Caribbean authors spotlight

Hernández, Rita Indiana. Tentacle. Translated by Achy Obejas, And Other Stories, 2018.

Review by Krystale Tremblay-Moll, PhD, Caribbean Studies Working Group member

Indiana’s speculative fiction novel La mucama de Omicunlé (2015), known as Tentacle (2018) in English, is a dizzying, whirlwind of a novel. It depicts a transgender man who is initiated into Dominican vudú and given the ability to travel back in time to prevent a catastrophic toxic spill that transforms the Caribbean Sea into “contaminated chocolate.” Tentacle offers a scathing critique of the neoliberal environmentalism that has spread through the Caribbean like a disease. What this novel manages to do in just under 200 pages is a total marvel.

Hall, Stuart. Familiar Stranger : A Life Between Two Islands. Edited by Bill Schwarz, Duke University Press, 2017.

Review by Michele Fiedler Fuentes, PhD Candidate, Caribbean Studies Working Group member

As a memoir written by a cultural theorist, this work tells us as much about Hall’s life as about the materialization of a form of writing and thinking, of a way of theorizing. Hall reflects and narrates his time in the two islands he called home during his life, Jamaica where he was born and grew up, and England where he studied and developed his professional and personal life, focusing, in his own words: “on how I lived the last days of colonialism, in both Kingston and London" (p. 60). It is about the gorgeous work in the constant process of becoming, about feeling as knowledge, about life as a Caribbean colonial subject, slow political awakenings through lived experience, and the formation of an academic movement.

Gosine, A. (2021). Nature’s wild: Love, sex, and law in the Caribbean. Duke University Press.

Review by Tatiana Haustant, Caribbean Studies Working Group member

L’ouvrage Nature’s wild : Love, sex and law in the Caribbean propose de manière incisive d’analyser les liens entre sexualité, colonialité et pouvoir dans la Caraïbe. Gosine a une capacité envoutante à articuler analyses historiques, archives familiales et contre-récits personnels. En mobilisant le droit colonial et les arts visuels, Gosine dénonce comment les régimes coloniaux ont façonné la sexualité en l’enfermant dans des cases dichotomiques entre humain et animal. En somme, ses régimes ont créé une opposition entre ce qui serait « humain » (acceptable et moral), et « animal » (déviant et immoral), afin de contrôler les comportements et désirs.