Reviews Mullen's examination (Greenwood Press, 1998, 236p) of Afro-Cuban literature. Notes that this study is "perceptive" and "important" to the field of Afro-Hispanic literary criticism.;
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.;
This paper uses postcolonial theory to analyze Jamaica Kincaid's quasi-autobiographical book, A Small Place. Kincaid's critique of tourism in Antigua reverses traditional travel writing trends in which First World perceptions of the Third World dominate. She discursively dismantles the imaginative geographies of empire that cement binary oppositions, such as tourist/native and black/white. She collapses these binaries to illustrate the intricate ways in which the global neocolonial ethos created by economic dependencies manifest. Arguing that tourism is implicated in this hegemonic process, she utilizes the metaphor of a guided tour to redirect the imperial gaze. Kincaid argues that legacies of colonial oppression can change once tourist and host value the same things in the shared space of the contact zone.
"Although Annie John is commonly categorized as primarily Caribbean (a precursor to Kincaid’s “American” sequel, Lucy [1990]), my proposed comparison elucidates the Western and transnational leanings of this foundational “Caribbean” work and the ways in which it implicitly expands on Morrison’s representations of female autonomy and visual culture." --The Author
