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WORK TITLE: Island People
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://joshuajellyschapiro.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://journalism.nyu.edu/about-us/profile/joshua-jelly-schapiro/ * https://nyu.academia.edu/JoshuaJellySchapiro
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born June 16, 1979.
EDUCATION:Yale University, B.A., 2002; University of California, Berkeley, Ph.D., 2011.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU, visiting scholar.
AWARDS:Fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Social Science Research Council.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including the New York Review of Books, New York, Harper’s, Nation, Artforum, and the Believer.
SIDELIGHTS
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro earned his bachelor of arts degree from Yale University in 2002. Nine years later, he completed his doctorate that the University of California, Berkeley. Jelly-Schapiro continued his academic career by becoming a visiting scholar at New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU. As a specialist in geography, Jelly-Schapiro often writes articles on travel and culture, and his articles have appeared in such periodicals as the New York Review of Books, New York, Harper’s, Nation, Artforum, and the Believer. Notably, Jelly-Schapiro’s work has been honored with fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Social Science Research Council.
For his first book, Jelly-Schapiro teamed with Rebecca Solnit and Rebecca Snedeker to serve as editor-at-large of the 2013 volume Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas (released by the University of California Press in Oakland). Next in 2016, Jelly-Schapiro again teamed with Solnit, this time to edit Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas (also released by the University of California Press). Jelly-Schapiro authored his first book in 2016, Island People: The Caribbean and the World, which was published by Knopf.
In the latter volume, Jelly-Schapiro explores the Caribbean’s many islands and diverse cultures, focusing on the region’s early and historic role in globalization. Because of its wealth in sugar cane and its central location to the slave trade, the Caribbean’s international diaspora has had a significant and lasting impact on global culture, the author explains. As Jelly-Schapiro traces this global influence, he also relates his own travels throughout the region. In doing so, the author portrays the Caribbean as both a physical place and as a cultural idea. The author thus comments on the people he meets with and traces their diverse histories. He also references other author’s who have written extensively about Caribbean culture.
Reviews of Island People were largely positive, although some critics warned that it may be too detailed for lay readers. For instance, a Kirkus Reviews correspondent announced that “scholars will no doubt find much to appreciate in this fine academic study,” while “a general audience may be somewhat daunted by the very detail that is at the heart of this fine, if at times meandering, book.” Echoing this assessment in her Library Journal review, Rachel Bridgewater advised: “Though the writing is accessible and charming, general interest readers may find the work too academic.” Yet, Booklist contributor Vanessa Bush felt that “this is a fascinating look at a culture that continues to draw travelers.” A Publishers Weekly critic was more ambivalent, asserting that Island Culture is a “sweeping cultural study,” but Jelly-Schapiro’s “arguments about the relationship between modernity, tourism, and branding are not always clear.”
Offering both pros and cons in the Guardian Online, Colin Grant declared: “In attempting to straddle this wealth of cultures and histories, Jelly-Schapiro can offer no more than sketches.” Nevertheless, Grant went on to conclude that, “ultimately, Island People, written by a careful and compassionate author, is a worthy travel and history book, a fresh study of these economically hamstrung islands and their failing attempts at rebranding. But in elegantly recycling the tales told by . . . others, Jelly-Schapiro puts himself overly in their authors’ shadow. He might have been better advised to be more arrogant, and a little less considerate.” Ian Thomson, writing in the Financial Times Online, was even more impressed, declaring that Jelly-Schapiro has created a “meandering but often vivid account of the Caribbean and its multi-shaded community of nationalities and cultures, champions the underrated “modernity” of the region.” Thomson additionally found that the book is “a pleasingly broad study of the Caribbean and its vital, indecipherable blend of peoples.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, November 1, 2016, Vanessa Bush, review of Island People: The Caribbean and the World.
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2016, review of Island People.
Library Journal, November 1, 2016, Rachel Bridgewater, review of Island People.
Publishers Weekly, September 19, 2016, review of Island People.
ONLINE
Financial Times Online, https://www.ft.com/ (January 27, 2017), Ian Thomson, review of Island People.
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (January 20, 2017), Colin Grant, review of Island People.
