African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Desirada was awarded the prestigious Prix Carbet de la Caraibe in 1998 given for the best book by a Caribbean author, 280 p, Desirada is the story of Marie-Noelle and her quest to understand the mother who abandoned her, and discover the identity of her father, despite the opposing stories from her mother and her grandmother. It is also the story of generations of island women and the pursuit of a meaningful life despite a tainted personal history.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
228 p, Contents: Canonized hybridities, resistant hybridities: Chutney Soca, carnival, and the politics of nationalism / Shalini Puri -- Soca and social formations: avoiding the romance of culture in Trinidad / Stefano Harney -- Trinidad romance: the invention of Jamaican carnival / Belinda J. Edmondson -- All that is black melts into air: negritud and nation in Puerto Rico / Catherine Den Tandt -- Positive vibration? Capitalist textual hegemony and Bob Marley / Mike Alleyne --"Titid ad pèp la se marasa": Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the new national romance in Haiti / Kevin Meehan -- Shadowboxing in the Mangrove: the politics of identity in postcolonial Martinique / Richard Price and Sally Price -- Beautiful Indians, troublesome negroes, and nice white men: Caribbean romances and the invention of Trinidad / Faith Smith -- Homing instincts: immigrant nostalgia and gender politics in Brown girl, brownstones / Supriya Nair -- Derek Walcott: liminal spaces/substantive histories / Tejumola Olaniyan
Esteves,Carmen C. (Author) and Paravisini-Gebert,Lizabeth (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
1991
Published:
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
273 p, Contents: Tétiyette and the devil / Anonymous (Guadeloupe) -- Little Cog-burt / Phyllis Shand Allfrey (Dominica) -- Cotton Candy / Dora Alonso (Cuba) -- See me in me Benz and t'ing : like the lady who lived on that isle remote / Hazel D. Campbell (Jamaica) -- They called her Aurora (a passion for Donna Summer) / Aida Cartagena Portalatín (Dominican Republic) -- Columba / Michelle Cliff (Jamaica) -- A pottage of lentils / Marie-Thérèse Colimon-Hall (Haiti) -- Three women in Manhattan / Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe) -- Hair / Hilma Contreras (Dominican Republic) -- Piano-bar / Liliane Dévieux (Haiti) -- Barred : Trinidad 1987 / Ramabai Espinet (Trinidad) -- The poisoned story / Rosario Ferré (Puerto Rico) -- Cocuyo Flower / Magali García Ramis (Puerto Rico) -- How to gather the shadows of the flowers / Ángela Hernández (Dominican Republic) -- Opéra Station. Six in the evening. For months-- / Jeanne Hyvrard (Martinique/France) -- Girl / Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua) -- No dust is allowed in this house / Olga Nolla (Puerto Rico) -- Widow's walk / Opal Palmer Adisa (Jamaica) -- Parable II / Velma Pollard (Jamaica) -- Red flower / Paulette Poujol-Oriol (Haiti) -- The day they burned the books / Jean Rhys (Dominica) -- Lola or the song of spring / Astrid Roemer (Surinam) -- Brights Thursdays / Olive Senior (Jamaica) -- ADJ, Inc. / Ana Lydia Vega (Puerto Rico) -- Of nuns and punishments / Bea Vianen (Surinam) -- Passport to paradise / Myriam Warner-Vieyra (Guadeloupe) -- Of natural causes / Mirta Yáñez (Cuba)
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
187 p, Contents: Introduction: The Third Wave -- Guanahani -- Waves and Echoes -- Olive Senior: Country Air and Juggled Worlds -- Summer Lightning: Customs of the Country -- Arrival of the Snake-Woman and Discerner of Hearts: The Wider World -- Zee Edgell: The Belize Chronicles -- Beka Lamb: A Lesson in History -- In Times Like These: Growing into Home -- Shiva Naipaul: Choreographer of Chaos -- Essays and Stories -- Fireflies: Illuminating the Void -- The Chip-Chip Gatherers: Ropes Across the Abyss -- A Hot Country: Too Much Nothing -- Caryl Phillips: The End of All Exploring -- The Final Passage: The Book of the Parents -- A State of Independence: The Book of the Sons -- Cambridge: The Book of the Ancestors -- Robert Antoni: The Voyage In -- Short Fiction -- Divina Trace: The Tale of Telling.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
