Colin Grant

Caribbean Voices

“There’s a kind of earnestness, a kind of humor that is very particular to the Caribbean and its tradition of picong—bold, verbal jousting.”

Yearning for Redemption

Kingsley Ben-Adir’s performance as Bob Marley in One Love is seductive, but in treating the singer as a savior, the film loses sight of his complexity.

The Jeopardy Is the Juice

Colson Whitehead’s latest novel, Crook Manifesto, depicts its characters’ perilous navigation of race, class, and crime in 1970s Harlem.

A Reconfigured Self

Margo Jefferson takes fractured shards of memory and pieces them together imperfectly to create what she calls “cultural memoir and confessional criticism.”

Far from Jamaica

Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You explores the unsettling shifts in identity for two generations of a Jamaican family in Florida.

The Enigma of Nonarrival

Though Roy Heath spent most of his life in Britain, he returned again and again in his fiction to Guyana.

A Country Out of Control

In Wole Soyinka’s laceratingly satirical new novel, Nigeria has lost its way and is inured to corruption and violence.

Sins of the Fathers

In Life of a Klansman, Edward Ball’s white supremacist great-great-grandfather becomes a case study in the enduring legacy of slavery.

Harlem on the Mediterranean

Claude McKay’s lost novel recounts the thrills and disappointments of lives spent along the Marseille harbor.

Fighting for the ‘Cause’

The Women’s War

Chanting Down Babylon

Peter Fryer & ‘Thinking Black’

In the 1980s, with the exception of a handful of those like Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, there were few black intellectuals, to my knowledge, writing about the history of black people in Britain. Into that vacuum walked the white journalist Peter Fryer.

Britain’s Debt to the Windrush Generation

Some seventy years after the first immigrants from the Caribbean arrived on British shores, the “Windrush generation” has returned to the center of attention in Britain—not this time in a spirit of optimism and hope but of hurt and anger.

1968: Enoch, Bageye, and Me

On April 20, 1968, Enoch Powell completed my early education, confirming an unsettling belief that had begun to take shape in my six-year-old’s fertile imagination: my color vexed some people’s spirits.