In Reclaiming Difference, Carine Mardorossian examines the novels of four women writers--Jean Rhys (Dominica/UK), Maryse Conde (Guadeloupe/USA), Edwidge Danticat (Haiti/USA), and Julia Alvarez (Dominican Republic/USA)--showing how their writing has radically reformulated the meanings of the national, geographical, sexual, and racial concepts through which postcolonial studies has long been configuring difference. Coming from the anglophone, francophone, and hispanophone Caribbean, these writers all stage and identify with transcultural experiences that undermine the usual...

Perhaps there is no other region in the world that has been more radically altered in terms of human and botanic migration, transplantation, and settlement than the Caribbean. Theorists such as Edouard Glissant argue that the dialectic between Caribbean -nature- and -culture, - engendered by this unique and troubled history, has not heretofore been brought into productive relation. Caribbean Literature and the Environment redresses this omission by gathering together eighteen essays that consider the relationship between human and natural history. The result is the first volume to...

Unique in its inclusion of Brazil in a comparative study of literary texts and their engagement with Western modernity, Cannibal Modernities is the first postcolonial study to show how the -peripheral- replications of modernity in contemporary Caribbean and Latin American texts differ crucially from their European models.

Luis Madureira addresses issues that so many postcolonial theorists have struggled with, particularly the complx interactions and antagonisms between indigenous cultures and the imperial cultures imposed upon them and the effort to -provincialize the West.-...

In Guarding Cultural Memory, Flora Gonzalez Mandri examines the vibrant and uniquely illuminating post-Revolutionary creative endeavors of Afro-Cuban women. Taking on the question of how African diaspora cultures practice remembrance, she reveals the ways in which these artists restage the confrontations between modernity and tradition.

Gonzalez Mandri considers the work of the poet and cultural critic Nancy Morejon, the poet Excilia Saldana, the filmmaker Gloria Rolando, and the artists Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons and Belkis Ayon. In their cultural representations these women...

Arising in the heyday of the music recently made famous by the Buena Vista Social Club, afrocubanismo was an artistic and intellectual movement in Cuba in the 1920s and 1930s that tried to convey a national and racial identity. Through poetry, this movement was the first serious attempt on the part of mostly white Cuban intellectuals to produce a national literature that incorporated elements from the Afro-Cuban traditions of lower-class urban blacks. One of its main objectives was to project an image of Cuban identity as a harmonious process of fusion between black and white people and...

Just Below South is the first book to examine the U.S. South and the Caribbean as a -regional interculture- shaped by performance--as a space defined not so much by a shared set of geographical boundaries or by a single, common culture as by the weave of performances and identities moving across and throughout it. By offering fresh ways for thinking about region, language, and performance, the volume helps to reimagine the possibilities for American Studies. It advances beyond current analyses of historical or literary commonalities between the South and the Caribbean to explore startling...

Diaspora studies have tended to privilege urban landscapes over rural ones, wanting to avoid the racial homogeneity, conservatism, and xenophobia usually associated with the latter. In Second Arrivals: Landscape and Belonging in Contemporary Writing of the Americas, Sarah Phillips Casteel examines the work of writers such as Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipaul, Jamaica Kincaid, Philip Roth, and Joy Kogawa, among others, to show how it expresses the appeal that rural and wilderness spaces can hold for the diasporic imagination.

Casteel proposes an alternative to postmodern celebrations of...

According to Martinican theorist Edouard Glissant, the twentieth century has been dominated in the Caribbean by a passion for the remembrance of colonial history. But while Glissant identifies this passion for memory in the thematizing of nature in Caribbean modernist life, scholar Guillermina De Ferrari claims it is the vulnerability of the human body that has become the trope to which Caribbean postmodernist authors largely appeal in their efforts to revise the discourse that has shaped postcolonial societies. In Vulnerable States: Bodies of Memory in Contemporary Caribbean...

Border Fictions offers the first comparative analysis of multiethnic and transnational cultural representations about the United States' borders with Mexico and Canada. Blending textual analysis with theories of globalization and empire, Claudia Sadowski-Smith forges a new model of inter-American studies.

Border Fictions places into dialogue a variety of hemispheric perspectives from Chicana/o, Asian American, American Indian, Latin American, and Canadian studies. Each chapter examines fiction that ranges widely, from celebrated authors such as Carlos Fuentes, Leslie Marmon Silko,...

On January 1, 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared the independence of Haiti, thus bringing to an end the only successful slave revolution in history and transforming the colony of Saint-Domingue into the second independent state in the Western Hemisphere. The historical significance of the Haitian Revolution has been addressed by numerous scholars, but the importance of the Revolution as a cultural and political phenomenon has only begun to be explored. Although the path-breaking work of Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Sibylle Fischer has illustrated the profound silences surrounding the...