sx salon, issue 7 (December 2011)

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

 

Next Seminar Meeting: Pablo Gomez

Our next Seminar meeting will be held on Friday, December 9, 2:00pm– 4:00pm in Room C203 at the CUNY Graduate Center. We will be discussing:

“Afro-Atlantic Empiricism and the Circulation of Bodily Knowledge in the Seventeenth Century Spanish Caribbean” by Professor Pablo F Gomez

Please read the pre-circulated paper (available here until the end of December and for the full year to registered seminar participants at The Center for the Humanities’ website.)

Our discussant for this paper will be Professor Tamara Walker, Department of History, University of Pennsylvania.  Please see below for an abstract and bio.

Abstract

This paper explores the routes followed by ideas and rites about the body emerging in seventeenth century black Atlantic Caribbean locales like Cartagena de Indias and Havana. Data related to the circulation of bodily knowledge in the Spanish Caribbean evinces a largely ignored process in which black ritual practitioners experimented with new materials and techne they found in the Americas and transmitted a corpus of “bodily knowledge” during the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Perambulating and interconnected black health practitioners, using oral tradition, performance, and material culture, functioned as the primordial links for the diffusion of black ideas about corporeality in the Spanish Caribbean. They shared information across ethnic lines and occupations in Spanish Caribbean locales using social practices traceable to Sub-Saharan African traditions. Within their epistemological realms, these healers probed the Caribbean landscape for medical products and explored the particular socio- cultural make up of the places where they would deploy their practices. As their European counterparts, seventeenth century Spanish Caribbean ritual practitioners of African origin –– coming from Europe and Africa or born in the New World –– engaged in procedural, conceptual, material, and social practices that had the specific objective of inquiring about the human body . Through these practices Caribbean black communities entered a larger conversation about the very nature of knowledge in the early modern era. For all the cries about their supposed primitivism and inferiority, black ritual specialists were at the forefront of the production of empirical knowledge related to the body.

Bio

Pablo Gomez PhD, MD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Geography at Texas Christian University. He works on the history of medicine and corporeality in the early modern African and Iberian Atlantic worlds. For the 2011-12 academic year Dr. Gomez is on leave on a Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship at the Cogut Center for the Humanities at Brown University working on his manuscript Imagining Atlantic Bodies: Health, Illness, and Death in the Early Modern African-Spanish Caribbean.

Caribbean History and Anthropology in the Archives

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

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

Narrating the Caribbean Nation

Narrating the Caribbean Nation:  A Celebration of Literature and Orature
Convened by Peepal Tree Press at Leeds Metropolitan University
14th – 15th April 2012

Peepal Tree Press is pleased to announce that a two-day conference, Narrating the Caribbean Nation: A Celebration of Literature and Orature, will be held on 14-15th April 2012 at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK. The conference will celebrate the Silver Anniversary of Peepal Tree Press and highlight the contribution of its own authors and other Caribbean and Black British writers to contemporary world literature. Continue reading Narrating the Caribbean Nation

Caribbean Studies Association, 37th Annual Conference

Call for Papers
Caribbean Studies Association
37th Annual Conference
May 28-June 3, 2012

Le Gosier, Guadeloupe

en français/en español

The Caribbean Studies Association issues a call for papers for its 37th Annual Conference with the theme “Unpacking Caribbean Citizenship: Rights, Participation and Belonging.” We invite scholars, practitioners in the humanities, social sciences, public policy and members of civil society organizations whose works focus on the wider Caribbean and its diasporas to submit abstracts of approximately 250 words or less for research papers and presentations. We also welcome graduate student submissions and multi-lingual panels. Continue reading Caribbean Studies Association, 37th Annual Conference

Next Seminar Meeting: Frank Guridy

Our next Seminar meeting will be held on Tuesday, November 22, 2:00pm– 4:00pm in Room C201 at the CUNY Graduate Center. We will be discussing:

“Neither Race Men nor Tragic Mulatas: Afro-Puerto Ricans and the Imperial Transition, 1898-1917” by Frank A. Guridy, Associate Professor. Departments of History and African and African Diaspora Studies, University of Texas at Austin.

Please read the pre-circulated paper (available here until the end of December and for the full year to registered seminar participants at The Center for the Humanities’ website.)

Our discussant for this paper will be Professor Melina Pappademos, Department of History, University of Connecticut.  Please see below for an abstract and bio. Continue reading Next Seminar Meeting: Frank Guridy

Colin Dayan Lecture

“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

2011 Langston Hughes Medal: Edwidge Danticat

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

Caribbean: Crossroads of the World

El Museo’s Simposio

Caribbean: Crossroads of the World
El Museo del Barrio, New York
October 2012

Deadline for submissions is January 15, 2012.

El Museo del Barrio seeks submissions for El Museo’s Simposio, organized in conjunction with the exhibition Caribbean: Crossroads of the World.  The two-day symposium is conceived as an inter-disciplinary public program that enlists a range of fields including art history, history, ethnic studies, visual and performance studies, ethnomusicology, philosophy, religious studies, political science and economics. Continue reading Caribbean: Crossroads of the World

Fourth Seminar Meeting: Kaiama L. Glover

Our fourth Seminar meeting will be held on Friday, November 4, 2:00pm– 4:00pm in Room C415A at the CUNY Graduate Center. We will be discussing:

“The Audacity of the ‘I’: Narcissism, Community, and the Textual Feminine in Francophone Caribbean Prose Fiction” by Kaiama Glover. Please read the pre-circulated paper (available here until the end of November and for the full year to registered seminar participants at The Center for the Humanities’ website.)

Our discussant for this paper will be Christopher Ian Foster, Department of English, CUNY Graduate Center. Continue reading Fourth Seminar Meeting: Kaiama L. Glover

Afro-Latin@s Now!

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!

A Conversation with Thomas Glave

Tue Nov 1, 2:00pm– 3:30pm
Room 8301

Thomas Glave has graciously agreed to meet with the Caribbean Epistemology Seminar participants for a more intimate discussion before he gives the Audre Lorde/Essex Hemphill Memorial Lecture which will follow at 6:00pm.  We will discuss Glave’s essay “Whose Caribbean? An Allegory, in Part” from Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Caribbean and one of his short stories, “Out There” from The Torturer’s Wife. The discussion will be led by Rosamond King, Department of English, Brooklyn College/CUNY. Continue reading A Conversation with Thomas Glave