Trevor Burnard is Wilberforce Professor of Slavery and Emancipation at the University of Hull and author of four books and many articles on eighteenth-century Jamaica. He has recently reviewed 34 books just published on Jamaica in “`Wi Lickle but Wi Tallawah’: Writing Jamaica into the Atlantic World, 1655-1834Reviews in American History 49 (2021), 168-86.
In this lavishly illustrated book, primarily about art in Jamaica but with nods to New South Wales and Britain, Sarah Thomas connects the plantation and urban world of Jamaica to the discipline of art history, giving careful analyses of painters like James Hakewill who painted scenes of plantation life designed to normalise and make more Arcadian a landscape that in fact was marked more by violence than by contentment. It speaks vividly to the silences that surround slavery on the island.
A timely and original look at the role of the eyewitness account in the representation of slavery in British and European art
Gathering together over 160 paintings, watercolors, drawings, and prints, this book offers an unprecedented examination of the shifting iconography of slavery in British and European art between 1760 and 1840. In addition to considering how the work of artists such as Agostino Brunias, James Hakewill, and Augustus Earle responded to abolitionist politics, Sarah Thomas examines the importance of the eyewitness account in endowing visual representations of transatlantic slavery with veracity. "Being there," indeed, became significant not only because…
As a poet and a novelist, I'm fascinated by the places where these two genres meet, undo each other, and create something new again. That sounds a lot like what love can do, and whenever I read a long poem that achieves a unique aesthetic unity, I feel the writer has found a new way to love the world, to love the reader. And, as usual, both the world and the reader are challenged by that love—to grow.
I studied this book with my graduate students a few years ago, and it’s truly a remarkable achievement. If there’s a (somewhat artificial) spectrum of book-length poems ranging from fragmented lyricism to linear narration, Dawes’ Prophets is fascinating because it lives somewhere in the middle: a powerful narrative informs the lyrical intensity throughout.
I highly recommend this book to writers who want to expand their ideas of what can be done with narration.
Set in Jamaica in the late 1980s and 1990s, Prophets is a poem of rhythmic and metaphoric inventiveness that portrays the social and cultural resonances of Jamaican society along with the tension between an ebullient cynicism and a heartfelt desire for faith. As 24-hour television, belching out the voices of American hellfire preachers, competes with dancehall, slackness, and ganja for Jamaican minds, Clarice and Thalbot preach their own conflicting visions. Clarice has used her gifts to raise herself from the urban Jamaican ghetto. She basks in the adulation of her followers as they look to her for their personal salvation.…
I grew up in a culture that both fears and embraces spirits or outrightly rejects the idea that spirits live on beyond death. I grew up on stories of rolling calves and duppies that caused havoc among the living. Since then, I’ve been fascinated by what haunts us—whether it be our familial spirits that float among the living and continue to play a role in our lives, our memories, or our past actions. I’ve written three books that play with this idea of past actions lingering long into the characters’ lives and returning in unexpected ways.
There’s no escaping past actions in this book—from a dying man confessing he assumed the identity of a dead friend and began a new life to the exploits of the Paisley family during colonial-era Jamaica.
I love the way the family stories intertwine, how the book traces the movement of Jamaican people from the Caribbean island to England and America, and the way the ghosts in the family are not just people but also broader things: slavery, colonization, migration, and abandoned families.
Longlisted for the 2020 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
A "rich, ambitious debut novel" (The New York Times Book Review) that reveals the ways in which a Jamaican family forms and fractures over generations, in the tradition of Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi.
*An Entertainment Weekly, Millions, and LitHub Most Anticipated Book of 2020 Pick and Buzz Magazine's Top New Book of the New Decade*
Stanford Solomon's shocking, thirty-year-old secret is about to change the lives of everyone around him. Stanford has done something no one could ever imagine. He is a man who faked his own death and stole…
Black
Cake is
evocative—its title, story, and characters.
