What role did the newspaper play in attempting to influence public opinion in the early stages of the Grenada Revolution and what are the terms in which printed discourses on the revolution were conceptualised? The Grenada Revolution was a discursive political process where branding and narration were necessary elements in securing the revolution's authority and legitimacy. This paper argues that Cuba functioned as a metonym through which the revolution was translated in Grenadian periodicals. Even before the coup of 13 March 1979 Grenadian media represented the New Jewel Movement-the revolutionary party-as Cuban-inspired and socialist. In order to examine how socialism in general, and the socialist character of the People's Revolutionary Government (PRG) in particular, was narrated, a comparison is staged between two newspapers-the government-run Free West Indian and the privately owned The Torchlight. Competing discourses on Cuban communism are analysed for the ways in which they stood-in for the Grenadian people's hopes, aspirations and anxieties in the midst of radical political change. Issues including race, gender equality, property ownership, freedom of religious practice and freedom of travel are examined in relation to capitalism and socialism, and the PRG's efforts to maintain narrative authority of the revolution.
In her 1984 poetry collection, Chronicles of the Hostile Sun, Trinidadian-Canadian author Dionne Brand examines the radicalism of the Grenada Revolution (1979–1983) vis-a-vis mainstream North American politics, which were decidedly antirevolutionary during the late 20th-century Cold War. Brand uses poetry to imagine what it means to claim sovereignty in the postindependence Caribbean. This article argues that Brand’s poetry unsettles “facts” about the revolution’s history by discrediting American imperialist rhetoric and policy in the Caribbean. Drawing on Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s concept of the North Atlantic universal as a fiction or colonial construct, I examine Brand’s efforts to undo US narratives that portray the Grenada Revolution as undemocratic and oppressive. Brand writes the Grenada Revolution in a way that reveals it as a collective project of Caribbean people whose goals and values have points of similarity as well as points of difference from those in the Global North. My analysis explores the way in which Brand sets up literary texts, and poetry in particular, as an alternative form of historical narrative in response to US-centered North Atlantic universals.
In Moving Against the System: The 1968 Congress of Black Writers and the Making of Global Consciousness, David Austin continues his important work as the leading historian of 1960s black Montreal. Moving Against the System illuminates histories that are critical to an understanding of black radicalism in Canada, the Caribbean, and the African diaspora, more broadly. This work decenters the United States as the nexus of Black Power, allowing readers to think about Canada as an understudied site of black radical organizing. While the congress viewed Black Nationalism as a serious political framework for defeating both racism and colonialism, all the speakers were male. This essay critiques the masculinist politics of Black Power at the congress and analyzes how Austin navigates the absence of women’s voices among the congress’s speakers.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.