Shalini Puri’s Grenada Revolution in the Caribbean Present is a sensitively crafted tour de force that adds considerably to the literature on the Grenada Revolution. Her broad-brushed methodology draws on interviews, conversations, personal observation, and the filtering of art, literature, monuments, and music. She also uses less explored ways of knowing—graffiti, Maurice Bishop’s calling card, an abandoned Cuban plane, and a stained-glass window—which together locate her work between an evidence-based social science account of the revolution and its aftermath and the poetic license afforded the arts. Puri’s almost spiritual engagement with these mementos allows her to see the present in the past and brings unprecedented immediacy and authenticity to her storytelling.
Puri approaches Grenada with a keen ear, finding a path through often wildly conflicting renderings of the revolution that allows for a nuanced reading of the varying perspectives, filtered through her own efforts to understand the motives/emotions behind them,...
