History has produced a myriad of cultural overlays in the Caribbean and the adjacent region of South America, a legacy of centuries of intrusion by rival European empires and the consequent sporadic exchange between the European invaders of the various local territories and peoples they claimed to control. The result is a mixture of peoples, languages, religions, and all other aspects of human culture, reflected in enrichment of the respective European and African languages involved, as well as in creation of new hybrid languages. It is in this context that one can speak of "Caribbean" literature and art from Suriname and the Netherlands.
Austin: University of Texas Press, Austin, Institute of Latin American Studies
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
330 p, Based on a decade the author spent among the African-Caribbean "Creole" people on Nicaragua's southern Caribbean coast, Disparate Diasporas is a study of identity formation and politics in that community. Shows how a particular Black community can evolve distinct types of diasporic consciousness, and, depending on the historical moment, how different types of memories, consciousness, and politics come to predominate. Focusing on the period of the 1970s and 1980s, explains the inability of the Sandinistas to come to terms with the racial and cultural challenge to the Nicaraguan nation posed by the Creole community.
