195 p., Paule Marshall's The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969), Gayl Jones' Corregidora (1975), and Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979) enhance our conceptualization of black aestheticism and black nationalism as cultural and political movements. The writers use the novel as genre to question the ideological paradigm of a black nationalist aesthetic by providing alternative definitions of community, black women's sexuality, and race relations. Because of the ways in which these writers respond to black aestheticism and black nationalism, they transform our understanding of movements often perceived as sexist, racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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219 p., This book investigates Kamau Brathwaite's and Derek Walcott's postcolonial debates, reading them against the traditional sites of the Caribbean imaginary.
"I don't want to look arrogant, especially with [Cornel West]. But I believe he sat on the side of something he doesn't actually know," [Nancy Morejon] said of the open letter West and 59 other African Americans sent to Cuban President Raul Castro late last year. In it, they accused his government of mistreating civil rights activists and a "callous disregard" for its Black population. "Yes, there is racism in Cuba," Tomas Fernandez Robaina, a prolific writer about the social condition of Black Cubans, told me. The country "engaged in romanticism" when Castro ordered an end to racial discrimination nearly a half-century ago, Fernandez said. "Now we understand it will take more than goodwill to get rid of it, something Americans should know better than Cubans."
220 p., Employs a black feminist diaspora literary lens to identify, define, trace, and speak to the African Diaspora as it functions in black women's diaspora fiction and informs our understanding of black women's diaspora identity. Considers three authors and novels by women of, in, and across the African Diaspora. The study centers on Sandra Jackson-Opoku's The River Where Blood Is Born as a primary site of analysis of diaspora formation and theorization, Dionne Brand's At the Full and Change of the Moon and Maryse Condé's Desirada as comparative textual and theoretical sites.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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247 p., Explores the literary tradition of Caribbean Latino literature written in the U.S. beginning with José Martí and concluding with 2008 Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, Junot Díaz. The contributors consider the way that spatial migration in literature serves as a metaphor for gender, sexuality, racial, identity, linguistic, and national migrations. The essays in this collection reveal the multiple ways that writers of this tradition use their unique positioning as both insiders and outsides to critique U.S. hegemonic discourses while simultaneously interrogating national discourses in their home countries.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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191 p., Conceptualizes the idea of jolie-laide ("the beautiful ugly") as a fully elaborated sexual poetics by three women writers of the African diaspora: Gayl Jones (USA), Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua, Caribbean), and Jackie Kay (Scotland, UK). The introductory chapter situates the study in a critical and cultural context and defines key terms. The chapters that follow analyze the thematic preoccupations and narrative strategies of the three writers' respective novels ( Corregidora and Eva's Man, The Autobiography of My Mother , and Trumpet ) and historicize the novels' explicit and implicit ideologies. With their jolie-laide portrayals of gender, the body and sex and sexuality, these three writers fashion complex representations of black female sexual subjectivity and critique the biased images, exaggerations, distortions, and silences of earlier representations. Recognizing that jolie-laide can be used to problematize racial, gender, and sexual binaries, these novelists exploit the structural possibilities of a jolie-laide sexual poetics to address culturally taboo topics in explicit, graphic, and imaginative language and with inventive jolie-laide tropes. They challenge white supremacist stereotypes of black sexuality as well as the sanitized characterizations of black sex found within the literary traditions of black respectability.
For women writers of the Caribbean as well as for larger marginalized communities, the relationship between oral traditions and written texts is a part of the defining thread of Caribbean historiography. This article draws on Waugh and Hutcheon to examine the use of such texts by women writers of the Hispanophone Caribbean in order to highlight narrative strategies of historically marginalized groups to contest hegemonic constructions of the nation.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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329 p., Just beneath the surface of most scholars’ research on the ethno-racial composition of Spanish-speaking America lies a definitive connection between the African Diaspora and the Latin American identity. Although to a lesser extent, this is also true of Portuguese-speaking Brazil––the existence of African-related people and their role as an integral part of the total Latin ethnicity currently appears to be more readily accepted and discussed in Brazil than in other Latin American countries. Afro-Peruvians, Afro-Colombians, Afro-Venezuelans, Afro-Uruguayans, or Afro-Mexicans––to name just a few––are rarely openly acknowledged in most of Spanish-speaking Latin America.
Analyzes the prominent role played by first wave feminism and by women writers between 1898-1903 as the Jamaica Times articulated a broad-based, middle class nationalism and launched a campaign to establish a Jamaican national literature. This archival material is significant because it suggests a significant modification of anglophone Caribbean feminist, literary and nationalist historiography: first wave feminism was not introduced to Jamaica exclusively through black nationalist organizations in the late 19th and early 20th century, but emerged in a broader phenomenon of respectable, middle class nationalism encompassing Jamaican nationalism and Pan Africanism.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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187 p., Looks primarily at Negrismo and Negritude, two literary movements that appeared in the Francophone and Hispanic Caribbean as well as in Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century. It draws on speeches and manifestos, and use cultural studies to contextualize ideas.
