African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
219 p., This book investigates Kamau Brathwaite's and Derek Walcott's postcolonial debates, reading them against the traditional sites of the Caribbean imaginary.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
263 p., A study of the poetics of experimental writing, focusing on the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Nathaniel Mackey, Suzan-Lori Parks and Kamau Brathwaite. Arguing that conceptions of time tend to be at the heart of political concerns throughout the sites of the African diaspora, this project challenges those notions of black writing that rest on the binary or oppression/resistance. Specifically concerned with poetry, Kamau Brathwaite and Nathaniel Mackey specifically confront and contravene the legacy of the lyric voice in both the presentation and topics of their work. Brathwaite invents a shifting system of fonts, margins and a capacious first-person singular/plural to articulate a time and a "we" of the Caribbean and the diaspora.
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.
Oonya Kempadoo has been praised for her debut novel, Buxton Spice, a coming-of-age story set in the Caribbean. The book is a breathtaking glimpse into the inner life of Lula, a lively, highly imaginative girlchild growing up in a racially mixed family in Guyana in the 1970s. Kempadoo's unique and vibrant prose is the camera lens on the lushly exotic world that Lula inhabits. Through her eyes readers are introduced to the colorful denizens of Tamarind Grove. We see the village prostitutes (Sugar Baby, Bullet and Rumshop), the eccentric families, the gentle town spinsters, and Aunt Ruthy, the obeah voodoo lady.
223 p., Argues that certain iconic poems have shaped the canon of American poetry. Not merely "canonical" in the usual sense, iconic poems enjoy a special cultural sanction and influence; they have become discourses themselves, generating our notions about American poetry. By "iconic" the author means extraordinarily famous works like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Paul Revere's Ride," Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," and Claude McKay's "If We Must Die," that do not merely reside in the national memory but that have determined each poet's reception and thus have shaped the history of American poetry.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
341 p., Examines the long-running debate between the proponents of Afro-Cuban cultural manifestations and the predominantly white Cuban intelligentsia who viewed these traditions as "backward" and counter to the interests of the young Republic. Includes analyses of the work of Felipe Pichardo Moya, Alejo Carpentier, Nicolás Guillén, Emilio Ballagas, José Zacarías Tallet, Felix B. Caignet, Marcelino Arozarena, and Alfonso Camín.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
1 microfiche, A selection from Charles' previous collections and a book’s worth of new poems. In the new poems from ‘Children of the Morning’ there is both a focus on the lives of the young, and a Blakean concern with the quality and integrity of childhood experience that clearly grows from his work as a storyteller with children. These are both songs of innocence and experience, of what ought to be, and, as in ‘Stephen’s Song’, of a young life snuffed out by racism."
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
317 p., While a great deal of postcolonial criticism has examined how the processes of hybridity, mestizaje, creolization, and syncretism impact African diasporic literature, Oakley employs the heuristic of the "commonplace" to recast our sense of the politics of such literature. Her analysis of commonplace poetics reveals that postcolonial poetic and political moods and aspirations are far more complex than has been admitted. African Atlantic writers summon the utopian potential of Romanticism, which had been stricken by Anglo-European exclusiveness and racial entitlement, and project it as an attain.
