African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
228 p, Contents: Canonized hybridities, resistant hybridities: Chutney Soca, carnival, and the politics of nationalism / Shalini Puri -- Soca and social formations: avoiding the romance of culture in Trinidad / Stefano Harney -- Trinidad romance: the invention of Jamaican carnival / Belinda J. Edmondson -- All that is black melts into air: negritud and nation in Puerto Rico / Catherine Den Tandt -- Positive vibration? Capitalist textual hegemony and Bob Marley / Mike Alleyne --"Titid ad pèp la se marasa": Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the new national romance in Haiti / Kevin Meehan -- Shadowboxing in the Mangrove: the politics of identity in postcolonial Martinique / Richard Price and Sally Price -- Beautiful Indians, troublesome negroes, and nice white men: Caribbean romances and the invention of Trinidad / Faith Smith -- Homing instincts: immigrant nostalgia and gender politics in Brown girl, brownstones / Supriya Nair -- Derek Walcott: liminal spaces/substantive histories / Tejumola Olaniyan
"Any attempt to trace the many resonances that historically have been attached to the creole figure in Caribbean literature and culture will be inflected by the long and pervading presence of colonialism in the region and its attendant corollary of hierarchical social separation and difference based on perceptions of race. Indeed, the ambivalent desire and subjective misrecognition that lay at the heart of historical writing about colonialism and racism have tended to frame the issues of monstrosity and exclusion that produced the creole as part and parcel of wider colonial discourses. Thus, the shifting and increasingly unstable inscription of the creole figure echoes, in a certain sense, certain critical ambiguities of politics and temporality that color the colonial encounter and its aftermath. Specifically, in the contemporary English- and French-speaking Caribbean, the multiplicity, displacement, and creative instability that undergird creole-driven theories of postcolonial performance have supplanted this category's suspect beginnings as colonialism's model for the fearfully unnameable and unplaceable hybrid monstrosity, and now increasingly shape the substance of much of the artistic and creative work emerging from the region." --The Author
