Bøger i New World Studies serien

The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) was the first antislavery and anticolonial uprising led by New World Africans to result in the creation of an independent and slavery-free nation state. This anthology brings together for the first time a transnational and multilingual selection of literature about the revolution.

The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) was the first antislavery and anticolonial uprising led by New World Africans to result in the creation of an independent and slavery-free nation state. This anthology brings together for the first time a transnational and multilingual selection of literature about the revolution.

This work presents links between the myth of Caribbean Paradise and colonial ideologies and economics. It considers the cultural, economic and social effects of tourism's contemporary Caribbean and explores the way post colonial writers have responded to the paradise-plantation dichotomy.

Examining three turning points that shaped exceptionalism in both Americas - the late colonial and early Republican period, expansion into the frontier, and the Cold War - John Ochoa pursues literary travellers across landscapes and centuries.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, the idea of independence inspired radical changes across the French-speaking world. Julie-Francoise Tolliver examines the links that writers from Quebec, the Caribbean, and Africa imagined to unite that world, illuminating the tropes they used to articulate solidarities across the race and class differences.

Examines the post-Revolutionary creative endeavors of Afro-Cuban women. Taking on the question of how African diaspora cultures practice remembrance, this book reveals the ways in which these artists restage the confrontations between modernity and tradition. It shows how their accomplishments were silenced in official Cuban history and culture.

Drawing on narratives from Martinique by Aime Cesaire, Edouard Glissant, Ina Csaire, and Patrick Chamoiseau, among others, Christina Kullberg shows how these writers turn to ethnography-even as they critique it-as an exploration and expression of the self. They acknowledge its tradition as a colonial discourse and a study of others, but they also argue for ethnography's advantage in connecting subjectivity to the outside world. Further, they find that ethnography offers the possibility of capturing within the hybrid culture of the Caribbean an emergent self that nonetheless remains attached to its collective history and environment. Rather than claiming to be able to represent the culture they also feel alienated from, these writers explore the relationships between themselves, the community, and the environment. Although Kullberg's focus is on Martinique, her work opens up possibilities for intertextual readings and comparative studies of writers from every linguistic region in the Caribbean-not only francophone but also Hispanic and anglophone. In addition, her interdisciplinary approach extends the reach of her work beyond postcolonial and literary studies to anthropology and ecocriticism.

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 the 1960s and 1970s, she argues, makes literature written in English during this time especially rich for an examination of the function of madness in literary critiques of colonialism and in the Caribbean project of nation-making. In drawing connections between madness and literature, gender, and religion, this book speaks not only to the field of Caribbean studies but also to colonial and postcolonial literature in general. The volume closes with a study of twenty-first-century literature of the Caribbean diaspora, demonstrating that Caribbean writers still turn to representations of madness to depict their changing worlds.

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 Daz, and Pauline Melville, among others, she examines dominant symbols and events that shape the literature and history of postslavery and postcolonial societies: the garden and empire, individual and national trauma, murder and massacre, contagion and healing, grotesque humor and the carnivalesque. In ranging across multiple contexts, generations, and genres, the book maps a syncretic and flexible approach to Caribbean literature that demonstrates the supple literary cartographies of New World identities.

Exhibiting Slavery examines the ways in which Caribbean postmodern historical novels about slavery written in Spanish, English, and French function as virtual museums, simultaneously showcasing and curating a collection of "e;primary documents"e; within their pages. As Vivian Nun Halloran attests, these novels highlight narrative "e;objects"e; extraneous to their plot-such as excerpts from the work of earlier writers, allusions to specific works of art, the uniforms of maroon armies assembled in preparation of a military offensive, and accounts of slavery's negative impact on the traditional family unit in Africa or the United States. In doing so, they demand that their readers go beyond the pages of the books to sort out fact from fiction and consider what relationship these featured "e;objects"e; have to slavery and to contemporary life. The self-referential function of these texts produces a "e;museum effect"e; that simultaneously teaches and entertains their readers, prompting them to continue their own research beyond and outside the text.

