We are also happy to announce in this issue the winners of the 2011 Small Axe Literary Competition:

• In the Short Fiction category, first place went to Barbara Jenkins and second place to Heidi N. Holder.
• In the Poetry category, we had two first place winners: Sonia Farmer and Danielle McShine.

The announcement of the Short List for each section of the 2011 Small Axe Literary Competition can be found here.

We hope you enjoy the December issue of sx salon (table of contents below).

Kelly Baker Josephs

 

Table of Contents

sx salon, issue 7 (December 2011), Introduction —Kelly Baker Josephs

Reviews
Color Me English: Migration and Belonging Before and After 9/11 by Caryl Phillips—Bastian Balthazar Becker
Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions by Jane G. Landers—Kristina Huang
The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti by Kate Ramsey—Toni Pressley-Sanon
Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism Between Women in Caribbean Literature by Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley—Kaiama L. Glover 

Discussion – The Book Review
Sitting Down Together and Talking About a Little Scholarship—Raphael Dalleo
On Rants and Roundabout Reviews—Charmaine Valere
James Baldwin and the Art of Reviewing—Douglas Field
Understanding Ourselves—Nicholas Laughlin

Poetry

Fred D’Aguiar
Kemar Cummings
Nicolette Bethel
Yannick Giovanni Marshall
Malachi Smith

 

Interviews

“The Narrative Is Not Written in Stone”: A Conversation with Caryl Phillips, Part I
Bastian Balthazar Becker
Black Midas in Moscow—A Conversation with Jan Carew
Joy Gleason Carew

 

A Symposium on the RISM Collections at NYU presented by the Caribbean Institute of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at NYU.
December 1-2, 2011

Featuring Keynote Lecture by Sidney Mintz and three panel presentations from top scholars discussing “Mid-Century Anthropology in the Archives” in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Trinidad. Continue reading Caribbean History and Anthropology in the Archives

Transcolonial Fanon: Trajectories of a Revolutionary Politics
a full-day conference
Friday, December 2, 2011
Buell Hall, East Gallery, Columbia University

To mark the fiftieth anniversary of Frantz Fanon’s death, an international group of scholars addresses the diverse sources, trajectories and reinscriptions of his thought. Participants will consider Fanon’s biographical and intellectual migration between the French Caribbean and North Africa, and between the theory of race and the project of anticolonial nationalism, and discuss his legacy across continents and across disciplines.

 

 

 

 

Continue reading Transcolonial Fanon

“THE GODS IN THE TRUNK, OR CHAUVET’S REMNANTS”

Monday, November 21, 2011
7PM
Sulzburger Parlor
Barnard Hall, 3rd Floor
3009 Broadway, Barnard College

“What is less easy to understand is how this religion resists manipulation, how its practices set limits to any universal trope or symbol, and finally, how its rituals confront, absorb, and reconstitute the extremes of idealization or denigration. In thinking about Vodou we must inhabit–even if risking that fashionable postmodern device—an indeterminate place, not vague so much as very particularized in its many conversions. We must move to a middle ground where laws of identity and contradiction no longer work, where local and sometimes erratic gods summon and urge an insistent ideology or world of reference.”

Colin Dayan, “Vodou, or the Voice of the Gods”

Reflecting on both the productive and the dangerous convergences of the spiritual and the political in Haitian author Marie Vieux Chauvet’s fiction, scholar, journalist, and activist Dayan offers an exploration of “the wrinkle in the business of divinity” – the revealing interplay of matter and not-matter, of defilement and exaltation at the crux of personhood. With Chauvet as her prompt, Dayan moves to rethink our understanding of the “supernatural” by questioning the context of the sacred and the meaning of accursed objects.

This lecture is part of the AESTHETIC AND CULTURAL EXPRESSIONS OF AFRICAN-DERIVED RELIGIONS Lecture series. Continue reading Colin Dayan Lecture

Next Friday, November 18th, 2011, Edwidge Danticat will be honored at the 2011 Langston Hughes Festival to be held at City College/CUNY. In the morning, the College will hold a symposium in her honor, featuring the Panel Discussion:

HAITI IN THE AGE OF DANTICAT
11:00 am —1:00 pm
Shepard Hall — 250

PANELISTS
DR. RÉGINE LATORTUE, Brooklyn College, CUNY
DR. MARIA RICE BELLAMY, College of Staten Island, CUNY
DR. KAIAMA L. GLOVER, Barnard College, Columbia University
DR. JEAN YVES PLAISIR, Borough of ManhattanCommunity College, CUNY
DR. MILLERY POLYNÉ, Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University

In the evening, the president of the College, President Lisa S. Coico, will present Danticat with the Langston Hughes Festival medal.  Continue reading 2011 Langston Hughes Medal: Edwidge Danticat

October 13, 2011 – November 25, 2011

OAS | AMA F Street Gallery
1889 F St., NW (Corner of 18th Street)
Washington, DC 20006