A
black cake doesn’t sound tasty, but Wilkerson’s layered family drama, Black
Cake, is delicious. The cake debuts on the first page, smeared on a wedding
dress in the hands of the police. Some weddings are doomed from the start, as
if the cake were bad. Black. Lightless. Cursed.
This legendary Jamaican
fruitcake shows up again and again as this multi-cultural, multi-generation
story unfolds moving between past and present, unraveling deception among
Wilkerson’s well-developed characters with intriguing connections.
Black
Cake is a fast-paced narrative replete with twists and turns. Can you
really savor the page when you’re turning them at lightning speed? Indeed!
**Featured on Barack Obama's Summer Reading List 2022** **A Grazia Instagram 'IT' book to watch out for** **Soon to be a major Hulu series by Oprah Winfrey, Aaron Kaplan and Marissa Jo Cerar**
Everyone wants to discover what they're made of . . . The compelling and beautifully written story about the inheritance of the secrets, betrayal and memories that shape one family for generations
'A story as meaningful as it is delicious. At turns delightfully juicy and then stunningly wise, Black Cake is a winner' TAYLOR JENKINS REID
I am a professor, writer, and musician who performs and produces Jamaican influenced music. I have always loved ska, reggae, dancehall, and dub music since I first heard it as a child. Since starting in ska bands, I have been lucky enough to travel around the world performing and was extremely lucky to be able to study and record in Jamaica at the University of the West Indies Reggae Studies Unit and Anchor Music Studios. In writing about music, I had always taken an outsider looking in approach before this book. For this book I wrote from the inside, and everything changed because of it.
I have read all of David Katz’s material and absolutely loved every bit of it. This book is essential as it details the life and times of a master.
The interviews and behind the scene look at a person who changed everything for Jamaican popular music kept me engaged throughout the writing. Katz brilliantly organizes the book and kept me engaged throughout the entire thing. His voice is heard but not overwhelming and this book is, not only about a master and Jamaican music, but about how to write an interview effectively.
One of the best biographies I have ever read in my life.
'David Katz's in-depth portrayal of his genius is to be commended and is an essential addition to any serious music fan's collection' David Rodigan MBE OD
'For the complete picture of this musical genius you can't get better than David Katz's People Funny Boy - if you're into Scratch, it's essential' Don Letts
Arguably the most influential force in Jamaican music, Lee Perry brought Bob Marley to international stardom and has since collaborated with artists such as Sir Paul McCartney, The Clash and The Beastie Boys. The book delves behind the myth of Perry to give a fuller examination of…
Ryan Murdock is Editor-at-Large (Europe) for Outpost, Canada’s national travel magazine, and a weekly columnist for The Shift, an independent Maltese news portal. His feature articles have taken him across a remote stretch of Canada’s Northwest Territories on foot, into the Central Sahara in search of prehistoric rock art, and around Wales with a drug squad detective hunting for the real King Arthur.
Henry Morgan was the scourge of the Spanish Main. Riches were brought to Europe each year by a treasure fleet of heavily armed galleons that collected loot on the coast of Panama before setting sail for the old world. Morgan captured Spain’s coastal fort of Portobelo and did what none had done before — crossed the isthmus to sack Panama City. He would later become acting Governor of Jamaica, but his exploits as a privateer, ably told by naval historian Dudley Pope, cemented his legend.
'Morgan the Pirate' is a name long associated with all the trappings of pirate living - skull and crossbones, pieces of eight, speeding ships, almost in fact 'with a yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum'. As legend has it, his was a life of high adventure, dastardly battles and more than a few gold coins thrown in, collected by underhand means of course. Yet if this legend is true, why did Charles II knight him at the height of his career and why was he given the exalted position of governor of Jamaica? In this authoritative biography, Dudley Pope lays…
I have been doing research in the Caribbean for twenty-five years. The region is diverse and magnificent. Caribbean people have sought creative solutions for racial inequality, climate and sustainability, media literacy and information, women’s and family issues. The transnational connections with the US are complex and wide-ranging, and knowing more about this region is an urgent matter. My own work has focused on race and social science, mobility and inequality, and sound and media, all as ways of grappling with colonial legacies and their impact on the daily lives of people who live in this region.
