Annie Paul

As the note on our theme says, the Caribbean has always existed at a crossroads of one kind or another, and nearly a quarter of the way into the 21^st century, the Caribbean remains at a crossroads. The artist Christopher Cozier once said, after a residency in Johannesburg, that he often felt like someone standing at an intersection with a sign, rewriting and reorganizing its message, wondering if it was being understood or engaged.

There’s a similar feeling as we put out the first issue of PREE, an online portal to relay high-grade writing from, on or about the Caribbean. Will PREE be read as widely as we hope? Who will PREE’s audience be and how will they engage us? Will this kind of writing appeal to the younger generations growing up in an era when books have virtually become an endangered species? Will youngsters still yearn to be writers in the same way that some of us born in the 20^th century did? Will the rest of the world be interested in what Caribbean writers have to say?

Continue reading “Crossroads Issue 1: Letter from the Editor” →

ANNIE PAUL and MIKIE BENNETT

In February 2018 the new Netflix-BBC TV series Collateral debuted, its tense opening scenes unfolding to the throbbing beat of dancehall. No gyal can tell me ’bout my mudda, raps Stefflon Don in impeccable Patwa. She’s a grime artiste, ‘grime’ being the unequivocal outside child of dancehall in the UK.^[1]

The following month, The New Yorker ran an online article on dancehall’s global avatars, ‘HoodCelebrityy and Dancehall’s New, Global Faces’, and later that month Jamaicans were transfixed by viral images of Beyoncé and Jay-Z riding a yeng yeng, or motorbike, through Trenchtown.^[2] The couple were reportedly shooting a music video in Kingston. At this moment – when Jamaican music has established its global reach – it’s hard to imagine a time when Jamaican singers were obliged to sound anything but Jamaican.

Continue reading “Reggae’s Voice: The Accent of Difference” →