Overview

The Grenada Revolution in the Caribbean Present: Operation Urgent Memory is the first scholarly book from the humanities on the subject of the Grenada Revolution and the US intervention. It is simultaneously a critique, tribute, and memorial. It argues that in both its making and its fall, the 1979-1983 Revolution was a transnational event that deeply impacted politics and culture across the Caribbean and its diaspora during its life and in the decades since its fall. Drawing together studies of landscape, memorials, literature, music, painting, photographs, film and TV, cartoons, memorabilia traded on e-bay, interviews, everyday life, and government, journalistic, and scholarly accounts, the book assembles and analyzes an archive of divergent memories. In an analysis that is relevant to all micro-states, the book reflects on how Grenada's small size shapes memory, political and poetic practice, and efforts at reconciliation.

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9780230120327

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Reviews

The reverberations from the Grenada Revolution and from its violent ending continue to stir passions on the island and throughout the Caribbean. While political and historical analyses abound, Shalini Puri's wonderful new book offers something completely different: a kind of cultural geography of present-day Grenada which seeks out the places in which the restless memories of the Revolution are embedded. Through an ethnographic immersion in the local culture she attends to all forms of remembrance, from literary text to calypso, from memorabilia to architecture. The result is a startlingly original and haunting set of analyses. - Peter Hulme, Professor of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies, University of Essex, UK

The reverberations from the Grenada Revolution and from its violent ending continue to stir passions on the island and throughout the Caribbean. While political and historical analyses abound, Shalini Puri's wonderful new book offers something completely different: a kind of cultural geography of present-day Grenada which seeks out the places in which the restless memories of the Revolution are embedded. Through an ethnographic immersion in the local culture she attends to all forms of remembrance, from literary text to calypso, from memorabilia to architecture. The result is a startlingly original and haunting set of analyses. - Peter Hulme, Professor of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies, University of Essex, UK In this assessment of the revolutionary project we are faced not with normative philosophical or social scientific categories evaluating decisions taken and policies pursued, but instead with the ways desire, despair, and betrayal are lived and experienced in the realm of everyday life. Puri builds an archive by reading how landscape, music, and literature reveal the everyday ways memory is embodied. She thus destabilizes easy categories like collaborator and vanguard, comrade and traitor by instead focusing on what it would mean to imagine alternative politics through the micropoetics of artistic practices, and the cultural geographies of land. By investigating how memory erupts, as well as how it lies unnoticed, unmemorialized, and even buried, Puri asks us to imagine democracy, engagement, and the politics of research in new ways. - Deborah A. Thomas, Professor of Anthropology and Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania, USA

The reverberations from the Grenada Revolution and from its violent ending continue to stir passions on the island and throughout the Caribbean. While political and historical analyses abound, Puri's wonderful new book offers something completely different: a kind of cultural geography of present-day Grenada which seeks out the places that the restless memories of the Revolution are embedded. Through an ethnographic immersion in the local culture, she attends to all forms of remembrance, from literary text to calypso, from memorabilia to architecture. The result is a startlingly original and haunting set of analyses. - Peter Hulme, Professor of Literature, University of Essex, UK Puri's book on the Grenada Revolution breaks with normative philosophical or social scientific categories that evaluate decisions taken and policies pursued. It offers an account of the ways in which desire, despair, hope, and betrayal are lived and experienced by ordinary people. Puri builds an archive through readings of landscape, music, and literature that show how both memory and its silencing are embodied in the intimacies of everyday life. She thus destabilizes categories like collaborator and vanguard, comrade and traitor, by focusing instead on what it would mean to imagine alternative politics through the micropoetics of artistic practices and the cultural geographies of land. By investigating how memory erupts, as well as how it lies unnoticed, unmemorialized, and even buried, Puri asks us to imagine democracy, engagement, and the politics of research in new ways. - Deborah Thomas, Professor of Anthropology and Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania, USA Puri leaves the well-trodden path of previous accounts of the rise and fall of the Grenada Revolution that are reliably inscribed within a sturdy political economy idiom. She risks instead a finely textured narrative that draws on the resources of the aesthetic and of memory in its various forms to bring to the surface the more elusive omissions. The necessity of such a work resides in the fact that, notwithstanding the sometimes exceptional scholarship of existing histories of the period, the regional Left has not recovered from the collapse of the Grenada Revolution. Puri's book in its quiet, meditative unfolding re-energizes the search for a politics of the possible. - Rupert Roopnaraine, Working People's Alliance, Guyana and author of The Sky's Wild Noise: Selected Essays

Author Information

Shalini Puri is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, USA. Puri is the author of the award-winning book The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity and the editor of The Legacies of Caribbean Radical Politics and Marginal Migrations: The Circulation of Cultures in the Caribbean. She is currently working on a collaborative project on the Global South entitled ""Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities."" For more information about this book, please visit www.urgentmemory.com.

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