125 p, A novel by Trinidadian author Samuel Selvon. Its publication marked the first literary work focusing on poor, working-class blacks in the beat writer tradition following the enactment of the British Nationality Act 1948.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
185 p, Contents: Pt. 1. Myth as a historical mode : Lo real maravilloso americano -- Lo real maravilloso in Caribbean fiction -- The folk imagination and history : El reino de este mundo, The secret ladder, and Le quatrième siècle -- Pt. 2. The problematic quest for origins -- The myth of El Dorado : Los pasos perdidos and Palace of the peacock -- Pt. 3. Myth and history : the dialectics of culture -- History as mythic discourse : El siglo de las luces, Tumatumari, and La case du commandeur -- The poetics of identity and difference : Black Marsden and Concierto barroco
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
462 p., On a Caribbean island in the 1950s, elderly Mary Gertrude Mathilda commits murder. As she explains herself to police, her story exposes the ugly underbelly of life on Caribbean plantations, with its slavery and brutality.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
250 p, Francis Sancher--a handsome outsider, loved by some and reviled by others--is found dead, face down in the mud on a path outside Riviere au Sel, a small village in Guadeloupe. None of the villagers are particularly surprised, since Sancher, a secretive and melancholy man, had often predicted an unnatural death for himself. As the villagers come to pay their respects they each--either in a speech to the mourners, or in an internal monologue--reveal another piece of the mystery behind Sancher's life and death. Like pieces of an elaborate puzzle, their memories interlock to create a rich and intriguing portrait of a man and a community.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
260 p, Contents: Caribbean modernist discourse : writing, exile, and tradition -- From exile to nationalism : the early novels of George Lamming -- Beyond the Kala-pani : the Trinidad novels of Samuel Selvon -- Deformation of modernism : the allegory of history in Carpentier's El siglo de las luces -- Modernism and the masks of history : the novels of Paule Marshall -- Writing after colonialism : Crick crack, Monkey and Beka lamb -- Narration at the postcolonial moment : history and representation in Abeng
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
126 p, Contents: The book is organized as a series of essays on related topics all applied to Caribbean women's fiction: white women writers; madness; postcolonial theory, female subjectivity, Bakhtin's Carnival image; ideology (Elaine Savory)
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
310 p, "First published in 1970, this pioneering account of the emergence of the West Indian Novel in English has been at the centre of the development of West Indian Literature as an academic discipline." (Ian Randle Publisher)
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
147 p, The Caliban-Prospero encounter in Shakespeare's "The Tempest" has evolved as a metaphor for the colonial experience. The present study utilizes the Caliban symbol in examining the influence of colonialism in Caribbean literature, focusing on the works of three major writers from the Caribbean islands: Jean Rhys, of British descent from Dominica; George Lamming, of African origin from Barbados; and Sam Selvon, of mixed Indian and Scottish heritage from Trinidad.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
672 p., This novel captures the “glittering string” of islands and their history; beginning in 1310, through Columbus's arrival, and the “bloody slave revolt” of Haiti to the rise of Castro. It deals with revolution and romance, slavery and superstition.
