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
Notes:
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."
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
223 p., Through complex explorations of narratives of Spanish Blacks in the Caribbean this collection of essays builds critically on mid and late twentieth century Afro-Hispanist scholarship and thereby amplifies the terms in which Africans in the Americas are generally discussed. Each of these essays deals with a pivotal aspect of the African experience in the Spanish speaking Caribbean from the period of slavery to the present day.