Hours MON-FRI 9 AM-5 PM

THE EXHIBITION
AMA | Art Museum of the Americas of the OAS presents Tent Life: Haiti, an exhibition of photographs by Wyatt Gallery and Young Haitians with Disability: 28 Winning Drawings. Continue reading Tent Life: Haiti (Exhibit)

Afro-Latin@s Now!
Strategies for Visibility and Action
A three-day international conference

Thursday, November 3rd, 6:00pm – 9:00pm
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

Friday, November 4th, 8:30am – 6:00pm
Graduate Center, City University of New York

Saturday, November 5th, 12:00pm – 6:00pm
El Museo del Barrio

The Afro-Latin@ Forum is pleased to host “Afro-Latin@s Now! Strategies for Visibility and Action,” a three-day international conference that will gather scholars, community leaders and artists to advance a dialogue on issues of importance to Black Latin@s in the United States as well as foster positive relations between Latin@s, African Americans and other peoples of color. Continue reading Afro-Latin@s Now!

Wednesday, October 19
4-9pm
(exhibit will be on view until Saturday October 22nd 2011)

ROGUE STUDIOS 9E | Chelsea Fine Arts building
508 west 26 street between 10th & 11th avenues
Manhattan, NY

	Continue reading Pascale MONNIN exhibit

Friday, October 14th
Bad Friday: Rastafari after Coral Gardens
screening and Q&A with co-director and co-producer, Deborah Thomas

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BAD FRIDAY focuses on a community of Rastafarians in western Jamaica who annually commemorate the 1963 Coral Gardens “incident,” a moment just after independence when the Jamaican government rounded up, jailed and tortured hundreds of Rastafarians. It chronicles the history of violence in Jamaica through the eyes of its most iconic community, and shows how people use their recollections of past traumas to imagine new possibilities for the future.
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12-2pm
CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Ave
Room 5414

Lunch will be served.

cosponsored by the Doctoral Students’ Council, IRADAC, CLACLS, and the Graduate Center’s PhD Program in Anthropology

Thu Oct 20, 2011
4:00pm
Martin E. Segal Theatre
CUNY Graduate Center

With panelists: Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Celso Castilho, Jason McGraw, Emily Kay Berquist

What are the particularities of abolitionism in Latin America and what are its connections with contemporary anti-slavery movements in the British and French Atlantic worlds? These two panels will focus on the trajectory of anti-slavery in Latin America, examining early struggles for freedom, the emergence, transformation, and impact of anti-slavery ideas, and the complex reality of slavery’s persistence in the Spanish Caribbean and Brazil until the late nineteenth century. Continue reading Freedom and Abolition in Latin America

Two events this week at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) at NYU:

Neoliberal Multiculturalism and the Paradox of Radical Refusal, Charles Hale
Monday, September 26th, 2011

and

Book launch of “Creole Religions of the Caribbean”
Margarite Fernández Olmos, Joseph Murphy, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert
Thursday, September 29th, 2011

Continue reading Two events at CLACS

Middlesex County College Studio Theatre Gallery, September 27 – November 8, 2011

(Opening Reception September 27, 5-7pm)

Exhibition curated by Tatiana Flores (Assistant Professor, Departments of Art History and Latino & Hispanic Caribbean Studies, Rutgers University), with the support of Michelle Stephens (Associate Professor, Departments of English and Latino & Hispanic Caribbean Studies)

Artists in the Exhibition:

Continue reading disillusions: Gendered Visions of the Caribbean and its Diasporas

Book Presentation: Boundaries by Elizabeth Nunez

Tuesday, October 25, 2011
6:30 p.m.
Americas Society
680 Park Avenue
New York, NY
Map of location

Trinidadian-U.S. writer Elizabeth Nunez will present her seventh novel, Boundaries, a work that takes on the thorny subject of racial and immigrant tensions and the marginalization of writers of color. The program will also feature Professor Donette Francis (Binghamton University and Caribbean Epistemologies seminar participant).

Nunez, a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College, CUNY and also a Caribbean Epistemologies seminar participant, is the recipient of numerous literary prizes for her fiction, including an American Book Award and a Writers for Writers Award from Poets and Writers.

Presented with support from Akashic Books, Hunter College, CUNY, and the Graduate Center, CUNY.

Download the event flyer here.

afrolatin@ forum Presents

¡Aqui Estamos! AfroLatin@ Film Series

(Lead in to the “Afro-Latin@s Now!” Conference)

AFRO –CUBAN NIGHT
Friday, October 7 – 7:00pm
WNYC’s Jerome L Greene Space Charlton Street
(Corner of Charlton and Varick), New York

• Recordando el Mamoncillo
  Pam Sporn (2006,15 mins.)
• Cuban Roots/Bronx Stories
  Pam Sporn (2000,1 hr.)

Continue reading ¡Aqui Estamos! AfroLatin@ Film Series

SHIFTING THE GEOGRAPHY OF REASON VIII:

The University, Public Education, and the Transformation of Society

September 29-October 1, 2011
Rutgers University, New Brunswick

For a complete program go to http://caribphil.org/CPA_2011.html

Below are highlights from the program. Continue reading Caribbean Philosophical Association Conference