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"Jamaicans Fiction."
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How to love a Jamaican : stories
\"Sweeping from close-knit island communities to the streets of New York City and Midwestern university towns, these eleven stories form a portrait of a nation, a people, and a way of life\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Fire rush
Yamaye lives for the weekend, when she can go raving with her friends at The Crypt, an underground club in the industrial town on the outskirts of London. A young woman unsure of her future, the sound is her guide - a chance to discover who she really is in the rhythms of those smoke-filled nights. In the dance-hall darkness, dub is the music of her soul, her friendships, her ancestry. But everything changes when she meets Moose, the man she falls deeply in love with, and who offers her the chance of freedom and escape. When their relationship is brutally cut short, Yamaye goes on a dramatic journey of transformation where past and present collide with explosive consequences.
Book
Every Story Has a Wall: Structures of State Surveillance in Jamaican Fiction
Using three novels, Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven , Diana McCaulay’s Dog Heart , and Kei Miller’s Augustown , set mostly in Kingston, Jamaica, the essay addresses the physical structures created by the imperative to contain blackness in the city of Kingston in particular. The essay argues that engineering space in this way for the control and restraint of black people has proliferated through the passing of time and the evolution of the city and has had a long-term impact on those who build the walls and those whom the walls are meant to contain. In addition to the novels, the essay engages history, city studies, and geography. It posits that surveillance (as well as resisting and coopting it) is at the center of the city’s dynamic and that from the moment it was initiated it was resisted. The texts show how walls, both physical and ideological, have functioned as generative installations within the city’s surveillance machineries spawning multiple corollaries that we can think of as Kingston’s cultural-political space.
Journal Article
Queer Talk: Black Leopard Red Wolf and the Black Diaspora
When Jamaican author Marlon James first started talking about the book series that begins with Black Leopard Red Wolf (2019), his pithy description, \"an African 'Game of Thrones,'\" circulated widely.1 Although there are differences between George R.R. Martin's Song of Fire and Ice series and its HBO adaptation, Game of Thrones, both broadly tell the stories of various royal families trying to gain possession of the Iron Throne, or absolute control of all of the kingdoms. [...]this moment of acceptance, what we are given of Tracker's interiority is consumed with trying to understand this in-between space even as he unhesitantly beds men, eunuchs, and women (in that order of preference). Black Leopard Red Wolf operates in an atmosphere of eroticism and sexual charge—most of the sex happens in the background, not much remarked upon because it is not the source of angst, shame, or power exchange. The four years that Tracker and Mossi spend living together is narrated in song, after James describes tenderness: \"Mossi squeezed my neck with a soft hand, and I leaned into it.
Journal Article
Rainbow milk
In the Black Country in the 1950s, ex-boxer Norman Alonso is a determined and humble Jamaican who has moved to Britain with his wife to secure a brighter future for themselves and their children. Blighted with unexpected illness and racism, Norman and his family are resilient in the face of such hostilities, but are all too aware that they will need more than just hope to survive. At the turn of the millennium, Jesse seeks a fresh start in London - escaping from a broken immediate family, a repressive religious community and the desolate, disempowered Black Country - but finds himself at a loss for a new centre of gravity, and turns to sex work to create new notions of love, fatherhood and spirituality.
Marlon James and the Metafiction of the New Black Gothic
Much of the criticism on Marlon James' novels focuses on their representation of graphic violence and salaciously profane language. In this essay, I intervene in these discussions by shifting focus from the violence itself to the generic elements this violence engages or represents. More specifically, I discuss James' use of violence, doubling, and abjection in The Book of Night Women and John Crow's Devil to argue that both novels engage these gothic tropes to offer critiques of canon formation in Caribbean writing. More specifically, I contend that they deploy gothic tropes of violence and horror to convey metafictional concerns about the relationship between literature and black sovereignty, both sexually and nationally. I suggest, moreover, that in taking this tack James's writing finds company with other contemporary African Diasporic art – literature, music, tv shows, and film – that constitutes a new iteration of the black gothic aesthetic. This new black gothic art functions, through temporal collapses, to demonstrate how and why disruptive and traumatic aspects of the slave past continue to manifest, and in fact are redoubled, in the neoliberal present of late capitalism.
Journal Article
Queenie : a novel
\"Queenie Jenkins is a 25-year-old Jamaican British woman living in London, straddling two cultures and slotting neatly into neither. She works at a national newspaper, where she's constantly forced to compare herself to her white middle class peers. After a messy break up from her long-term white boyfriend, Queenie seeks comfort in all the wrong places--including several hazardous men who do a good job of occupying brain space and a bad job of affirming self-worth\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Re-placing Wealth, Re-mapping Social Division: Kingston in the Fiction of Brian Meeks and Diana McCaulay
In this article I trace the geographies of poverty and wealth represented in two contemporary Jamaican novels, Brian Meeks’s
(2003) and Diana McCaulay’s popular novel,
(2010), and argue that despite the emphasis on the seemingly fixed distance between rich and poor, these novels are also concerned to present spaces of interconnection and relations of intimacy that cross physically imposed borders. In both novels, the city is affectively mapped: its spaces produce many varied and contradictory emotions that in turn define those spaces and their inhabitants. Using the work of social geographers I focus on the texts’ interrogation of kindness, compassion and intimacy, and their effectiveness as a means of transforming individual lives that are, finally, defined by the social, economic, and political structures which produce the humiliation, rage, and violence that destroy lives.
Journal Article