African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
228 p, Contents: Canonized hybridities, resistant hybridities: Chutney Soca, carnival, and the politics of nationalism / Shalini Puri -- Soca and social formations: avoiding the romance of culture in Trinidad / Stefano Harney -- Trinidad romance: the invention of Jamaican carnival / Belinda J. Edmondson -- All that is black melts into air: negritud and nation in Puerto Rico / Catherine Den Tandt -- Positive vibration? Capitalist textual hegemony and Bob Marley / Mike Alleyne --"Titid ad pèp la se marasa": Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the new national romance in Haiti / Kevin Meehan -- Shadowboxing in the Mangrove: the politics of identity in postcolonial Martinique / Richard Price and Sally Price -- Beautiful Indians, troublesome negroes, and nice white men: Caribbean romances and the invention of Trinidad / Faith Smith -- Homing instincts: immigrant nostalgia and gender politics in Brown girl, brownstones / Supriya Nair -- Derek Walcott: liminal spaces/substantive histories / Tejumola Olaniyan
Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State Popular Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
365 p, "This book of essays - carefully written by twenty-four authorities on their subjects - provides a deep understanding of and appreciation for the coherence, primacy and, importance of the search for identity in the divergent areas of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Continent." (Barnes & Noble);
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
350 p., In this second edition of "The Repeating Island," Antonio Benitez-Rojo, a master of the historical novel, short story, and critical essay, continues to confront the legacy and myths of colonialism. This co-winner of the 1993 MLA Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize has been expanded to include three entirely new chapters that add a Lacanian perspective and a view of the carnivalesque to an already brilliant interpretive study of Caribbean culture. As he did in the first edition, Benitez-Rojo redefines the Caribbean by drawing on history, economics, sociology, cultural anthropology, psychoanalysis, literary theory, and nonlinear mathematics. His point of departure is chaos theory, which holds that order and disorder are not the antithesis of each other in nature but function as mutually generative phenomena. Benitez-Rojo argues that within the apparent disorder of the Caribbean--the area's discontinuous landmasses, its different colonial histories, ethnic groups, languages, traditions, and politics--there emerges an "island" of paradoxes that repeats itself and gives shape to an unexpected and complex sociocultural archipelago. Benitez-Rojo illustrates this unique form of identity with powerful readings of texts by Las Casas, Guillen, Carpentier, Garcia Marquez, Walcott, Harris, Buitrago, and Rodriguez Julia.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
251 p, Taylor uses the works of Frantz Fanon to examine the expressive culture of the Afro-Caribbean. Focuses on the narrative of the colonized people and makes a distinction between mythic narrative and the narrative of liberation. (JSTOR)
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
192 p, Book Description Using a multifaceted approach, this study explores questions of identity in novels by Dany Bbel-Gisler, Maryse Cond, and Emile Ollivier. As signs, narrators and characters are connected to each other dialogically and produce multilayered narratives that problematize the concept of a cohesive and static collective identity. In revealing identity to be a constantly fluctuating semiotic process, the study shows that Caribbean Francophone narrative is creating a new literary space where the dialogic underpinnings of the self are called upon to express the difficulties, the heterogeneity, and the opacity of meaning associated with any definition of a cultural or national identity. (Amazon);
