African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
126 p, Contents: The book is organized as a series of essays on related topics all applied to Caribbean women's fiction: white women writers; madness; postcolonial theory, female subjectivity, Bakhtin's Carnival image; ideology (Elaine Savory)
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.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
260 p, Contents: Caribbean modernist discourse : writing, exile, and tradition -- From exile to nationalism : the early novels of George Lamming -- Beyond the Kala-pani : the Trinidad novels of Samuel Selvon -- Deformation of modernism : the allegory of history in Carpentier's El siglo de las luces -- Modernism and the masks of history : the novels of Paule Marshall -- Writing after colonialism : Crick crack, Monkey and Beka lamb -- Narration at the postcolonial moment : history and representation in Abeng