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro Website, http://joshuajellyschapiro.com/ (July 11, 2017)
NYU Academia Website, https://nyu.academia.edu/ (June 21, 2017), author profile.*
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
New York University, Institute for Public Knowledge, Visiting Scholar | American Studies +6
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is the author of "Island People: The Caribbean and the World" (Knopf, 2016) and the co-editor, with Rebecca Solnit, of "Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas" (California, 2016). His work has appeared in The New York Review of Books, Harper's, The Believer, The Nation, Artforum, American Quarterly and Transition, among many other publications, and he is the recipient of fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Social Science Research Council. He earned his PhD in geography at UC-Berkeley, and is currently a visiting scholar at the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU.
www.joshuajellyschapiro.com
@jellyschapiro
www.zpagency.com
Address: Institute for Public Knowledge
20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10003
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
Adjunct Faculty
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is the author of Island People: The Caribbean in the World (Knopf), and the co-editor, with Rebecca Solnit, of Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas (California). His essays and reporting have appeared in the New York Review of Books, New York, Harper’s, The Nation, Artforum, and the Believer, among many other publications. He earned his PhD in Geography at UC-Berkeley and he is currently a visiting scholar at the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU.
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
jellyschapiro@berkeley.edu • 415-335-1721 PO Box 20844 • New York, NY 10025
- Curriculum Vitae - EDUCATION
University of California, Berkeley, CA
Department of Geography PhD 2011 Dissertation: “The Caribbean in the World: Imaginative Geographies in the Independence Age” Best Dissertation Award from the Caribbean Studies Assocation, 2012 Yale University, New Haven, CT BA 2002, cum laude Double major in Literature and Ethnicity, Race & Migration. distinction in Literature, distinction in Ethnicity, Race, & Migration. CURRENT AFFILIATION
New York University, New York, NY
Visiting Scholar, the Institute for Public Knowledge MAJOR FELLOWSHIPS
Fulbright ‘Flex’ Fellowship (2014-2016) Visiting Researcher, The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad Mellon/ACLS Early Career Fellowship (2010) One-year award for dissertation completion, The American Council of Learned Societies NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (2006-2009) Multi-year award, The National Science Foundation SSRC Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship, (2007) The Social Science Research Council (field: Black Atlantic Studies) PUBLICATIONS Books
Island People: The Caribbean and the World [under contract with A.A. Knopf, 2!"# Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, co-editor with Rebecca Solnit [under contract with University of California Press, 2016]
- 1 -
Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas, Editor-at-large, with Rebecca Solnit and Rebecca Snedeker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013) Chapters and Introductions “Bananas!: Fruit’s Fortunes and the Ecology of Culture in New Orleans” in Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013) “Introduction” to The Traveler’s Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands by Patrick Leigh Fermor (New York: New York Review Classics, 2011) “Shipyards and Sounds” in Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, Rebecca Solnit, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010) $%Are &e A'' Creo'e( Now)%* +thnicit and Nation in a -eteroeneou( Cari//ean 0ia(pora,1 Trinidad3 in Ethnicity, Class and Nationalism: Caribbean and Extra- Caribbean Dimensions, Anton Allahar, ed. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005) Scholarly Articles “Ground Zero(es) of the New World: Geographies of Violence in Edwidge Danticat and Junot Díaz” TransformingAnthropology 21:2 (October 2013) “Different Folk: The Discreet Charm of Kate and Anna McGarrigle” American Quarterly 64:2
(June 2012) “C.L.R. James in America (Or, the ballad of Nello and Connie)” Transition 104, Spring 2011 Essays and Interviews “Trading Amidst Tensions: On the Madam Saras of Haiti” The New Yorker (online) September 18, 2015
“Postcard from Trinidad: On the FIFA mess” Harper’s (online) August 27, 2015
“Waiting to Be Deported in Santo Domingo” The New Yorker (online) June 27, 2015
“’Human Once Again’: on Film and Violence in Mexico” Sight and Sound (British Film Institute) April 22, 2015
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6/11/2017 Joshua JellySchapiro | New York University Academia.edu
https://nyu.academia.edu/JoshuaJellySchapiro/CurriculumVitae 2/4
April 22, 2015
“The News in Fidel and Raúl Castro’s Hometown” The New Yorker (online) January 16, 2015
“How Détente Looks from Havana” The New Yorker (online) December 23, 2015
“On Stuart Hall: A Conversation with John Akomfrah (filmmaker)” Trinidad and Tobago Film
Festival (ttfilmfestival.com) February 15, 2014
“Reflecting Jacmel: Arcade Fire in Haiti” The Believer, July-August 2014
- 2 -
“The Low End: An Interview with George Porter, Jr. (musician)” in Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2013) “Sounds of Our Times: Emory Cook in Trinidad” The Believer, July-August 2013
“Caribbean: Crossroads of the World” Artforum, November 1, 2012
“All Over the Map: A Revolution in Cartography” Harper’s, September 2012
“Neither Sand nor Sea: Music and Violence in Jamaica” Los Angeles Review of Books, June 12, 2012
$4u(ic of the 5uture* An Inter6iew with Peter 0oi arti(t31 The Believer, Apri' 2!2
$Bac7 in the 0a8O* 9ue(tion( for -arr Be'afonte1 New or!, Octo/er !:, 2!!
