Hardwick,Lorna (Editor) and Gillespie,Carol (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2010
Published:
New York: Oxford University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
422 p., Classical material was traditionally used to express colonial authority, but it was also appropriated by imperial subjects and put to new uses. Includes Cashman Kerr Prince's "Divided Child, or Derek Walcott's post-colonial philology" and Emily Greenwood's "Arriving backwards : the return of The Odyssey in the English-speaking Caribbean."
227 p., Considers the often-silenced, tangible traces that the Haitian Revolution and radical anti-slavery have left in the greater Caribbean as they emerge in contemporary cultural productions. The author looks at national trends in the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Jamaica in order to formulate an understanding of the uses of gendered images of slavery and blackness in modern nation-building campaigns. Critically assesses what is left out of these narratives and how these gaps serve specific purposes. Argues for the centrality of the Caribbean in any true understanding of the history of modernity and the contemporary nation-state by investigating the after-shocks of the Haitian Revolution and of radical anti-slavery.
205 p., Analyzes the poetry of the African American Langston Hughes and the Jamaican Louise Bennett during the 1940s. Through an examination of the unique similarities of their poetic projects, namely their engagement of performance to build their audiences, their experiments with poetic personae to represent vernacular social voices, their doubleness as national and transnational figures, their circulation of poetry in radio and print journalism and their use of poetry as pedagogy to promote reading, this dissertation establishes a new perspective on the role of poetry in decolonizing language practices. While Hughes and Bennett are often celebrated for their representation of oral language and folk culture, this project reframes these critical discussions by drawing attention to how they engage performance to foster an embodied form of reading that draws on Creole knowledge systems.