Taking up the challenge of redefining modernity from a Caribbean perspective instead of assuming that the North Atlantic view of modernity is universal, Maria Cristina Fumagalli shows how the Caribbean's contributions to the modern world not only provide a more accurate account of the past but also have the potential to change the way in which we imagine the future. Fumagalli uses the myth of Medusa's gaze turning people into stone to describe the way North Atlantic modernity freezes its "e;others"e; into a state of perpetual backwardness that produces an ethnocentric narrative based on homogenization, vilification, and disempowerment that actively ignores what fails to conform to the story it wants to tell about itself. In analyzing narratives of modernity that originate in the Caribbean, the author explores the region's refusal to succumb to Medusa's spell and highlights its strategies to outstare the Gorgon.Reflecting a diversity of texts, genres, and media, the chapters focus on sixteenth-century engravings and paintings from the Netherlands and Italy, a scientific romance produced at the turn of the twentieth century by the king of the Caribbean island Redonda, contemporary collections of poetry from the anglophone Caribbean, a historical novel by the Guadeloupean writer Maryse Cond a Latin epic, a Homeric hymn, ancient Egyptian rites, fairy tales, romances from England and Jamaica, a long narrative poem by the Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott, and paintings by artists from Europe and the Americas spanning the seventeenth century to the present. Caribbean Perspectives on Modernity offers an original and creative contribution to what it means to be modern.

Argues that the Haitian Revolution nonetheless had an enduring cultural and political impact, particularly on peoples and communities that have been marginalized in the historical record and absent from the discourses of Western historiography. This book interrogates the literary, historical, and political discourses that the Revolution produced.

Investigates the fiction and poetry of four writers who emerged from the postslavery plantation world of the Americas - William Faulkner, Edouard Glissant, Toni Morrison, and Saint-John Perse - to show how these descendants from slaves and from slaveholders wrote both in relation and in resistance to the violence of plantation slavery.

The 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 book treats the poetry of this movement, and questions the assumption that the poetry did manage to symbolize racial reconciliation and unification.

Examines the novels of four Caribbean women writers who have radically reformulated the meanings of the national, geographical, sexual, and racial concepts through which postcolonial studies represents difference. This book represents a phase in postcolonial studies that calls for a fundamental rethinking of the terminology and assumptions.

Arguing that the aesthetic practices of 20th-century French Caribbean writers reconstruct an historical awareness once lost amid colonial exploitation, Nesbitt shows how these writers use the critical force of the aesthetic imagination to transform the parameters of the Antillean experience.

Staging a dialogue between Maryse Conde's novels and the field of postcolonial studies, this work argues that Conde enacts a strategy of ""critical incorporations"" in her fiction, imitating and transforming many of the prevailing narratives of postcolonial theory so as to explore their theoretical and conceptual limits.

With inclusion of Brazil in a comparative study of literary texts and their engagement with Western modernity, this study shows how the ""peripheral"" replications of modernity in contemporary Caribbean and Latin American texts differ crucially from their European models, and addresses issues that many post colonial theorists have struggled with.

This study of John Jacob Thomas (1841-1889) looks at the work of this leading member of the newly emergent intelligentsia in 19th century Trinidad. It puts his texts in context with other narratives by local and international Pan-Africanists and Victorian intellectuals.

The 1992 quincentennial of the encounter between the Old and New World resulted in a polarisation of hardened ideological positions on different ideas of America. This text demonstrates that both sides are interested in defending an idea of ""Americanness"".

In Market Aesthetics, Elena Machado Saez explores the popularity of Caribbean diasporic writing within an interdisciplinary, comparative, and pan-ethnic framework. She contests established readings of authors such as Junot Daz, Julia Alvarez, Edwidge Danticat, and Robert Antoni while showcasing the work of emerging writers such as David Chariandy, Marlon James, and Monique Roffey. By reading these writers as part of a transnational literary trend rather than within isolated national ethnic traditions, the author is able to show how this fiction adopts market aesthetics to engage the mixed blessings of multiculturalism and globalization via the themes of gender and sexuality.New World StudiesModern Language Initiative

In 1979, the Marxist-Leninist New Jewel Movement under Maurice Bishop overthrew the government of the Caribbean island country of Grenada, establishing the People's Revolutionary Government. Laurie Lambert offers the first comprehensive study of how gender and sexuality produced different narratives of the Grenada Revolution.

