"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
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
159 p, Discusses the importance of the role played by the Caribbean mother in her Latina daughters' negotiation of a hybrid identity as seen through the works of Julia Álvarez, Cristina García, and Esmeralda Santiago
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
245 p, Contents: The politics of postcolonial nationalist literature / The nation as problem and possibility / Caribbean space: Lamming, Naipaul, and federation / The novel after the nation: Nigeria after Biafra / The persistence of the nation: literature and criticism in Canada / National culture and globalization
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.;
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
191 p., The essays in this volume consider various literary and linguistic aspects of the Francophone Caribbean at the beginning of the twenty-first century, focusing particularly on the French Overseas Departments of Martinique and Guadeloupe, and the independent islands of Haiti and Dominica. The literary chapters are devoted to new voices in the region and the Caribbean diaspora, or to recent works by established authors. Contributors offer fresh interpretations of Caribbean literary movements, and explore relevant non-literary issues such as socio-political developments which have influenced the writers of today. The linguistic chapters examine the dynamics of the respective roles of Creole and the European standard language, and consider the present viability of Creole as a literary medium. This collection will be of interest to specialists in Caribbean culture, to university students of Francophone literature, cultural studies and Creole, and to the general reader with some knowledge of the Caribbean.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
287 p, Eexamines how a number of "foundational" Argentine authors—Echeverría, Mármol, Sarmiento, Ingenieros, Lugones, and others—either repressed the Afro-Argentine past or portrayed Afro-Argentines in profoundly racist ways. José Hernández (Martín Fierro) and Borges, in their allegedly sympathetic treatment of Afro-Argentines, were notable exceptions. The book has some appealing aspects. Extensive excerpts from the authors Solomianski examines—including, in Chapter 7, from nineteenth-century black newspapers and writers—give readers a vivid sense of literary representations of blackness in Argentina. And his analysis of Afro-Argentine characters in twentieth-century films, plays (including the patriotic skits presented in public elementary and high schools), and tangos is revealing and suggestive.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
500 p, Daughters of the Diaspora features the creative writing of 20 Hispanophone women of African descent, as well as the interpretive essays of 15 literary critics. The collection is unique in its combination of genres, including poetry, short stories, essays, excerpts from novels and personal narratives, many of which are being translated into English for the first time. They address issues of ethnicity, sexuality, social class and self-representation and in so doing shape a revolutionary discourse that questions and subverts historical assumptions and literary conventions.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
336 p, Naturalist novel about peasant life in late nineteenth-century Puerto Rico includes a critical analysis of the book, an author biography, and the historical context of the work