$At &or7* An Inter6iew with 5ernando True/a1 The Paris "eview 0ai', ;une 2:, 2!!
“Letter from Trinidad (Beyoncé is Gold)” Los Angeles Review of Books, May 27, 2011
$9ueen of the 0anceha''* An Inter6iew with Lad Saw1 The Believer, ;u'8Auu(t 2!
$Tra6e'in% &o
$The Bo/ 4ar'e Stor1 The New or! "eview o# Boo!s, Apri' ?, 2?
$In Cono S@uare* &h New Or'ean( 4atter(1 The Nation, 0ece
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
NYPL JellySchapiro Neff.jpg
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro at the New York Public Library, October 18, 2016
Born June 16, 1979 (age 37)
United States
Occupation Writer, Geographer
Language English
Nationality United States of America
Alma mater Yale University; University of California, Berkeley
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro (born June 16, 1979) is an American geographer and writer. He is the author of Island People: The Caribbean and the World (2016) and the co-editor, with the writer Rebecca Solnit, of Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas (2016). Jelly-Schapiro has written essays and criticism for The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The Believer, Artforum, Transition, and The Nation.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]
Jelly-Schapiro grew up in Vermont and attended Yale, where he studied literature and was also a member of Yale’s first graduating class in the new program in “Ethnicity, Race, & Migration”.[9] He earned his PhD in geography at the University of California, Berkeley, where his doctoral thesis on the culture and geography of the Caribbean was awarded the Caribbean Studies Association’s Best Dissertation Prize in 2012.[10]
Jelly-Schapiro’s first book, Island People, was published in November 2016 by Knopf. Island People was described by Tom Gjelten in The New York Times as “a travelogue of love and scholarship,” that “does the region splendid justice.”[11] In The Washington Post, Amy Wilentz wrote that “Every 50 years or so there should be a book like this one, in which a passionate, informed, dedicated and adventurous traveler skips from island to island in the bright blue palm-lined bowl and reassesses the contemporary significance of this world-historical outpost of the globe.”[12]
As a journalist, Jelly-Schapiro has covered topics including the music of Bob Marley, the history of phonography, and changing politics in Cuba.[13][14][15] His essay “All Over the Map,” on how technology is changing people’s relationship to maps, was published by Harper’s in September 2012.[16] He has also published interviews with cultural figures including the musicians Harry Belafonte, Lady Saw, and RZA; filmmakers John Akomfrah and Joshua Oppenheimer; the painter Peter Doig; and the writers Geoff Dyer and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.[17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24]
Nonstop Metropolis, the “imaginative atlas” of New York City that Jelly-Schapiro completed with Rebecca Solnit in 2016, was the third in a trilogy of atlases launched by Solnit in San Francisco in 2010.[25] Consisting of 26 maps of the city, accompanied by essays and interviews, Nonstop Metropolis was described by Sadie Stein in The New York Times as “a document of its time, of our time,”.[26] Maria Popova, on brainpickings.org, wrote that the atlas's maps “reveal the nature of all cities as functions of human intention with its always dual and often dueling capacities for good and evil, for revolution and repression, for power and prejudice, for creation and destruction."[27] In April 2017, the Municipal Art Society awarded Nonstop Metropolis the Brendan Gill Prize, granted annually "to the creator of a specific work—a book, essay, musical composition, play, painting, sculpture, architectural design, film or choreographic piece—that best captures the spirit and energy of New York City."[28] Recent winners of the Gill prize include Lin-Manuel Miranda for his play Hamilton, and the artist Kara Walker, for her sugar sculpture “A Subtlety.”[29]
Jelly-Schapiro lives in New York, where he is a visiting scholar at the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU.[30]
Books[edit]
Island People: The Caribbean and the World. Knopf. 2016. ISBN 978-0385349765.
