Narratives of Obeah in West Indian Literature: Moving through the Margins

ISBN-13: 9781138585812 / Angielski / Twarda / 2019 / 240 str.

Germany) Janelle Rodriques (University of Bremen

Opis

This scholarly monograph is the first literary critical history to focus on representations of Obeah, a name used in the English/Creole-speaking Caribbean to describe various African-inspired, syncretic Caribbean religious practices, across a range of prose fictions published in the twentieth century. This book demonstrates that Obeah, while understudied as a literary trope, has long been central to Caribbean literary production, and thus to the imagination of Caribbean culture(s). The author argues that Obeah has played, and continues to play, an important role in the articulation of West Indian literary and cultural identity and functions, in the texts under analysis, as a symbol of resistance to colonial ideology and a marker of the Afro- "folk" aesthetics that are now constitutive of West Indian literary and cultural production. Obeah's relationship to power has the potential to undermine the imagined coherence of creole cultural nationalism, which is evident in its presentation as an "unruly" narrative subject. Focusing on moments at which narratives slip and fray, and the dispossessed and undocumented can potentially be reimagined as subjects outside of established (dominant) categories of personhood, this book will be of interest to scholars of Caribbean literature, African and Caribbean religious studies, and more widely to scholars of the Black Atlantic, and postcolonial studies.

Spis treści

Introduction. Obeah as cultural signifier  1. "Too much row an' contention is in this yard:" Contemplating Cacophony in Minty Alley and Black Fauns  2. "Part of the narrative of modern art yet not central enough to be considered constitutive:" "Primitive Modern" in Banana Bottom and Wide Sargasso Sea  3. "It is the reader who constructs a story:" Obeah and Cultural Identity in the Mid-century West Indian Short Story  4. Obeahmen as Heroes, in "a zone of direct contact with developing reality"  5. "The peace of those she must touch and who must touch her:" Obeah as Healing in Erna Brodber’s Myal  Conclusion. Hearing Obeah

O autorze

Janelle Rodriques is an assistant professor in the English Department of Auburn University, Alabama.