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.
Tillis explores the socio-political poetics of Blas Jiménez in the context of the negritude aesthetic in the Spanish-speaking world. The selected poems of Jiménez attest to the continuation of negritude ideology of Afrocentric thematic poetry in the Carribean and showed that the poet's social criticism is linked to an ideology of white supremacy resulting from colonialism and slavery.;
"Any attempt to trace the many resonances that historically have been attached to the creole figure in Caribbean literature and culture will be inflected by the long and pervading presence of colonialism in the region and its attendant corollary of hierarchical social separation and difference based on perceptions of race. Indeed, the ambivalent desire and subjective misrecognition that lay at the heart of historical writing about colonialism and racism have tended to frame the issues of monstrosity and exclusion that produced the creole as part and parcel of wider colonial discourses. Thus, the shifting and increasingly unstable inscription of the creole figure echoes, in a certain sense, certain critical ambiguities of politics and temporality that color the colonial encounter and its aftermath. Specifically, in the contemporary English- and French-speaking Caribbean, the multiplicity, displacement, and creative instability that undergird creole-driven theories of postcolonial performance have supplanted this category's suspect beginnings as colonialism's model for the fearfully unnameable and unplaceable hybrid monstrosity, and now increasingly shape the substance of much of the artistic and creative work emerging from the region." --The Author
Discusses the emergence of an Afro-Cuban aesthetic. Notes the major contributions of Cuban writers Félix Tanco, Antonio Zambrana, Nicolás Guillén, Miguel Barnet, and others to the literary movement. Remarks that these authors give us a view of Latin American history from "below the deck of a slave ship" - a view that is very different from the traditional one.;
This article, based on the 2003 Raphael Samuel Memorial Lecture, begins with the issue of memory, but also asks: what are the limitations of studying memory? I suggest that smuggled in to current memory studies are a range of issues which are, in fact, analytically distinct from the problem of memory itself: historical temporality, consciousness of time, and consciousness of history. Underlying all these distinct problems is the overarching question of how we can conceive of ‘the past’ existing in ‘the present’. I explore this in relation to two Caribbean thinkers. I look first at C. L. R. James’s monumental and wonderful history book, The Black Jacobins, which works closely within the Hegelian idea of ‘world-history’. An alternative conceptualization can be found in George Lamming’s more phenomenological approach, manifest most in his novel, In The Castle of My Skin. These two polarities – history on the world-stage, and history in subjective mode – continue to underwrite our understanding of the-past-in-the-present. I close by turning to the work of Raphael Samuel, and suggest that his celebrated volumes, Theatres of Memory, are more concerned with the-past-in-the-present than they are with memory itself. (Author)