Island People: The Caribbean and the World. Canongate. 2017. ISBN 978-1782115588.
Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas. University of California Press. 2016. ISBN 978-0520285941.
Island People: The Caribbean and the World
Vanessa Bush
Booklist. 113.5 (Nov. 1, 2016): p13.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
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Island People: The Caribbean and the World. By Joshua Jelly-Schapiro. Nov. 2016.496p. Knopf, $28.95 (9780385349765). 972.9.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The Caribbean, with its historical ties to globalization via slavery and sugar cane plantations and ongoing international diaspora, has enjoyed outsize influence on cultures around the world. Writer and geographer Jelly-Shapiro has long been fascinated by the sea of islands "discovered" by Columbus and mistaken for islands off Asia. Jelly-Shapiro recounts the history of transatlantic slave trading and colonization that blended people from all over the world to form the distinctive Caribbean culture despite its multitude of origins and languages. He traces the history of the Greater Antilles, Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and Haiti and the Dominican Republic as well as Antilles, Cayman, Barbados, Grenada, Trinidad, and others. He tells the stories of the lives of ordinary citizens, their carnivals and storytelling traditions, and the histories of famous writers and artists who carried their Caribbean flavor around the world, from Bob Marley to Paule Marshall, C. L. R. James to Pedro Mir. He also examines the adaptations to Western culture as well as the spirit of rebellion embodied by such figures as Marcus Garvey, Toussaint-Louverture, and Fidel Castro. This is a fascinating look at a culture that continues to draw travelers and send out messengers of island culture.--Vanessa Bush
Jelly-Schapiro, Joshua. Island People: The Caribbean and the World
Rachel Bridgewater
Library Journal. 141.18 (Nov. 1, 2016): p93.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
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Jelly-Schapiro, Joshua. Island People: The Caribbean and the World. Knopf. Nov. 2016.496p. notes. ISBN 9780385349765. $28.95; ebk. ISBN 9780385349772. TRAV
Geographer, writer for The New Yorker, Harper's, and the Beliei'er, and visiting scholar at New York University Jelly-Schapiro's book melds vivid travel narrative with rigorous and detailed history as he explores the Caribbean as both a place and an idea and argues for the importance of the region in the making of our modern world. The author describes his travels to nearly every island in the region, describing the people and destinations he visits with clarity and warmth. Braided into his personal account is rich historical knowledge and a focus on the Caribbean musicians, writers, and thinkers who have helped shape world culture. VERDICT Though the writing is accessible and charming, general interest readers may find the work too academic. However, Caribbean studies scholars and enthusiasts, as well as those traveling to the area who are interested in deepening their understanding of the islands, will rejoice in this lovely book.--Rachel Bridgewater, Portland Community Coll. Lib., OR
Bridgewater, Rachel
Island People: The Caribbean and the World
Publishers Weekly. 263.38 (Sept. 19, 2016): p60.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Island People: The Caribbean and the World
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro. Knopf, $28.95 (496p) ISBN 978-0-385-34976-5
Jelly-Schapiro (co-editor of Nonstop Metropolis) investigates the Caribbean in this sweeping cultural study that covers the Greater and Lesser Antilles, including Jamaica, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, the Cayman Islands, Barbados, Grenada, Antigua, Martinique, and Trinidad. Jelly-Schapiro introduces the region's intellectual and artistic giants: Antigua's Jamaica Kincaid, Dominica's Jean Rhys, Jamaica's Bob Marley, Martinique's Aime Cesaire and Frantz Fanon, and Trinidad's V.S. Naipaul. He also discusses historical figures, such as Christopher Columbus and Toussaint Louverture, who influenced events throughout the Caribbean, and pays special tribute to Trinidadian C.L.R. James, whose scholarship looms over the book. Though his arguments about the relationship between modernity, tourism, and branding are not always clear, Jelly-Schapiro writes joyfully about music and literature and how these arts reflect the Caribbean's hybrid and evolving culture. Agency: Zoe Pagnamenta Agency. (Nov.)