Allende,Isabel (Author) and Peden,Margaret Sayers (Translator)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2010
Published:
New York: Harper
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
457 p, The story of a mulatta woman, a slave and concubine, determined to take control of her own destiny in a society where that would seem impossible
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
149 p., Examines Marshall's use of the trope of travel within and between the United States and the Caribbean to critique ideologies of development, tourism, and globalization as neo-imperial. This examination of travel in Marshall's To Da-Duh, In Memoriam; The Chosen Place, The Timeless People; Praisesong for the Widow; and Daughters exposes the asymmetrical structures of power that exist between the two regions.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
389 p., Thirteen-year-old Hazel leaves her comfortable, if somewhat unconventional, London home in 1913 after her father has a breakdown, and goes to live in the Caribbean on her grandparents' sugar plantation where she discovers some shocking family secrets.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
161 p., An anthology of short stories focusing on people of the Caribbean. The characters face problems of freedom, history, race, class, violence, entrapment, and morality.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
228 p, The West Indian narrator vents her bitterness at the unhappy life fate dealt her--mother died in childbirth, father ignored her, stepmother tried to kill her, at school she had an abortion. Finally, she married a white doctor, but it was impossible for her to love him because he was a colonialist. She draws parallels with the despair of her country--Dominica--attributing it to the legacy of slavery. By the author of Lucy.;
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
148 p, Episodes from the young life of Annie John, aged 10 to 17, as she grows up on the Caribbean Island of Antigua. This is a magical coming-of-age tale, ripe with the special ambience of its tropical setting and sustained by Annie's far from naive awareness of the world around her. Death, illness, and poverty intrude on the narrator's perceptive sensibility from time to time, but even these experiences instruct her and expand her understanding of life and its shifting reality.Although Annie leaves Antigua at the end of the novel for a new role as a student in England, the hollowness she feels at her departure is balanced by the new self that awaits her as she begins the search for her own identity. A poetic and intensely moving work from the author of At the Bottom of the River.;
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
v, 174 leaves ; 29 cm., This novel is a contemporary novel that deals with the history of france; "UMI:9959638."/ Includes bibliographical references ( 167-174)./ Reproduction: Photocopy./ Ann Arbor, Mich. :/ UMI,/ 2000./ v, 174 ; 21 cm.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
192 p, Book Description Using a multifaceted approach, this study explores questions of identity in novels by Dany Bbel-Gisler, Maryse Cond, and Emile Ollivier. As signs, narrators and characters are connected to each other dialogically and produce multilayered narratives that problematize the concept of a cohesive and static collective identity. In revealing identity to be a constantly fluctuating semiotic process, the study shows that Caribbean Francophone narrative is creating a new literary space where the dialogic underpinnings of the self are called upon to express the difficulties, the heterogeneity, and the opacity of meaning associated with any definition of a cultural or national identity. (Amazon);
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Journal Title Details:
xi
Notes:
290 p, Introduction. Conceptualizing creoleness : French Caribbean "postcolonial" discourse. -- La Lézarde : Alienation and the poetics of Antillanité. -- En attendant le bonheur : Creole conjunctions and cultural survival. -- LIsole Soleil/Soufrières : textual creolization and cultural identity. -- LAutre qui danse : the modalities and multiplicities of Métissage. -- Solibo magnifique : carnival, opposition, and the narration of the Caribbean maroon. -- Conclusion. Creolizing the colonial encounter.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
368 p., A series of extended, illuminated moments in the history of Spanish and British imperialism in the Caribbean: Raleigh's final, shameful expedition to the New World; Francisco Miranda's disastrous invasion of South America in the eighteenth century; the more subtle aggressions of the mid-twentieth-century English writer Foster Morris; the transforming and distorting peregrinations of Blair, the black Trinidadian revolutionary.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
361 p., "I wrote Transfer Day as a way to honor the people of the Virgin Islands and to honor the upcoming Centennial celebration in 2017." --The Author
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
171 p, A novel by Trinidadian author Samuel Selvon. Its publication marked the first literary work focusing on poor, working-class blacks in the beat writer tradition following the enactment of the British Nationality Act 1948.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
399 p, Ivanhoe Martin arrives in Kingston, Jamaica, looking for work and, after some initial struggles, lands a recording contract as a reggae singer. He records his first song, "The Harder They Come," but after a bitter dispute with a manipulative producer named Hilton, soon finds himself resorting to petty crime in order to pay the bills. He deals marijuana, kills some abusive cops and earns local folk hero status. Meanwhile, his record is topping the charts.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
111 p, Examines the ways Guadeloupean women writers Maryse Conde, Simone Schwarz-Bart and Myriam Warner-Vieyra demystify the theme of the return to Africa as opposed to the masculinist version by Negritude male writers from the 1930s to 1960s. Negritude, a cultural and literary movement, drew much of its strength from the idea of a mythical or cultural reconnection with the African past allegorized as a mother figure. In contrast these women writers, of the post-colonial era who are to large extent heirs of Negritude, differ sharply from their male counterparts in their representation of Africa. In their novels, the continent is not represented as a propitious mother figure but a disappointing father figure.
