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Julian Lucas

Julian Lucas is an Associate Editor at Cabinet. (April 2017)

IN THE REVIEW

Southern Sublime

Morning, Paramin

by Derek Walcott and Peter Doig
No one has scrutinized the Caribbean with more devotion, sensitivity, and protectiveness than Derek Walcott, a St. Lucian poet, playwright, and painter who has made its landscape the touchstone of his art. He flew to Montreal in 2014 for Peter Doig’s exhibition “No Foreign Lands,” urged by the French editor Harry Jancovici, who after reading Walcott on Caribbean painting proposed a joint project. It began with the artist steering Walcott through the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, watching from behind his wheelchair as he evaluated each painting, inaugurating the series of exchanges that would become Morning, Paramin.

New Black Worlds to Know

Jacob Lawrence: from the series The Migration of the Negro, 1940–1941

The Underground Railroad

by Colson Whitehead
Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad isn’t the modern slave narrative it first appears to be. It is something grander and more piercing, a dazzling antebellum anti-myth in which the fugitive’s search for freedom—now so marketable and familiar—becomes a kind of Trojan horse. Crouched within it are the never-ending nightmares of slavery’s aftermath: the bloody disappointments, usually sidelined by film and fiction, that took place between the Civil War and civil rights. In Whitehead’s hands the runaway’s all-American story—grit, struggle, reward—becomes instead a grim Voltairean odyssey, a subterranean journey through the uncharted epochs of unfreedom.

Ambush, Night & Day

Marlon James at Jumel Terrace Books, Sugar Hill, Harlem, September 2014

A Brief History of Seven Killings

by Marlon James
If hell were a place on earth, a Bob Marley concert in Jamaica isn’t the first place you’d expect to find it. But perspective is everything. Bam-Bam, the first character to die in Marlon James’s new novel, has been running for two days when he reaches the show, held in …