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro: ISLAND PEOPLE
Kirkus Reviews. (Sept. 15, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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Joshua Jelly-Schapiro ISLAND PEOPLE Knopf (Adult Nonfiction) 28.95 11, 22 ISBN: 978-0-385-34976-5
A geographer’s exuberant travel narrative about the nations and people of the Caribbean.Jelly-Schapiro (co-editor: Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, 2016) begins with the premise that the Caribbean, a place often overlooked by both the academic and cultural mainstream, “has been anything but ‘marginal’ to the making of our modern world.” He examines this idea by offering an ambitious depiction of almost all the islands in that region in a narrative that merges historical, political, and geographical accounts of the Caribbean with the author’s abundant experiences as a traveler with an abiding fondness for the islands in all their eccentric, sometimes-bizarre complexity. He divides the book into two sections: one that discusses the islands of the Greater Antilles (Jamaica, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hispaniola) and another that considers many of the Lesser Antilles (Barbados, Grenada, St. Lucia, Antigua, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Trinidad). In the first section, Jelly-Schapiro brings his passion for Caribbean music to the fore while delineating the people and places he encounters with precision, grace, and eloquence. He discusses how the music of people like Jamaican reggae master Bob Marley, Puerto Rican salsa singer Hector Lavoe, and Cuban bandleader and I Love Lucy star Desi Arnaz helped put the islands on the map of world culture. In the second section, Jelly-Schapiro focuses more on writers and thinkers—e.g., Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, and C.L.R. James—who made the much smaller islands of the Lesser Antilles important to Western intellectual consciousness. In particular, the author examines their relationships to the places that shaped—and in some cases, came to haunt—them. While descriptive detail is one of the book’s strengths, it is also the source of a possible weakness. Caribbean studies scholars will no doubt find much to appreciate in this fine academic study–cum-travelogue. However, a general audience may be somewhat daunted by the very detail that is at the heart of this fine, if at times meandering, book. An eminently well-informed narrative.
Island People: The Caribbean and the World review – Naipaul and dancehall
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro’s elegant travel book delves deep into the region’s brutal history and unique allure
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Colin Grant
Friday 20 January 2017 04.00 EST Last modified on Tuesday 2 May 2017 13.29 EDT
In 1958 the BBC World Service shut down Caribbean Voices, a programme that had provided a nurturing platform for fledgling West Indian authors, a handful of whom went on to become luminaries of the region. Explaining the reasons for its closure, a BBC official announced that inevitably “the children had outgrown the patronage of the parent”. Four years later Jamaica and Trinidad gained independence from the UK, with a rush of jubilation and anxiety. It is particularly this theme – the fallout from change – that travel writer Joshua Jelly-Schapiro explores cogently in Island People.
It takes courage to venture into a territory already inhabited by Anthony Trollope, Patrick Leigh Fermor and VS Naipaul. A writer is bound to ask himself whether he has anything to say – to match their wit and arrogance. The Trinidadian-born Naipaul was most disparaging about the void created by the departing British, which he claimed left his compatriots (of African and Indian descent) squabbling like “monkeys pleading for evolution”. Notwithstanding the dyspeptic tone of Naipaul’s 1962 non-fiction work The Middle Passage, the Nobel prize-winning writer set a high bar for reflections on life in the Caribbean from then onwards. Jelly-Schapiro proves equal to the task, and eschews the temptation to lampoon.
He writes more obviously in the shadow of Leigh Fermor, who published The Traveller’s Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands in 1950. The gap between the gentleman explorer/traveller and his native subjects appears to have narrowed. Jelly-Schapiro forgoes the white linen suit for T-shirt and shorts. Informality and greater familiarity (he is a frequent visitor to the region) invests his book with a deeper understanding of the corrupted human transactions and brutal history just beneath the surface of the sanitised, all-inclusive-holiday branded, sun‑kissed islands.
Woman adjust their headdresses before the Carnival in Port of Spain, Trinidad.