Glissant,Edouard (Author) and Wing,Betsy (Translator)
Format:
Book, Whole
Language:
eng
Publication Date:
2001
Published:
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
294 p., Tells of the quest by Mathieu Beluse to discover the lost history of his country, Martinique. This book tells of the love-hate relationship between the Longoue and Beluse families, whose ancestors were brought as slaves to Martinique.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
951 p., Story of an elderly African, blind and dying, traveling from Africa to Brazil in search of the lost son for decades. Along the journey, she will tell her life, marked by killings, rape, violence and slavery. Set in an important historical context in the formation of the Brazilian people and narrated in a way in which the historical facts are immersed in daily life and in the lives of the characters.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
316 p., She was an 18th century black Suriname woman with millions of dollars. But she sought the forbidden: to marry a white man. Why, when she already had so much? Elisabeth Samson's immense wealth puzzled many early historians who concluded that it could only have been the result of an inheritance from a master with whom she had lived and by whom she had been set free.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
260 p., Offers a comparative analysis of fiction from across the pan-Caribbean, exploring the relationship between literary form, cultural practice, and the nation-state. Engaging with the historical and political impact of capitalist imperialism, decolonization, class struggle, ethnic conflict, and gender relations, it considers the ways in which Caribbean authors have sought to rethink and re-narrate the traumatic past and often problematic 'postcolonial' present of the region's peoples.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
347 p., While investigating the seemingly innocent death of the U.S. Ambassador to the Dominican Republic, Edgar Espinosa-Jones (EJ) finds the Caribbean islands of the 1970s seething with political intrigue, revolutionaries, superstition, violence, and love affairs--with the curse of voodoo magic over all.
Schwarz-Bart,Simone (Author) and Bray,Barbara (Translator)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2013
Published:
New York: New York Review Books
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Translation of Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle (Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1972)., 246 p, A tale of love and wonder, mothers and daughters, spiritual values and the grim legacy of slavery on the French Antillean island of Guadeloupe. Here long-suffering Telumee tells her life story and tells us about the proud line of Lougandor women she continues to draw strength from. Simone Schwarz-Bart's incantatory prose, interwoven with Creole proverbs and lore, appears here in a remarkable translation by Barbara Bray.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
263 p., Analyzing pamphlets, newspapers, estate papers, trial transcripts, and missionary correspondence, this book recovers stories of ordinary Caribbean people, enslaved and free, as they made places for themselves in the empire and the Atlantic world, from the time of sugar tycoon Simon Taylor to the perspective of Samuel Ringgold Ward, African American eyewitness to the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion.
Behn,Aphra (Author), Gallagher,Catherine (Editor), and Stern,Simon (Contributor)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2013
Published:
Lexington, KY: Simon & BrownI
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
77 p., A short novel written by English female author Aphra Behn, published in 1688. It is the story of an African prince who deeply loves the beautiful Imoinda. Imoinda is eventually sold as a slave and is taken to Suriname which is under British rule. Oroonoko is taken prisoner, is sold, and finds himself and Imoinda enslaved on the same plantation. Contents: 1. To the right honourable the Lord Maitland. 2. The history of the royal slave.
Condé,Maryse (Author) and Philcox,Richard (Translator)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
1997
Published:
Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
216 p., Follows the history of a fictional African royal family through forced exile to the Caribbean and eventual emigration to the United States, setting up a provocative critique of multiculturalism and modern race relations. Explores the complex interplay between America and Africa, symbolized in the cultural and racial jumble of the Caribbean islands.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
210 p., From the days of slavery, the Negro from Martinique has never stopped "marronner", that is to say, to try to escape his condition, winning the great woods, the plebeians districts boroughs or even the neighboring islands. Simon, principal figure of the book, was one of them. He knew in the 17th century the arrival of the first slaves from Africa Guinea, the eighteenth hell of sugar plantations in the nineteenth fever abolition, in the early twentieth that of marching strikes and, at the dawn of XXI, the mare desperadoes of false modernity.
