Tillis explores the socio-political poetics of Blas Jiménez in the context of the negritude aesthetic in the Spanish-speaking world. The selected poems of Jiménez attest to the continuation of negritude ideology of Afrocentric thematic poetry in the Carribean and showed that the poet's social criticism is linked to an ideology of white supremacy resulting from colonialism and slavery.;
Biographer Delia Jarrett-Macauley stumbled across Marson's name while doing research for another book. The book has been well-received throughout Britain. Copies have sold out during every one of Jarrett-Macauley's book-signings and scheduled talks. "I saw this clipping that said, `Una Marson, the well-known BBC producer is now on holiday in Jamaica.' And I said: `What! You mean we had a black woman producer at the BBC as early as 1945 and we don't know about it.' I decided her story must be known," she said. Marson joined the BBC in 1936 and made an immediate impact, rising rapidly through the ranks. In 1942 she became the West Indies producer and created the Caribbean Voices programme, which won exposure and respectability for Caribbean writers and poets.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
256 p., This book explores the common links and differences between the works of two modern Caribbean poets, Kamau Braithwaite and Dereck Walcott. The study focuses on the engagement of the two with the mythology of the Caribbean's African experience, defining each poet's contribution to the development of modern Caribbean poetics.
The author examines race, language, and identity in Derek Walcott's poetry, reading Walcott's poetry as an extended meditation on the question of whether it is possible to exist within the English language and an Afro-Caribbean tradition, drawing poetic nourishment from each, or whether the attempt is a betrayal of both. Of mixed racial ancestry, a native speaker of French Creole who was formally educated in British colonial schools, raised Methodist on the Catholic island of St. Lucia, Derek Walcott occupies a peripheral place with respect to both English and Caribbean culture, it is noted. Throughout the course of his poetic career he has been criticized from both perspectives, either for "appropriating the Other" and putting it to use in the service of the dominant culture or for not assimilating that dominant (English) culture fully enough.;
