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.
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.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
369 p., This title includes discussions of Ernest Hemingway's life and works. Includes Philip Melling's "Cultural imperialism, Afro-Cuban religion, and Santiago's failure in Hemingway's The old man and the sea."
