An essay is presented on the relationship between black U.S. feminist literature celebrating author Zora Neale Hurston and U.S.-Caribbean cultural linkages, and the U.S. invasion of the Caribbean during the 1980s. According to the author, black feminists' attempts to reclaim the Caribbean through Hurston contributed to a neoliberal vision of the Caribbean which excluded Grenadian revolutionaries. Grenadian government debt and depictions of the Caribbean in popular culture are discussed.
Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
204 p., Examines cultural and literary material produced by Afro-Mexicans on the Costa Chica of Guerrero and Oaxaca, Mexico, to challenge the selective and Euro-centric view of Mexican identity in the discourse about racial and ethnic homogeneity and the existence of black people in the country, as well as assumptions and stereotypes about gender and sexuality.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
226 p., 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.
Dionne Brand's memoir, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, touches on the author's childhood in Trinidad and adulthood in Canada but is equally concerned with understanding and intervening in the larger histories among which Brand situates her identity. Her sources are rich and varied, and they can be broken down into three general types: the historical archives written during the 'age of exploration' and the slave trade; the contemporary archives of newspapers and journals; and the creative archive of postcolonial writers, or the neo-archive.
Lalla,Barbara author (Author), D'Costa,Jean (Author), and Pollard,Velma (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2014
Published:
Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
277 p, Caribbean Literary Discourse opens the challenging world of language choices and literary experiments characteristic of the multicultural and multilingual Caribbean. In these societies, the language of the master-- English in Jamaica and Barbados--overlies the Creole languages of the majority. As literary critics and as creative writers, Barbara Lalla, Jean D'Costa, and Velma Pollard engage historical, linguistic, and literary perspectives to investigate the literature bred by this complex history. They trace the rise of local languages and literatures within the English speaking Caribbean, especially as reflected in the language choices of creative writers.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
223 p., Investigates the exilic literature of Caribbean-born and Caribbean-descent writers who, from their new location in Northern America, question their cultural roots and search for a creative autonomy.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
156 P., Focusing on the immigration of West Indians to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, these seven one-act radio plays vividly capture the loneliness and isolation that can be felt in one of the world's largest cities. With characteristic humor and poignancy, these stories touch on the dreams and disappointments of both the young and old as they face racial and class differences in a sprawling, urban London.
"Although Annie John is commonly categorized as primarily Caribbean (a precursor to Kincaid’s “American” sequel, Lucy [1990]), my proposed comparison elucidates the Western and transnational leanings of this foundational “Caribbean” work and the ways in which it implicitly expands on Morrison’s representations of female autonomy and visual culture." --The Author
