168 p., Explores Caribbean literature that contests the privileging of nation and diaspora community models, and instead presents the spontaneous and productive formation of communities through praxis. Conceptualizing community through this lens challenges systemic emphases on unity, shared history, and shared identity, while it simultaneously incorporates difference at its very foundation. The author draws on Caribbean and postcolonial theory, subaltern studies historiography, and feminist theory in my analysis of Caryl Phillips's The Atlantic Sound , Erna Brodber's Louisiana, Zee Edgell's Beka Lamb , and Maryse Condé's I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
296 p., Examines how changes in political, economic, and social structures have produced different sets of possibilities for writers to imagine their relationship to the institutions of the public sphere. In the process, he provides a new context for rereading such major writers as Mary Seacole, José Martí, Jacques Roumain, Claude McKay, Marie Chauvet, and George Lamming, while also drawing lesser-known figures into the story.
75 p., The aim of this project is two-fold: to discuss the limits of Frantz Fanon's postcolonial theories, and to then present a possible model for turning "the `thing' colonized [into] a new man" (Wretched 2) by liberating "him" from Fanon's desire for inclusion. Or, to put this in other terms, this investigation seeks to highlight one of the most limiting factors in Fanonian postcolonial theory: Fanon's grounding in European humanism.
319 p., Examines the psychological and socio-cultural factors that influence the practice of skin bleaching in the postcolonial society of Jamaica. Additionally, the study outlined the nation's efforts to combat the skin-bleaching phenomenon. The naturalistic paradigm of inquiry was used to frame the study and to collect and analyze data. The sample consisted of fifteen participants--twelve participants (six males and six females) with a history of skin bleaching; a retailer of skin lightening products; a local dermatologist who has written and published in local newspapers on the practice; and a representative from the Ministry of Health who was integrally involved in the national educational efforts to ban the practice. The overall findings show that there is a bias in Jamaica for light skin over dark skin and these values are taught in non-formal and informal ways from very early in life.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
336 p, Joseph Conrad, Jean Rhys, and Pramoedya Ananta Toer are writers renowned for crafting narratives of great technical skill that resonate with potent truths on the colonial condition. Yet given the generational and geographical boundaries that separated them, they are seldom considered in conjunction with one another. The Passage of Literature unites the three in a bracing comparative study that breaks away from traditional conceptions of modernism, going beyond temporal periodization and the entrenched Anglo-American framework that undergirds current scholarship.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
336 p., Traces a trio of interrelated modernist genealogies. English modernism as exemplified by Conrad's Malay trilogy, Indonesian modernism of Pramoedya's Buru quartet, and creole modernism of the Caribbean in Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight and Wide Sargasso Sea.
