African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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309 p., Offers a corrective to some of America's institutionalized invisibilities by delving into the submerged networks of ritual performance, writing, intercultural history, and migration that have linked the coastal U.S. South with the Caribbean and the wider Atlantic world. Draws from Haitian Vodou and New Orleanian Cuban and South Floridian Santería,and Afro-Baptist (Caribbean, Geechee, and Bahamian) models of encounters with otherness.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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182 p., About an ugly divorce in which the main characters bear a striking resemblance to Ms. Kincaid and to her former husband, Allen Shawn. Ms. Kincaid has denied that the book is strongly autobiographical. In this novel, a marriage is revealed in all its joys and agonies. A mother, a father, and their two children, living in a small village in New England move, in their own minds, between the present, the past, and the future, constrained by the world, the characters despairing in their domestic situations.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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104 p., She Sex could rightly be regarded as a trailblazing, transformative work, concerned with showcasing the innermost erotic stories of Caribbean Women.
Draws on two Caribbean texts, Anim-Addo's Imoinda: Or She Who will Lose Her Name and Philip's Zong!. Discusses how these two Caribbean texts counterwrite the history of the slave plantation by staging and embodying the work of an affective memory drawn from the history of the black subject as a history of being and community.
473 p., Demonstrates that the figure of the trickster is a key trope for the achievement of agency by the narrators of the three slave narratives Autobiografia de un esclavo, "Routes in North Africa by Abú Bekr es[dotbelow] s[dotbelow]iddik" [sic], and Biografia de un cimarrón. Also shows how both the realization of the trickster's role and the achievement of agency to which such a role is oriented are dependent on the use of the four Afro-Caribbean meta-tropes ndoki, nkisi, nganga, and simbi.
203 p., Examines the presence of slave vocality in Black Atlantic literature, placing the North American tradition of slave narrative against works from authors throughout the United States and the Caribbean. Challenges existing approaches to slave narrative by viewing the genre as one based on the fundamental impossibility of expressing black subjectivity under the political, ethical, and psychic conditions of slavery. The slave narrative thus ceases to represent an attempt by former slaves to access freedom and agency through writing, along with its promises of reason and autonomy, but rather signals (or sounds) a process of expression built not upon meaning, but upon signification. In other words, rather than crafting themselves into legible objects for the sake of narration and perception, slave narrators performed their roles as exchangeable units, both discursive and political, in ways that exposed the underlying lacunae of being a slave-narrator, a significative protocol that persists in contemporary black fiction throughout the Atlantic, even in areas in which the slave narrative did not historically emerge.
The article critiques several poems by African American poet of the Harlem Renaissance Langston Hughes, including "Ballad of Margie Polite," "Broadcast to the West Indies" and "Good Morning." Hughes' depiction of transnational solidarity between African Americans of Harlem, New York City, New York and blacks of the West Indies, including his use of an imaginary radio broadcast to portray this theme in the poem "Broadcast to the West Indies," is discussed.
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.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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245 p., Addressing the transnational relationships of Freemasonry, politics, and culture in the field of Latin American and Caribbean literatures and cultures, Writing Secrecy provides insight into Pan-Caribbean, transnational and diasporic formations of these Masonic lodges and their influences on political and cultural discourses in the Americas. Includes "Technologies: Caribbean Knowledges, Imperial Critiques 1860-1900s" and "Urgency and Possibility: Afro-Latin® Identities."
