African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
208 p., Examines the representation of violence in the work of contemporary writers and artists of the Hispanic Caribbean and its diaspora in the United States.
68 p., A collection of poems that explores the immigrant experience, detailing three worlds that forge a Caribbean-American voice. All three sections of the manuscript examine an identity that comes directly, almost solely, from her surroundings. In the tradition of Louise Bennett, the use of dialect aside, Section I attempts to comprehend a narrow Caribbean existence by scrutinizing a life that is tied to nature, family, and country. Section II sees the world slightly more broadly, but there the speaker is also acutely aware of her identity and the complexity in bridging the two worlds she now finds herself simultaneously occupying, one immediate, the other existing only through reflection.
"I went on vacation. I went to Jamaica thinking that I didn't want to be bothered. This young man ends up talking to me. I'm like `thank God he's young, I don't have to worry about him hitting on me.' But I was very surprised when he did. Despite the public bashfulness, she feels good about her own very new relationship. It's exciting, she's learning a lot and so is he. "It's just really refreshing to be with someone that doesn't know who you are. I don't really care if it lasts another month or two months or three months, it's all fine. Right now I feel so good and that's what I've written about. What's the point of predicting 20 years from now; after all how many relationships last that long. There's no point living in the future. F**k the future. How about now? After his attempt to get a share of her millions, she went a number of years without talking to him. "He was being a real dog. He was always crying broke and saying he didn't have any money. But I never bad - mouthed him in all these years, I just told [Solomon] `oh your father s under the weather' or `he's having hard times'. But he's pathetic, that's a better word for it."
[Rosa Guy]'s novels have explored the stifling consequences of poverty in settings as far away as the Caribbean, or as near as New York's Harlem for over 30 years. Once it is published, "The Sun, The Sea, A Touch of the Wind" will join an impressive body of literary material authored by Ms. Guy that includes "Bird At My Window," "A Measure of Time," "And Then She Heard of Bird Sing," "Edith Jackson," "Ruby," "Children of the Longing" and "Music of Summer." "I believe I write for everybody," says Guy., "Young people like my work because I don't talk down to them." This attitude helps explain the on-going popularity of her "Imamu Jones Mystery Series," a crossover favorite among both Black and White young readers. Many of them have come of age reading the suspenseful "Mystery Series" which focuses on the trials and tribulations of a Brooklyn teen struggling to define his manhood.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
239 p., Collection of profiles, interviews, essays and reviews on such well-known black writers and artists as Nalo Hopkinson, Dionne Brand, Austin Clarke, Lawrence Hill and Edwidge Danticat constitutes a frank conversation on the significance of race in contemporary Black Canadian and American literature.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
216 p., Discusses the literary representations of Afro-descendants in mid- to late-19th century Cuba and Brazil, and how these representations impacted the development of the national narratives and mapped out the future social terrain for blacks and whites in both countries.
Vega,Marta Moreno (Editor), Alba,Marinieves (Editor), and Modestin,Yvette (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2012
Published:
Houston, TX: Arte Público Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
233 p, Features eleven essays and four poems in which Latina women of African descent share their stories. The authors included are from all over Latin America and they write about the African diaspora and issues such as colonialism, oppression and disenfranchisement.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
318 p., In the late 20th century, Toni Cade Bambara, Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor, Ntozake Shange, and Toni Morrison reclaim and revise cultural nationalism. The author devotes a chapter to each author. Organizing, formally on the page and thematically in the story, heals the fractured single and communal bodies in Bambara's 1980 novel The Salt Eaters. On the islands of Tatem and Carriacou, Marshall's Avey Johnson dances a cultural nation dependent on diasporic connections in Praisesong for the Widow (1983). Naylor's Willow Springs proves fertile island ground in Mama Day (1988) for women's work to map nation, unearth an archive, and mother the next generation. Shange's recipe-laden novel Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982) and later cookbook if I can Cook/you Know God can (1998) posit cooking as theory and practice of community. In Morrison's Paradise (1997), women write and paint records of their individual and collective histories. This group of writers uses Africa, the Sea Islands, the Caribbean, the American South, the kitchen, the dance floor, and the garden as spaces that help define a distinctly African American collectivity practiced in highly local, concrete work for fashioning self and community. In these practices, cultural nationalism comes to rely not on the imagined and far away, but on the lived and local.
289 p., Argues that Caribbean writers challenge state notions of democracy and revolution by embracing ideological opacity (forms of political action that are not immediately legible) as a form of radicalism. Writers such as Merle Collins, Dionne Brand, and George Lamming narrated a new revolutionary consciousness using literary form and structure to express créolité (Caribbean cultural hybridity) and represent political resistance. This form of radicalism allows writers to explore political change in terms that are more subtle than discourses of outright revolution. The dissertation draws on the work of theorist Édouard Glissant who uses opacity as a critical term to articulate the right of Caribbean people to create their own forms of knowledge and to refuse Western epistemologies.