Place of publication not identified: CayStreet Publications
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
164 p., Topics include George Town In the 50's and 60's, The Wights and McTaggarts as the owners of Cayman’s First Supermarket who were pioneers of keeping Caymanian young people employed, Miss Kippy School in George Town, Cayman Prep and Rev.George Hicks, Cayman High and Rev. John R. Gray, Aunt Ione's Fried Fish, Church Girls, Ghosts and Rolling Calf, Dating in the 60's,The Flag Carrier, Cayman Bruce Lee, C.H. Goring and Barbadians in Cayman, A Cayman Summer, and 50’s Christmas in Cayman.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
32 p., Jamaica has many adventures around her island home, as she dances in the marketplace to the beat of Miss Lee Brown's drums and chases the baby chick who escapes from her father, in an infectious rhymed verse inspired by the rhythms of reggae music.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
277 p, After his grandfather leaves his family and returns to a dangerous situation on his home island in the Caribbean, fourteen-year-old Junius decides to follow him in search of his lost heritage.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
A lyrical and evocative dreamscape of the Caribbean. Lively pictures & spare, poetic text are used to illustrate the actions of four island children & evoke the mood of the Caribbean. Where does sea meet sky? Where does sound meet color? Where does song meet soul? They meet where children run, splash, sing, and live, on an island in the West Indies. Rachel Isadora has written an inventive text, just right for the very young, featuring the activities children love. Winsome watercolors depict the connections that exist in the world around us, and take us to the places that lie deep in the hearts of all children, no matter where they live.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
224 p., Marronage - the process of flight by slaves from servitude to establish their own hegemonies in inhospitable or wild territories - had its beginnings in the early 1500s in Hispaniola, the first European settlement in the New World. As fictional personae the maroons continue to weave in and out of oral and literary tales as central and ancient characters of Jamaica's heritage. Identifies the place of Jamaican fiction in the larger regional literature and focuses on its essential themes and strategies of discourse for conveying these themes.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
312 p, In the Castle of My Skin, the first novel by Barbadian writer George Lamming, tells the story of the mundane events in a young boy's life that take place amid dramatic changes in the village and society in which he lives. Through his eyes, we see the effects of race, feudalism, capitalism, education, the labor movement, violent riots, and emigration on his small town and, by extension, on Caribbean society as a whole.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
472 p, The chosen place is Bourneville, a remote, devastated part of a Caribbean island; the timeless people are its inhabitants, black, poor, inextricably linked to their past enslavement. The advance team for an ambitious American research project arrives, and the tense, ambivalent relationships that evolve dramatize the vicissitudes of power.
Milstein,Linda Breiner (Author) and Taylor,Cheryl Munro (Illustrator)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
1995
Published:
New York: Tambourine Books
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
32 p., A counting and story book set in the Caribbean. Fishermen, market ladies, and babies alike all love coconut. Count down from ten to one with the Coconut Mon as he winds his way around the island.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Winner of the 1978 National Book Critic's Circle Award for fiction., 305 p., The lives of 5 people, black and white, servant and millionaire, are entertwined. The setting is a Caribbean island. A visitor, young Jadine, neice of the butler and his wife and protegee of the Streets, educated at the Sorbonne, comes home for a visit from Paris. Son, black American street man breaks into the house and all lives are changed. Jadine and Son come together and strive to hold and understand each other as backgrounds and cultural circumstances come into play.
Roa Bastos,Augusto Antonio (Author), Maciel,Alejandro (Author), Prego,Omar (Author), and Nepomuceno,Eric (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Language:
Spanish
Publication Date:
2001
Published:
Buenos Aires: Alfaguara
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
249 p., "On the opposite side of the Paraguay River, the Gran Chaco, has founded a large quilombo or establishment of fugitives, where Brazil and Argentina, eastern and Paraguayans live together in mutual friendship or enmity with the rest of the world." So wrote Sir Richard Burton, traveling consul of Her Britannic Majesty. War was declared. In this fictional account the authors recreate alternatives to that struggle: dialogue between General Mitre and his deputy, the painter Candido Lopez; the last period of resistance Marshal Solano Lopez and his wife, Madame Lynch; the defection of Argentine captain Francisco Paunero; the secret archives of General Rocha Uruguayan Dellpiane, and the anodyne existence of Baron VII Ramalho, a descendant of one of the conspirators of Quilombo Gran Chaco.
Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago: Bocas Lit Fest
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
119 p, This book of sixteen tales is divided into two parts: the first features stories told by youngsters beneath the age of 10, and the second showcases the work of children aged 11 through 15. The titles of some stories are the same, but this is where the similarities stop. Each of the sixteeen fables is equally precious, highlighting the talent, creativity and boundless imagination of our nation’s budding wordsmiths.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
247 p, Set in both Toronto and the Caribbean, this novel gives voice to the power of love and belonging in a story of two women, profoundly different, each in her own spiritual exile.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
183 P., "Demonstrating how Latin American magical realism and Holocaust literature reflect and refract in literary form the carnivalesque spirit of
inversion, intensification of experience, and hallucinatory strangeness. Drawing on the works of Mikhail Bakhtin, Carl Jung, James Frazer, and others, Danow is able to suggest a striking and subtle connection between two genres that on the surface
would appear to have little in common." --Lynn Gelfand, Folklore Forum 29:1 (1998), p. 130.