Who thought the devastation of the environment in the interest of mining and development would be a funny, lyrical love story? For Flora Smith, scientist and head of a small environmental NGO, her native Jamaica is filled with family, lovers, friends, and enemies. She is deeply connected to her surroundings and finds ways to immerse herself in the landscape, wildlife, human relationships, and embodied pleasure when all else fails.
Flora Smith, Jamaican scientist and head of tiny NGO Environment Now, dedicates her life to getting Jamaicans to care about the natural environment. At the opening of Limbo, Flora is confronted by the nagging reality of not having enough money to keep her organization afloat. When sand is stolen from a resort development owned by a wealthy donor, she becomes embroiled in corrupt politics, dirty money, and a murder. In Jamaica, the land of "No problem, mon," everything is known but off the record. Can Flora get anyone to be held accountable? Can she find solutions for any of Jamaica's…
Trevor Burnard is Wilberforce Professor of Slavery and Emancipation at the University of Hull and author of four books and many articles on eighteenth-century Jamaica. He has recently reviewed 34 books just published on Jamaica in “`Wi Lickle but Wi Tallawah’: Writing Jamaica into the Atlantic World, 1655-1834Reviews in American History 49 (2021), 168-86.
Beautifully illustrated and persuasively argued, this survey of a variety of architectural forms in the eighteenth century, from merchant houses to enslaved yards to great houses shows how studying the built environment of early Jamaica gives insight into a society both rich and highly conflicted.
Through Creole houses and merchant stores to sugar fields and boiling houses, Jamaica played a leading role in the formation of both the early modern Atlantic world and the British Empire. Architecture and Empire in Jamaica offers the first scholarly analysis of Jamaican architecture in the long 18th century, spanning roughly from the Port Royal earthquake of 1692 to Emancipation in 1838. In this richly illustrated study, which includes hundreds of the author's own photographs and drawings, Louis P. Nelson examines surviving buildings and archival records to write a social history of architecture.
Zadie Smith’s first ‘historical’ novel does not
disappoint. This is a wonderfully written, witty, richly imagined,
characteristically idiosyncratic book.
This intriguing book is set in the nineteenth century and
peopled with historical figures—the now little-known novelist William Ainsworth, his housekeeper, the
fascinating Mrs. Touchet, Charles Dickens, Andrew Bogle, a man born into slavery
in Jamaica, who becomes a key witness in a real-life Victorian cause celebre.
Intricately structured, at its heart one finds a
powerful, compelling story within a story which gives a force to the book. The
issues raised within the book—racism,
colonialism, woman’s rights, populism, fake news—resonate in our times. A
book to set you thinking.
From acclaimed and bestselling novelist Zadie Smith, a kaleidoscopic work of historical fiction set against the legal trial that divided Victorian England, about who gets to tell their story—and who gets to be believed
It is 1873. Mrs. Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper—and cousin by marriage—of a once-famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years.
Mrs. Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects her cousin of…
The Pirates of the Caribbean
films are my favorite of all time, and it intrigued me to learn that the fourth
movie was inspired by a novel published decades prior.
It was fascinating to me
to see how elements from the book translated to the movie, yet it remained its
whole unique experience—one with high-octane action, magical mischief, and a
diabolical way with words. On Stranger
Tides gets dense at times, but it was a very fun read nonetheless.
Shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award Shortlisted for the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel
1718: Puppeteer John Chandagnac has set sail for Jamaica to recover his stolen inheritance, when his ship is seized by pirates. Offered the choice to join the crew, or be killed where he stands, he decides that a pirate's life is better than none at all.
Now known as Jack Shandy, this apprentice buccaneer soon learns to handle a mainsail and wield a cutlass - only to discover he is now a subject of a Caribbean pirate empire ruled by one Edward Thatch, better known…