Woman adjust their headdresses before the Carnival in Port of Spain, Trinidad. Photograph: Lynne Sladky/AP
It is more in the spirit of a critical friend than participating observer that Jelly-Schapiro records the degraded resentments of the louche Rasta pimp offering “nice girls. Nice and clean”, and the monetising model in “royal-blue dress and zebra-print heels” propping up the bar who, having invited him not to buy her a drink but to pay for her rent, settles for a glass of Chablis. At times, though, his familiarity seems to inure him to events that a novice would find shocking: when held up at gunpoint in Trinidad he dispatches the incident in a few lines as if it were no more troubling than a persistently buzzing mosquito.
When held up at gunpoint in Trinidad he dispatches the incident as if it were no more troubling than a mosquito
The contrasts in tone between Island People and The Traveller’s Tree are telling. Leigh Fermor talks of “Negroes” on dozens of occasions, and Jelly-Schapiro’s tongue would cleave to his palate before uttering such a word. But while Fermor respectfully admires a “room full of sable Venuses”, Jelly-Schapiro favours the company of the dancehall queen, Lady Saw, and celebrates the riotously shameless “slackness” of the lyricist behind “let me fuck you with my heels on”.
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A century ago in The West Indies and the Spanish Main, Trollope wrote, “If we could, we would fain forget Jamaica altogether.” But Jelly-Schapiro is drawn to the exuberance of a country (as Island Records founder Chris Blackwell reminds him) “with its own frigging soundtrack. Imagine that!” Island People offsets the dominance of Jamaican reggae with reflections on the culture of other countries with their own soundtracks, notably Cuba and Trinidad, whose siren songs (salsa and calypso/soca) prove equally alluring.
The book manages a difficult balancing act. There are over a thousand islands in the Caribbean, 28 countries and numerous languages including French, English, Spanish, Dutch, Hindi, Mandarin and Creole/Patois. In attempting to straddle this wealth of cultures and histories, Jelly-Schapiro can offer no more than sketches. When our guide excels – as he does in Grenada, capturing the heady excitement of 1970s revolution (“Utopian dreams on a lush small Antille with weed and waterfalls from Eden”), quickly followed by tragedy (culminating in the execution of the charismatic leader Maurice Bishop) – you wish he had made fewer stops and dallied a while longer.
The final chapter homes in on Trinidad, an island that bears disturbing similarities to Jamaica with its corrupt politicians, gangsters and pervading sense of wildness: “this still-young nation retains the ambience of the OK Corral”. Jelly-Schapiro begins with unsparing reportage of the escalating violence on the island – the sign above the emergency wing of the Mt Hope hospital, outside the capital, Port of Spain, announces “Gun Shot and Chop Wounds this way”. He then moves on to write a homage of sorts to two of Trinidad’s most famous sons, the socialist writer CLR James and VS Naipaul. The chapter’s title, “Return to El Dorado”, is a nod to Naipaul’s history book The Loss of El Dorado.
A fresh fruit stand in Scarborough on Tobago.
A fresh fruit stand in Scarborough on Tobago. Photograph: Alamy
The ghosts of other writers haunt the pages of Jelly-Schapiro’s book, in particular the idiosyncratic and ungenerous Naipaul, whose fresh and stinging insights were born both of titanic certainty and the confidence of belonging to the story. You can take issue with Naipaul’s odium in The Middle Passage but you can’t deny the guilty pleasure of reading its pompous, brutal, piquant and despairingly dark humour. Indeed the devilish Naipaul has the best lines in Island People, and in frequently reminding us of his predecessor’s bons and not so bons mots, the latest chronicler of the Caribbean cedes too much ground and advantage to them.
Close to the book’s end, Jelly-Schapiro quotes a wise and elderly mentor who advises: “Do not speak untruth, no matter how pleasing. Do not speak truth that is displeasing. Only speak the truth that is pleasing.” Ultimately, Island People, written by a careful and compassionate author, is a worthy travel and history book, a fresh study of these economically hamstrung islands and their failing attempts at rebranding. But in elegantly recycling the tales told by Naipaul and others, Jelly-Schapiro puts himself overly in their authors’ shadow. He might have been better advised to be more arrogant, and a little less considerate.
