The literature of Cuba, argues Eduardo Gonzalez in this new book, takes on quite different features depending on whether one is looking at it from -the inside- or from -the outside, - a view that in turn is shaped by official political culture and the authors it sanctions or by those authors and artists who exist outside state policies and cultural politics. Gonzalez approaches this issue by way of two twentieth-century writers who are central to the canon of gay homoerotic expression and sensibility in Cuban culture: Jose Lezama Lima (1910-1976) and Reinaldo Arenas (1943-1990). Drawing on...

The Purloined Islands offers the first book-length exploration of literary and cultural exchanges between the United States and the Caribbean during the roughly eighty-year period of their greatest interaction, from the close of the Spanish-American War to the Cuban Revolution. The interconnected histories of colonization, migration, slavery, and political struggle thrust writers from both regions into a vibrant literary conversation across national borders. Jeff Karem charts this dialogue and its patterns of influence through an analysis of key literary and cultural sources in...

Exploring the prevalence of madness in Caribbean texts written in English in the mid-twentieth century, Kelly Baker Josephs focuses on celebrated writers such as Jean Rhys, V. S. Naipaul, and Derek Walcott as well as on understudied writers such as Sylvia Wynter and Erna Brodber. Because mad figures appear frequently in Caribbean literature from French, Spanish, and English traditions--in roles ranging from bit parts to first-person narrators--the author regards madness as a part of the West Indian literary aesthetic. The relatively condensed decolonization of the anglophone islands during...

Pathologies of Paradise presents the rich complexity of anglophone Caribbean literature from pluralistic perspectives that contest the reduction of the region to Edenic or infernal stereotypes. But rather than reiterate the familiar critiques of these stereotypes, Supriya Nair draws on the trope of the detour to plumb the depths of anti-paradise discourse, showing how the Caribbean has survived its history of colonization and slavery. In her reading of authors such as Jamaica Kincaid, Michelle Cliff, V. S. Naipaul, Zadie Smith, Junot Diaz, and Pauline Melville, among others, she...

Studies of sexuality in Caribbean culture are on the rise, focusing mainly on homosexuality and homophobia or on regional manifestations of normative and nonnormative sexualities. The Cross-Dressed Caribbean extends this exploration by using the trope of transvestism not only to analyze texts and contexts from anglophone, francophone, Spanish, Dutch, and diasporic Caribbean literature and film but also to highlight reinventions of sexuality and resistance to different forms of exploitation and oppression.

Contributors:

Roberto del Valle Alcala, University of Alcala...

The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) reshaped the debates about slavery and freedom throughout the Atlantic world, accelerated the abolitionist movement, precipitated rebellions in neighboring territories, and intensified both repression and antislavery sentiment. The story of the birth of the world's first independent black republic has since held an iconic fascination for a diverse array of writers, artists, and intellectuals throughout the Atlantic diaspora. Examining twentieth-century responses to the Haitian Revolution, Philip Kaisary offers a profound new reading of the representation...

In Bodies and Bones, Tanya Shields argues that a repeated engagement with the Caribbean's iconic and historic touchstones offers a new sense of (inter)national belonging that brings an alternative and dynamic vision to the gendered legacy of brutality against black bodies, flesh, and bone. Using a distinctive methodology she calls -feminist rehearsal- to chart the Caribbean's multiple and contradictory accounts of historical events, the author highlights the gendered and emergent connections between art, history, and belonging.

By drawing on a significant range of...

Focusing on slave narratives from the Atlantic world of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this interdisciplinary collection of essays suggests the importance--even the necessity--of looking beyond the iconic and ubiquitous works of Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs. In granting sustained critical attention to writers such as Briton Hammon, Omar Ibn Said, Juan Francisco Manzano, Nat Turner, and Venture Smith, among others, this book makes a crucial contribution not only to scholarship on the slave narrative but also to our understanding of early African...

In the history of the early twentieth-century Americas, visions of hemispheric unity flourished, and the notion of a transnational American identity was embraced by artists, intellectuals, and government institutions. In The Pan American Imagination, Stephen Park explores the work of several Pan American modernists who challenged the body of knowledge being produced about Latin America, crossing the disciplinary boundaries of academia as well as the formal boundaries of artistic expression--from literary texts and travel writing to photography, painting, and dance. Park invests in...

While postcolonial discourse in the Caribbean has drawn attention to colonialism's impact on space and spatial hierarchy, Stanka Radovic asks both how ordinary people as -users- of space have been excluded from active and autonomous participation in shaping their daily spatial reality and how they challenge this exclusion. In a comparative interdisciplinary reading of anglophone and francophone Caribbean literature and contemporary spatial theory, she focuses on the house as a literary figure and the ways that fiction and acts of storytelling resist the oppressive hierarchies of colonial...