Conde,Maryse (Author) and Richard Philcox (Translator)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2000
Published:
New York: Soho
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
260 p., Desirada is the story of Marie-Noelle and her quest to understand the mother who abandoned her and to discover the identity of her father. It is also the story of generations of island women and the pursuit of a meaningful life despite a tainted personal history.
Conde,Maryse (Author) and Richard Philcox (Translator)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
1998
Published:
New York, NY: Soho
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
348 p, A tale of revenge set in the Caribbean, in which the hero gets back at a rich man who stole his love by impregnating her after she becomes the man's wife. The result is tragedy, the woman dying in childbirth. By the author of Black Witch of Salem
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
277 p., This wild and entertaining novel, winner of the 1986 Grand Prix Litteraire de la Femme, expands on the true story of the West Indian slave Tituba, who was accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, arrested in 1692, and forgotten in jail until the general amnesty for witches two years later. Maryse Conde brings Tituba out of historical silence and creates for her a fictional childhood, adolescence, and old age. She turns her into what she calls "a sort of female hero, an epic heroine, like the legendary 'Nanny of the maroons, "' who, schooled in the sorcery and magical ritual of obeah, is arrested for healing members of the family that owns her. Rich with postmodern irony, the novel even includes an encounter with Hester Prawn of Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
371 p., The story of a Caribbean family whose history is as much their own as it is their native island's. When the narrator's forebear, Albert Louis, decides to go to Panama to make his fortune building the canal rather than stay at home cutting sugar like all his fellow blacks, he begins the ascendancy of the Louis family--a family that over the years will be divided by color (not just black and white but all the shades in between), money, and politics. In Panama, Albert finds money but not a fortune, encounters racial prejudice, learns about Marcus Garvey, and marries a Jamaican who dies giving birth to son Bert. Back home in Guadeloupe, the embittered father prospers in business but is disliked for his meanness and surly disposition. A second marriage follows, and the narrator's grandfather, the ugly but hard-working Jacob, is born. Births and deaths occur at a clip; the dead advise the living in dreams; and characters travel to New York, where more is learned of Garvey and black politics, and to France, where Bert, disowned because of his marriage to a white woman, commits suicide. Then on to Bert's niece, Jacob's daughter, pampered and indulged Th’cla, who moves to France pregnant with the narrator, whom she leaves with a white family. Abandoned by her black lover, Th’cla marries a white doctor, takes a side trip to New York, where she has an affair with a Malcolm X follower; goes to Jamaica, this time with daughter and new lover in tow; and then finally returns to her white husband in Paris, leaving daughter with grandfather and the obligation to tell ``the story of very ordinary people who in their own way had nonetheless made blood flow.'' Vivid writing, and certainly wide-ranging, though sometimes the fast pace leads to skimping on the plot. Still, a very readable story of an unfamiliar territory.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
197 p, In Miami, Lieutenant Gutierrez investigates gruesome, ceremonial killings by Santeria, an Afro-Caribbean cult. To solve the case he joins forces with a student who is writing a thesis on the subject. By the author of The Cuban-American Experience.
Danticat,Edwidge (Author) and New York (Series Editor)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
1995
Published:
Vintage Books
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from the impoverished village of Croix-des-Rosets to New York to be reunited with her mother, where she gains a legacy of shame that only be healed when she returns to Haiti, to the woman who first reared her., 234 p
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
951 p., A story of an African elderly who is blind, and on the verge of death, travels to from African to Brazil in a hunt for the lost child for decades.
Lovelace,Earl (Author) and New York (Series Editor)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
1998
Published:
Persea Books
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
In Trinidad the martial arts dancer, Aldrick Prospect, fights the commercialization of the Mardi Gras carnival. Sick to see the country's traditions destroyed-- warrior contests have been replaced by games for tourists-- he joins a coup d'etat, serves a stint in jail and never dances again., 240 p
