The Grenada Revolution in the Caribbean Present

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.

“Shalini Puri’s The Grenada Revolution in the Caribbean Present: Operation Urgent Memory contributes to and intervenes in this scholarship on the Revolution. … Puri’s text is useful for those interested in Caribbean studies, Africana studies, American studies, literary methods, Caribbean history, English, trauma studies, international relations, and peace and conflict studies. It is a significant contribution across these fields, especially for those exploring archival writing in the context of radical social movements in the Caribbean.” (Warren Harding, SX Salon, smallaxe.net, June, 2017)

"Elegantly written . . . what is most striking about the book is the compassionate tone throughout. It's as if the author is herself moved by the story she is telling, and touched by the cast of unforgettable characters." - Southern World Arts News



"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 

 

"For some of us, the mention of the Caribbean island country of Grenada brings a vague visceral feeling of discomfort, like a tragic accident in the family never again discussed...Shalini Puri's book brings us back to this landscape [...] to examine the 'unsettled truths and restless memories' they have left, 32 years later. She also asks the more pressing question: How do these events haunt the Caribbean in the present? ...The book dazzles, provokes, turns us around, and at nearly every turn brings us up against some new angle on the events of 1979 – 1983, and far far beyond." - Havana Times

"If you are looking for a book that offers pat answers and reinforces traditional left ideas, with the usual cast of heroes and villains, this is not for you. If, however, you are still plagued, as I am, with images of joyous revolutionary movements followed by tragedy, and the question: 'What did they leave behind?' this book will offer you a banquet of new perspectives to ponder." - Havana Times   

"Puri's stakes are clear: not a history of the Grenadian revolution but a 'meditation on memory'…here the humanities is perfectly suited to the project at hand, finely attuned to contradiction, able to bring imaginative resources to bear on the range of ways in which memorialisation occurs… Ethnographic and aesthetic immersion offer hope, for proximity reveals everyday connections that distance overlooks. We will walk with Shalini Puri's generous, generative offering for a long time. Her methodological approach, deeply attentive to the vernacular rhythms of this island, one crossroads to the world, reminds us that landscape is archive. Philosophy. Poetics." - Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies

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.