Neoliberalism has had a central place in economic rationale for the past forty years. In Neoliberal Frontiers, Brenda Chalfin gives a great insight of what it means in specific interventions. She analyses how Ghana renegotiates its sovereignty in a seemingly economic laissez-faire context. Since the mid seventies, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World…
Laura Joh Rowland has wowed me with another of her stories. I was interested in reading The Cloud Pavilion because of Sana Ichiro, the main character. I first met him in The Red Chrysanthemum, when he was a powerful detective in the Tokugawa regime. In this book, he has risen to become Chamberlain, a position…
Peony, the protagonist in Peony in Love, is a pampered sixteen year old when the reader meets her. She is sequestered in the Chen household with female family members and knows nothing of men beyond her relationship with her father. She is betrothed to a man she has never met and during a performance put…
Patricia Dixon-Spear’s book analyzes African American relationships outside of the confines of European-Atlantic cultural norms. The first two chapters lay the ground work by defining polygyny while illustrating the historical Greco-Roman attitudes towards polygyny which have been super imposed upon European-Atlantic ideology in general and modern feminist thought in particular. In this section the author…
Ghana provides a vivid, if sometimes chaotic setting for this second novel by Marilyn Heward Mills. The main characters are four women who are transplanted from Europe. Three are married and two are raising children. The fourth has children, but is not married and fights an ongoing battle with the children’s father, who is lax…
Black women who have turned their backs on relaxers and weaves and who embrace their afro textured hair are women who are hungry for knowledge. Two of the most popular topics within online communities for naturals are how to grow hair and how to style it. But top of the list is what products to…
In most of the Caribbean novels I have read, the narrator is a son of the soil. In The White Woman on the Green Bicycle the main characters are George and Sabine Harwood. The couple arrive from England in 1956, prior to the People’s National Movement’s ascendance to power. Sabine expects they will depart in…