209 p., Explores the representation of black masculinities in Claude McKay's novels, Home to Harlem (1928), Banjo (1929) and Banana Bottom (1933). I use the trope of marronage to theorize McKay's representations of black male subjectivities across a range of African diasporan spaces in the Caribbean, the USA and Europe, arguing that McKay's male characters negotiate these diasporan spaces with the complex consciousness and proclivities of maroons. Through the trope of marronage, the project will demonstrate how McKay's male characters use their maroon conditions to map, explore and define a black diasporan experience -- one, moreover, that is shaped by "creolizations"-- the various pushes and pulls of multiple forms of psychological and cultural crossover. The Introduction places marronage in its historical and cultural contexts and defines who the Maroons were and what particular characteristics managed their existence. The trope of marronage, as an organizing frame for McKay's texts, is intricately tied to the understanding of how "creolization," a term that is integrally associated with the Caribbean experience of hybridity, as both an experience and a concept, structures McKay's sensibility and representations.
220 p., Employs a black feminist diaspora literary lens to identify, define, trace, and speak to the African Diaspora as it functions in black women's diaspora fiction and informs our understanding of black women's diaspora identity. Considers three authors and novels by women of, in, and across the African Diaspora. The study centers on Sandra Jackson-Opoku's The River Where Blood Is Born as a primary site of analysis of diaspora formation and theorization, Dionne Brand's At the Full and Change of the Moon and Maryse Condé's Desirada as comparative textual and theoretical sites.
223 p., Argues that certain iconic poems have shaped the canon of American poetry. Not merely "canonical" in the usual sense, iconic poems enjoy a special cultural sanction and influence; they have become discourses themselves, generating our notions about American poetry. By "iconic" the author means extraordinarily famous works like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Paul Revere's Ride," Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," and Claude McKay's "If We Must Die," that do not merely reside in the national memory but that have determined each poet's reception and thus have shaped the history of American poetry.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
159 p, Discusses the importance of the role played by the Caribbean mother in her Latina daughters' negotiation of a hybrid identity as seen through the works of Julia Álvarez, Cristina García, and Esmeralda Santiago
391 p., Argues for a revisionist periodization of neo-slave literature as well as a reorientation away from a US-based literary history that has been dominated by the mode of realism and toward a more comparative view defined by the geography, history, and aesthetics of the Caribbean. The canon of slave narratives was first dominated by the assumption both of narrative as the major and sometimes only genre of slave writing and of a linear temporality emplotting the journey from slavery to an attenuated freedom. In contrast, most twentieth-century neo-slave narratives rethink the genre from the twin standpoints of temporality and narratology: how both the "neo" and "narrative" descriptors have produced an entrenched and unnecessarily restrictive view of this evolving archive.
221 p., Carmen (Mérimée 1845, Bizet 1875), the story about the (in)famous Gypsy dancer from Spain, is the second most adapted narrative in the history of world cinema, with over eighty global versions officially recognized to date. Despite the global reach of the Carmen phenomenon, many scholars claim that this tale has hardly been reworked in Spanish America and never in the Caribbean. Following Carmen from Spain to Spanish America, the author shows how the template of Carmen (a love story that reveals the racio-ethnic and gender stratification in Spain) has been artfully but unsuspectingly reappropriated and "creolized" in postcolonial Cuba in the controversial film María Antonia (1991) by Afro-Cuban filmmaker Sergio Giral, based on the landmark play María Antonia (1964) by Afro-Cuban playwright Eugenio Hernández Espinosa.
398 p., U.S. American literary and creative artists perform the work of developing a discursive response to two critical moments in Haitian history: the Revolution (1791-1804) and the U.S. Marine Occupation (1915 to 1934), inspiring imaginations and imaginary concepts. Revolutionary images of Toussaint Louverture proliferated beyond the boundaries of Haiti illuminating the complicity of colonial powers in maintaining notions of a particularized racial discourse. These productive literatures and art forms actively engage in creating the transnational ideal of diaspora as we understand it today.
351 p., Explores the racial and gender decolonization of New York and Curaçaoan women in a select group of novels, paintings and performance text by women from Curaçao and New York City. The Curaçaoan novels are: Aliefka Bijlsma's Gezandstraald [Sandblasted] (2007); Loeki Morales' Bloedlijn Overzee: Een Familiezoektocht [Overseas Bloodline: A Family Search] (2002); Myra Römer's Het Geheim van Gracia [The Secret of Gracia] (2008). The Curaçaoan painters are: Jean Girigori (1948), Minerva Lauffer (1957) and Viviana (1972). The New York novels and performance text are: Black Artemis' Picture Me Rollin' (2005), Angie Cruz's Soledad (2003) and Nelly Rosario's Song of the Water Saints (2002) and Josefina Báez's Dominicanish (2000). The ways the women characters, figures, images and voices align to subvert gendered delineations as well as the stifling cultural and colonial imprints on their bodies and their selves in Curaçao and New York are central to the decolonizing project explored here.
