The work of Haitian author Jacques Stephen Alexis is replete with examples of characters caught in the dilemmas of exile. The author focuses on Alexis's characters who go through a "true" expatriation, a movement out of Haiti and into another country, and considers how the various experiences of expatriation are represented, as well as how the presence of the Haitian exiles impacts the host country. Taking examples from Alexis's novel Compère Général Soleil, Monro argues that the Haitian exiles unwittingly, though inevitably, disrupt the illusion of oneness of national identity and culture and become a subversive force, creolizing culture in the place of exile, the Dominican Republic. This cultural creolization in turn is a threat to the monocultural, totalizing political discourses of the host country, it is argued.;
All literary categories and definitions are imperfect and are often the sunject of the debate and contestation: "West Indies and The Caribbean" are no exception. 'West Indies', the term used in this journal's previous bibliographies to describe the literature of the Caribbean region, accurately defines the literature of the Commonwealth Caribbean, which is Anglophone and which has historical and contemporary political, social and cultural link to Britain. At the same time, literary scholarsship from the region increasingly identifies itself as Caribbean, that is connected geographically, historically and culturally to the Francophone, Hispanic and Ducth-speaking Caribbean and to the Americas; The Caribbean complied and introduced by Suzanne Scafe London .....Debate and contestation: West Indies' and 'The Caribbean' are no exceptions.
Examines the impact of the U.S. media on gender relations in the Caribbean area. The U.S. media have created a cultural dependency whereby Caribbean people tend to reject their indigenous culture and favor the American culture. The author asserts that Caribbean men behave in a certain manner and contribute to social problems because they have been improperly socialized by the U.S. media. Moreover, the portrayal of sports celebrities has created a feeling of victimhood among blacks.
Some of the forms that collective identities and nationalism have taken in the Caribbean are analyzed in this paper, which examines two historical figures, one from Jamaica and the other from Puerto Rico: Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) and Pedro Albizu Campos (1891-1965), respectively. Both were black, radical, and politically persecuted.
"In this article, I revisit debates about so-called matrifocal societies as a way to critique the centrality of heteronormative marriage and family in anthropology. Using gender as a tool of analysis, I argue that anthropologists have relied on the trope of the dominant heterosexual man, what I call the "Patriarchal Man," to create and sustain concepts of "marriage" and "family." By examining the discourse on matrifocality in studies of Afro-Caribbean and Minangkabau households, I show how it is the "missing man," the dominant heterosexual man, who is the key to the construction and perpetuation of the matrifocal concept and, by extension, the motor of marriage, family, and kinship. This fixity on the dominant heterosexual man has led anthropologists to misrecognize other forms of relatedness as less than or weaker than heteronormative marriage. I suggest that, rather than positing a foundational model for human sociality, intimacy, or relatedness, researchers look for webs of meaningful relationships in their historical and social specificity." (author)
The way in which the Caribbean person is given emblematic status as the metropolitan migrant is made clear in James Clifford's declaration that ‘We are all Caribbeans now...in our urban archipelagos'. Examines the impact on the critical reception of Caribbean writings that has been made as a result of the fact that metropolitan diasporas are now the privileged places in which to be properly ‘postcolonial’.