• Colin Grant’s books include Negro With a Hat and A Smell of Burning: The Story of Epilepsy. Island People: The Caribbean and the World is published by Canongate. To order a copy for £17 (RRP £22) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
Island People by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro — sun, sea and modernity
A wide-ranging Caribbean travelogue paints a picture of a region ahead of its time
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JANUARY 27, 2017 by: Ian Thomson
Back in the 1960s, Fidel Castro’s bearded, Old Testament head appeared in student bedsits more dependably than rising damp. Yet his 1959 revolución was not in essence socialist but nationalist in origin. It was only after Cuban exiles attempted their disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 that Castro opportunistically aligned himself with Nikita Khrushchev’s Soviet Union.
The late Castro’s nationalism was an ethnically inclusive sort, a consequence less of socialist orthodoxy than of Cuba’s distinctively Caribbean history. By the 19th century the island had become the greatest slave-importing colony in the history of the Spanish empire; today it remains typically West Indian in its collision of European and African cultures.
Island People, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro’s meandering but often vivid account of the Caribbean and its multi-shaded community of nationalities and cultures, champions the underrated “modernity” of the region. Jamaica’s intermingling of Asian, white and African bloods made it in many ways a more “modern” society than late 1950s and 1960s Britain, where calls for racial purity often puzzled Caribbean newcomers.
Jelly-Schapiro, a New York-based academic and journalist, sets out to prosecute his “modernity” thesis in a series of journeys undertaken across Jamaica, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Hispaniola (the Greater Antilles) in Part I and, in Part II, Barbados, Grenada, Antigua, Martinique, Guadeloupe and Trinidad (the Lesser Antilles). The result is a gallimaufry of history and colour supplement-style reportage that does not always quite cohere.
Apart from the accident of their having been under British rule, Jamaicans, Trinidadians and Bajans actually have little in common other than a history of slavery. Superimpose a map of Europe on the West Indies: Jamaica would be Edinburgh, Trinidad would be north Africa, Barbados would be Italy. That is how far apart the islands are geographically and, by extension, culturally. How to find a thread (“modernity” turns out to be a slightly flimsy one) that might adequately unify them?
Barbados, with its golf clubs, Anglican churches and statues of Lord Nelson, is disappointingly suburban and “Little England”-like for Jelly-Schapiro. Perhaps due to his American birth, he does not care to dwell much on the history of British colonialism in the West Indies; for good or ill, however, British culture remains a significant part of what it means to be Bajan today.
The history and mythology of Jamaica is fabulously revealed in its music, from trance-inducing reggae to DJ-based dance hall to old-time gospel and mento (a type of calypso). The first of three long chapters on the island, titled “Branding”, discusses the sainted figure of Bob Marley. A kind of political correctness cautions that one should not be too unkind to Marley, who died of cancer in 1981, aged 36. Yet much of his music (except for the early Lee “Scratch” Perry productions) sounds slightly vapid to my ears. Jelly-Schapiro evidently does not think so. For many middle-class Americans, Bob Marley is reggae.
Kingston, the Jamaican capital, is mostly explored here by car. Although the essence of Kingston — the place where the noisy, violent and frequently humorous quality of the city’s life unfolds — is the public bus, the attraction of the car is self-evident. A white man seen on a Jamaican bus has either lost his mind or place in society; like the “walk-foot buckra” (white man) who had no horse in the days of slavery, he is looked upon as a misfit or loser. In lively pages, Jelly-Schapiro reflects on his place in postcolonial Jamaica as a white tourist (or, as he solemnly puts it, one “without brown skin”).
If the author is sometimes given to portentous jargon (“telos”, “hegemon”, “the epiphenomenon of poverty”), he is also happily wide-ranging in his enthusiasms. He discusses the influence on salsa music of self-conscious “badman” Puerto Rican singer Héctor Lavoe, celebrates the Ellingtonian dance jazz of Cuban bandleader Benny Moré, and appraises the work of both the Trinidad historian and cricket enthusiast CLR James (“my first big intellectual crush”) and Martinique-born anti-colonialist Frantz Fanon. The result is a pleasingly broad study of the Caribbean and its vital, indecipherable blend of peoples.
Island People: The Caribbean and the World, by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, Canongate RRP£22/Knopf RRP$28.95, 464 pages
Ian Thomson is the author of ‘The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica’ (2009)
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