bahareads's reviews
1071 reviews

A quick read; I couldn't put it down but I also started skimming through. The book is too long, and a lot of time is spent on exposition or characters I didn't care about AT ALL. The premise of the story was really interesting though. 

I like this book but I think I should read Backman physically. I was grated down by the repetition of some of the characters complaints or thought processes. The story is very moving and thought provoking though.

Caribbean by James Mitchener covers a large span of history, from the history of indigenous people of the Caribbean up to when the book was published. He covers all the different empires in The Caribbean from the Spanish to the French, Dutch, and English. He attempts to cover major points of Caribbean history through these different empires.

I enjoyed the chapter setups. Even though, Mitchener went from Point of View to Point of View with the different characters, the stories were connected enough or flowed into each other well enough to follow. Throughout the book I kept wondering, “where is The Bahamas?” But at the very end of the book, with his ‘the setting’ page, I see he chose to exclude The Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands from the book completely. 

To me that was an interesting narrative choice, though The Bahamas is not in the Caribbean Sea. It is a part of the Caribbean in every other way. It is the place where Columbus first landed and the first interaction between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ world. Nassau, New Providence also played a large role in the Golden Age of Piracy among other historical events, so I was disappointed to see its exclusion. The one chapter where he did mention The Bahamas (Chapter 5) made me wonder what he was citing or where he was drawing his information from. The Bahamas was barely an established English colony by 1650 as the first English settlers created a colony in 1647. So the likelihood of the colony weighing in on important government matters would have been very unlikely.


I have always enjoyed reading historical fiction. I liked elements of Caribbean; it was a mammoth task to try and write a whole history of the Caribbean. I believe a number of the characters fall into the White Savior trope, particularly in latter half of the book. I am aware of racism throughout history but some of the POVs were apologetically racist. Racism is even acknowledged in the book and characters shift and change. But the lens through which, not only the characters see people of color, but also the way Mitchener describes people of color rubbed me the wrong way at times. 

There is an exotification of indigenous people with how they are physically described and how their way of life is described. What stuck out to me the most was in chapter 14, Ras-Negus Grimble is described in very physically dirty language. “Mud” in his hair, that looks like “writhing vipers.” He has a “savage appearance” and “fetid smell.” This is not a particular POV, this is just general description from Mitchener. Personally, I have never known a Rastafarian, or people with locs, to have mud in their hair and not bathe.

too long and bad writing 

The way Backman unfolds a story should be praised. I loved it. It covers a lot of heavy topics in a light way. The story did drag at times for me, but I'm not sure if that was the format or the actual story itself.

I wanted to love this book so bad; I went through phases of enjoying the story and then asking where the hell we were going. Sometimes it felt like the plot got sidetracked. The ending had my head reeling.

A sad short novella that made me cry and think about my own granddaddy.

I enjoyed the premise of the book a lot but it was too long. The struggle on racial lines was relatable. It was great to see what it would have been like - to learn how to deal with black hair while having a white mother - without the internet. I liked the ideas of race and racial harmony that were explored in the book. Sometimes the characters felt flat to me. And, once again, the book was too long.

Read on audiobook - This was my first foray into into Any Tan's work. I enjoyed it but it was hard to get into it at first. The book was split into three parts that did not always make sense to me. I loved the historical fiction elements of the book. I also enjoyed the exploration of family dynamics, particularly between Ruth and her mother.

The Digital Black Atlantic is a collected volumed edited by Kelly Baker-Josephs and Roopika Risam. It is comprised of a total of 19 essays, excluding the introduction. The essayists span University librarians to Historians to English Professors to the head of a Digital Humanities collective etc.

The Digital Black Atlantic is the first volume to put into conversation a cross section of Black studies and digital studies because they are often separated; it presents what a diaspora-based approach to Digital Humanities can look like.

The editors say they wanted to foster discussions from the Debates in Digital Humanities, and decided to use the inclusive term 'digital black Atlantic' to gesture toward the complex relations within and among the terms and geographic positionalities, and the interdisciplinary of the work. They acknowledge their privilege as being US based. They chose not to define but create provisional space and framework for academic conversation.

One goal of this volume was to shed light on the possibilities that define digital inquiry in African diasporic culture for digital Black Atlantic scholarship, discourse and citation. Another goal was to consider what "Black Atlantic" is as a formulation offers the study of Blackness and Digital cultures while articulating the challenges that approach offers to digital humanities.

The scholarship poses a direct challenge to the foundational assumptions of digital humanities, universality of language and parameters of access and epistemology of privilege. With the collection they ask and hope to answer the tradition of interrogating the texture and borders of the Black Atlantic that might be integrated with the negotiation of digital identities, tools, methods, and aspirations.

The chapters of this volume contribute to discourse and conversations within global Digital humanities. They decenter Global North/West digital knowledge production. The volume assembles multiple perspectives on the global Black and digital studies.

The digital Black Atlantic is a product of juxtapositions within the African diaspora. But juxtaposition is a transformative alchemical movie where the sum is greater than the whole. They begin with Paul Gilroy's work about Black Atlantic as the theoretical core and the articulating principle for the volume. They also critique his work, talking about point they do not wish to reproduce.

The Digital Black Atlantic draws on existing debates within digital humanities as a way of challenging the limits of humanities scholarship and emphasising the African Diaspora Scholarship. Digital Black Alantic pushes back against the ways technology has been historical used to disempower Black communities.

The thematic divisions are supposed to resonate in Black studies rather than the traditional ones in the Digital Humanities
1. Memory situates histories of and contemporary archival impulses towards African diasporic experiences
2. Crossings encompasses the fluid and flexible ways that BA DH negotiates movement across time and space, forging varied spatial and temporal relationships
3. Relations, derived from Edouard Glissant's conception of networked creolized cultures, reveals the rhizomatic connections created via exchanges in BA spaces.
4. Becomings outlines the dreams and aspirations of the DBA as scholars continue to create and imagine new configurations for the African diaspora.
- each concept is interdisciplinary, grounded in specific histories in BA studies while transcending traditional disciplines by spanning a variety of academic fields.

The editors say the attempts to represent and transform Black life with Digital Humanities must push against limits of traditions.

I really enjoyed this book. I wanted to go back and purchase a physical copy later. I've interacted with several of the people in volume at the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective over the summer.