Search results for ""Author Brian Meeks""

'A book of rare beauty’ - Bill Schwarz, Professor at Queen Mary University of London Across the Anglophone Caribbean, the great expectations of independence were never met. From Black Power and Jamaican Democratic Socialism to the Grenada Revolution, the radical currents that once animated the region recede into memory. More than half a century later, the likelihood of radical change appears vanishingly small on the horizon. But what were the twists and turns in the postcolonial journey that brought us here? And is there hope yet for the Caribbean to advance towards more just, democratic and empowering futures? After the Postcolonial Caribbean is structured in two parts, 'Remembering', and 'Imagining.' Author Brian Meeks employs a sometimes autobiographical form, drawing on his own memories and experiences of the radical politics and culture of the Caribbean in the decades following the end of colonialism. And he takes inspiration from the likes of Edna Manley, George Lamming and Stuart Hall in reaching towards a new theoretical framework that might help forge new currents of intellectual and political resistance. Meeks concludes by making the case for reestablishing optimism as a necessary cornerstone for any reemergent progressive movement.

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Brian Meeks's novel is a moving requiem for the years of an extraordinary ferment in Jamaican society, when reggae and Rastafarian dreams reached from the ghettoes to the University campus, and idealistic young men and women threw themselves into the struggle to free independent Jamaica from its colonial past. In portraying the the temptations towards tribal revenge that corrupted the vision of change, Meeks's sensitively written and well-structured novel speaks powerfully to the present, when even now, Jamaica's political divisions erupt into killings on the streets.As Mikey Johnson takes a minibus through Kingston on his release from eleven years in jail, what he sees and the persons he meets provoke memories of the years when those who sought to destabilize Jamaican society, fearful of the radical socialist direction it was taking, unleash a virtual civil war. His encounters reveal that few have escaped unscathed from those years: there are the dead (in body and in spirit), the wounded, the turncoats, and those like himself who are condemned to carry the burden of those times. Mikey's quest to discover why he survived when his friend Carl and lover, Rosie, were killed in a shootout with the police draws him to look for Caroline, the other woman he was involved with before his imprisonment. From her he discovers a bitter truth about Jamaica's unwritten code of class and its role in his survival.One of the encounters is, we learn in a postscript to the novel, with Rohan, Rosie's brother. Rohan has suffered this loss deeply, but has survived to move forward, while Mikey, with the stigma of his imprisonment, is trapped in the past. It is Rohan who tells Mikey's story, a revelation that casts a reflexive light on the relationship between the actual writer and his subject.Brian Meeks was born in Montreal, Canada of West Indian parents and grew up in Kingston, Jamaica. He has taught political science at the University of the West Indies, Mona for many years.

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The poems in The Coup Clock Clicks were written between 1971 and 1988, reflecting the work of the then young political activist, poems challenging indifference, and mainly concerned to understand and, if possible, ameliorate the situation of others. It is also a personal memoir, shaped as autobiography. In reggae-conscious free verse in Jamaican patwa, these poems are fierce, sometimes witty jeremiads against economic and socio-cultural division, poverty, violence, and thwarted lives. The collection is suffused with references to music – mainly Jamaican popular music, heard everywhere, but displaying Meeks’ sharply observant eye, as in his poem about a Marley concert where the detailed fashion notes vividly point to the actual separation of classes in Jamaica.The later poems reflect on the collapse of 1970s' hopes of decolonisation after the widespread defeat of the left through self-inflicted injuries and the new world order of resurgent American power under Ronald Reagan.As Mervyn Morris notes in his introduction, The Coup Clock Clicks is an important contribution to Caribbean poetry. He characterises Meeks as “a resourceful poet” producing “nicely crafted poems… There is plenty of grief in this collection. But resilience also, and philosophical questioning.”

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The essays in this collection are a tribute to Stuart Hall, and to the outstanding contribution he has made to contemporary cultural, social and political thought. The central figure in the development of Cultural Studies, Hall's writing has influenced a whole generation of intellectuals. Some contributors reflect and comment on Hall's contribution; others continue to develop some of his key themes. But most share a focus on reconnecting his work with Jamaica - his birthplace - and the wider Caribbean.

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