Examines Langston Hughes's associations with a number of black writers from the Caribbean and Africa, exploring the implications of recognising these multiple facets of the African American literary icon and of taking a truly transnational approach to his life, work, and influence.

Considers how certain literary texts confront the dominant and, at times, exaggerated anti-Haitian Dominican ideology. Megan Jeanette Myers examines the antagonistic portrayal of the two nations, endeavouring to reposition Haiti on the literary map of the Dominican Republic and beyond.

Looks at how fiction from the American tropics written since 1950 engages with the promise of El Dorado in the age of the Anthropocene. Just as the golden kingdom was never found, natural resource extraction has not produced wealth and happiness for the peoples of the tropics.

As modern Caribbean politics and literature emerged in the first half of the twentieth century, Haiti, as the region's first independent state, stood as a source of inspiration for imagining decolonization and rooting regional identity in Africanness. Yet at precisely the same moment that anticolonialism was spreading throughout the Caribbean, Haiti itself was occupied by U.S. marines, a fact that regional political and cultural histories too often overlook. In American Imperialism's Undead, Raphael Dalleo examines how Caribbean literature and activism emerged in the shadow of the U.S. military occupation of Haiti (1915-34) and how that presence influenced the development of anticolonialism throughout the region. The occupation was a generative event for Caribbean activists such as C. L. R. James, George Padmore, and Marcus and Amy Jacques Garvey as well as for writers such as Claude McKay, Eric Walrond, and Alejo Carpentier. Dalleo provides new ways of understanding these luminaries, while also showing how other important figures such as Aim Csaire, Arturo Schomburg, Claudia Jones, Frantz Fanon, Amy Ashwood Garvey, H. G. De Lisser, Luis Pals Matos, George Lamming, and Jean Rhys can be contextualized in terms of the occupation. By examining Caribbean responses to Haiti's occupation, Dalleo underscores U.S. imperialism as a crucial if unspoken influence on anticolonial discourses and decolonization in the region. Without acknowledging the significance of the occupation of Haiti, our understanding of Atlantic history cannot be complete.

Focusing on the literary representation of performance practices in anglophone, francophone, and hispanophone Caribbean literature, Jeannine Murray-Romn shows how a shared regional aesthetic emerges from the descriptions of music, dance, and oral storytelling events. Because the historical circumstances that led to the development of performance traditions supersede the geopolitical and linguistic divisions of colonialism, the literary uses of these traditions resonate across the linguistic boundaries of the region. The author thus identifies the aesthetic that emerges from the act of writing about live arts and moving bodies as a practice that is grounded in the historically, geographically, and culturally specific features of the Caribbean itself. Working with twentieth- and twenty-first-century sources ranging from theatrical works and novels to blogs, Murray-Romn examines the ways in which writers such as Jacques Stephen Alexis, Zo Valds, Rosario Ferr, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Marlon James experiment with textually compensating for the loss of the corporeality of live relationship in performance traditions. Through their exploration of the interaction of literature and performance, she argues, Caribbean writers themselves offer a mode of bridging the disjunction between cultural and philosophical approaches within Caribbean studies.

Arguing that race has been the specter that has haunted many of the discussions about Latin American regional and national cultures today, Anke Birkenmaier shows how theories of race and culture in Latin America evolved dramatically in the period between the two world wars. In response to the rise of scientific racism in Europe and the American hemisphere in the early twentieth century, anthropologists joined numerous writers and artists in founding institutions, journals, and museums that actively pushed for an antiracist science of culture, questioning pseudoscientific theories of race and moving toward more broadly conceived notions of ethnicity and culture.Birkenmaier surveys the work of key figures such as Cuban historian and anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, Haitian scholar and novelist Jacques Roumain, French anthropologist and museum director Paul Rivet, and Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, focusing on the transnational networks of scholars in France, Spain, and the United States to which they were connected. Reviewing their essays, scientific publications, dictionaries, novels, poetry, and visual arts, the author traces the cultural study of Latin America back to these interdisciplinary discussions about the meaning of race and culture in Latin America, discussions that continue to provoke us today.