Category Archives: Reviews

Hemingway & Ford Madox Ford’s ‘Paris Journal’

LIT HUB (February 7, 2025): In November 1923, Ford Madox Ford, “like everyone else in Paris,” was sick with flu. Yet he was optimistic. He dashed off letters from a typewriter set on “a table across my bed.” In 1908, Ford founded The English Review, and edited its first fifteen issues. Now, as he wrote his daughter, he was “at my old game of starting reviews” again.

The Transatlantic Review had an almost preternatural birth. Paris “gyrated, seethed, clamoured, roared with the Arts. Painters, novelists, poets, composers, sculptors, batik-designers, decorators, even advanced photographers, so crowded the boulevards that you could not see the tree-trunks.” Ford had a “vague sense rather than an idea” of what to do about this “immense seething cauldron” of artists, who “bubbled and overflowed,” but lacked a practical vision. His brother Oliver suggested a magazine. (The original name of the magazine was to be the Paris Review. The name was switched because the first serial advertisement was from Compagnie Transatlantique.)

Ford soon promised H.G. Wells that the first issue of his new magazine, to be published in January 1924, would be better than the inaugural edition of The English Review, which boasted work from Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad. Ford hoped that the magazine would “[widen] the field in which the younger writers of the day can find publication.”

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Book Reviews: “Humans In Shackles – An Atlantic History Of Slavery” (LSE)

Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of SlaveryAna Lucia AraujoUniversity of Chicago Press. 2024.


Humans in shackles cover

LSE REVIEW OF BOOKS (February 5, 2025): At the close of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the eponymous revenant representing the deepest traumas of slavery’s violence has finally left the house she haunted. After a while, even her recurring footprints are forgotten: “by and by all trace is gone”. She is not simply forgotten but “disremembered and unaccounted for”. Howard University historian Ana Lucia Araujo’s hybrid trade-academic history of slavery makes specific reference to Belovedthe case of Margaret Garner that inspired it, and other horrific instances of infanticide from the Americas in a section that confronts the “combination of motherhood and slavery” as “haunted by tragedy” (323). This is just one example of the way in which Araujo’s book deliberately remembers and accounts for the individual lives, specific communities and broader cultural, social and economic structures touched, formed or devastated by chattel slavery and the Atlantic slave trade.  

Humans in Shackles has four distinct but related aims. First, it aims to decentre the United States and English-speaking Caribbean islands in the history of slavery, arguing that this imbalance neglects, in particular, the place of Brazil in the Atlantic slave trade. This attention to Brazil, where slavery was not abolished until 1888, reveals important archival gaps. For instance, despite the fact that around 5.7 million enslaved people boarded ships on the coast of West Central Africa, and that the majority of these people were transported to Brazil (estimates from the SlaveVoyages website), there are no published first-hand accounts by Africans boarding ships on this part of the coast.  

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