Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Caribbean & Latin American

A wide-ranging work that explores two centuries of Caribbean literature from a comparative perspective. While haunted by the need to establish cultural difference and authenticity, Caribbean thought is inherently modernist in its recognition of the interplay between cultures, brought about by centuries of contact, domination, and consent.

Renk demonstrates how contemporary Anglophone Caribbean women's writing radically subverts the myth of the family as it is constructed in 19th century British and colonial texts. These women writers reconfigure Caribbean identity, family, and nation according to cross-cultural, trans-national and transtemporal paradigms.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND NATIONAL IDENTITY in the Americas puts texts from English and French Canada, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Brazil, Bolivia, and the United States into a hemispheric dialogue on national and ethnic identity. Drawing on such materials as journals, personal essays, autobiography, and the testimonio, this ambitious book is as comprehensive in its treatment of autobiographical writing as in its geographical coverage.

Departing from Benedict Anderson's hopeful premise that the -imagined community- is fundamentally inclusive, Steven V. Hunsaker maintains that national identity is...

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND NATIONAL IDENTITY in the Americas puts texts from English and French Canada, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Brazil, Bolivia, and the United States into a hemispheric dialogue on national and ethnic identity. Drawing on such materials as journals, personal essays, autobiography, and the testimonio, this ambitious book is as comprehensive in its treatment of autobiographical writing as in its geographical coverage.

Departing from Benedict Anderson's hopeful premise that the -imagined community- is fundamentally inclusive, Steven V. Hunsaker maintains that national identity is...

Before the Caribbean-inflected spoken-word poetry of the 1990s, epitomized by poetry slams at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in Manhattan, there was reggae. In the past thirty years, most Caribbean poetry written in English has come to the shores of the United States on waves of music, in the lyrics of Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Burning Spear. Kwame Dawes, himself a musician and poet, is not surprised by this phenomenon. The region's political and cultural awakening of the 1970s was fueled by a growing African consciousness, often in competition with the multiple traditions--European, Indian,...

Before the Caribbean-inflected spoken-word poetry of the 1990s, epitomized by poetry slams at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in Manhattan, there was reggae. In the past thirty years, most Caribbean poetry written in English has come to the shores of the United States on waves of music, in the lyrics of Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Burning Spear. Kwame Dawes, himself a musician and poet, is not surprised by this phenomenon. The region's political and cultural awakening of the 1970s was fueled by a growing African consciousness, often in competition with the multiple traditions--European, Indian,...

-It is hard to ignore the hotels. They rise like mammoths of iron and concrete above the homes, the office buildings, the trees of New Providence, island of my birth.- So begins Ian Strachan's history of the idea of the Caribbean as paradise. The modern image of the Bahamas as a carefree tourist oasis has its origins in much earlier cultural mythology: the first colonizers conceptualized the Caribbean as a place beyond time, beyond the real, and the region produced profit seemingly without work. Yet an Edenic experience was made possible only by the existence of the plantation--the very...

In Voicing Memory Nick Nesbitt argues that the aesthetic practices of twentieth-century French Caribbean writers reconstruct a historical awareness that had been lost amid the repressive violence of slavery, the plantation system, and colonial exploitation. Drawing on the work of Aime Cesaire, Edouard Glissant, Daniel Maximin, Maryse Conde, and Edwidge Danticat, he shows how these writers use the critical force of the aesthetic imagination to transform the parameters of Antillean experience.

The author takes the aesthetic practices of the black Atlantic--Antillean poetry, literature,...

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...

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...

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.-...

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.-...

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...

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...

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...

In Orphan Narratives, Valerie Loichot investigates the fiction and poetry of four writers who emerged from the postslavery plantation world of the Americas--William Faulkner (USA), Edouard Glissant (Martinique), Toni Morrison (USA), and Saint-John Perse (Guadeloupe)--to show how these descendants from slaves and from slaveholders wrote both in relation and in resistance to the violence of plantation slavery. She uses the term -orphan narrative- to capture the ways in which this violence severed the child, the text, and history from a traceable origin. Black or white, male or...

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...