City of Islands: Caribbean Intellectuals in New York by Tammy L. Brown (review)

City of Islands joins a number of recent books dealing with the Caribbean presence in New York. Some of these have focused on literary figures (Davis on Eric Walrond) and some on political figures (Timm on Wilfred Domingo), but at least one (Stephens) has invoked the rather broader category of 'intellectuals' that Tammy L. Brown also deploys here. Michelle Stephens' three main examples are fully in the mainstream: Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay, and C.L.R. James. Brown's are less well-known and more varied. An introductory chapter on "Caribbean New York" is vaguely organized around the story of Trinidadian-born pianist, Hazel Scott (1920-1981) and a coda touches on the afterlife of Marcus Garvey in the twenty-first century; but the five main figures under consideration are the Jamaican Unitarian minister and political activist, E. Ethelred Brown (1875-1956); the Barbadian-born writer and political activist, Richard B. Moore (1893-1978); the Trinidadian-born dancer and choreographer, Pearl Primus (1919-1994); the Brooklyn-born (to Barbadian parents) politician, Shirley Chisholm (1924-2005); and the Brooklyn-born (to Barbadian parents) writer, Paule Marshall (b. 1929). All five are important figures; all lived significant parts of their lives in New York; and it's encouraging to see particular attention given to the experiences and achievements of Caribbean women. They are very different kinds of figures, so City of Islands certainly offers plenty of variety. But variety works best within some coherent framework, and it's here that the book struggles.

Given the quality of the canonical work by Winston James on Caribbean intellectual presence in New York, any new offering needs an original approach. A series of biographical sketches has some merit, since there are plenty of interesting figures in need of study, but it is less obvious that the chosen five make a cogent group. Part of the problem is with range. Richard B. Moore arrived in New York in 1909 and Marshall is still alive, so the book tries to cover a century, which is a big stretch for five lives. They also involved five very different kinds of intellectual activity—only Brown and Moore's careers have significant overlap—so it's difficult to make meaningful comparisons. All five were certainly 'Caribbean' in some sense, and identified as such, but what that word meant in terms of their individual experiences was inevitably very different: Ethelred Brown was 45 when he relocated to New York from Jamaica, while Paule Marshall was born in Brooklyn and didn't visit Barbados until she was six years old. In addition, the term 'Caribbean' is used problematically in the book as a synonym for 'British Caribbean,' by which the author actually means 'black British Caribbean.' It looks odd to see Ethelred Brown (who arrived in 1920) described as belonging to the first wave of Caribbean immigration into New York, when the evidence the book draws on comes from Brown's papers in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, Arturo Schomburg having arrived in New York from Puerto Rico in 1891 as part of a wave of Caribbean intellectuals that included Cirilo Villaverde, Francisco González Marín, and José Martí.

The theme of antagonism between what the author calls "Caribbean immigrants and American-born blacks" (xvi) is a significant strand here and indeed seems to have provided the spark for the 2007 Ph.D. thesis on which the book is based, judging from the anecdotes in the book's prologue about the (Cincinnati-born) author's own experiences at university. The biographical approach frequently crosses into the autobiographical, not always to the benefit of the book's scholarly credentials, particularly in the rather rambling coda.

City of Islands is littered with small errors, some the result of inadequate proof-reading, others of carelessness. So, for example, Claude McKay's poem "The Tropics in New York...