Analyses Sistren Theatre Collective's theatrical and organizational collective model by contextualizing the company's commitment to collectivity in terms of political and social shifts in Jamaica during the 1980s. Argues that race- and class-based divisions within Jamaican society were masked by collectivity masked.
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:
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:
762 p., A biography of the novelist Jean Rhys, author of Quartet and Wide Sargasso Sea, who was born and grew up in the Caribbean island of Dominica. Jean Rhys's childhood, her momentous first love affair, her three marriages, the disasters which befell her husbands, her drinking and its consequences: all are shown with unsparing clarity.
This article explores Japanese literary engagement with the Caribbean island of Jamaica, one informed most directly by the recent popularity of Jamaican musical culture in Japan. I link these works to a discursive imagination of the international, including the Third World, as a proving ground for artistic accomplishment and for the acquisition of an ideological cosmopolitanism counterposed against life in insular Japan. This includes the discourse of jibun sagashi, or self-searching, that has emerged in the post-1991 recessionary era. I argue that a consistent trope in many works of fiction and non-fiction on Japanese travel to Jamaica is of their protagonists' or authors' intimate encounter with Afro-Jamaican blackness as both menacing and impoverished, but also vitalizing and endearing. Encountering the Afro-Jamaican, and surviving it, simultaneously affords a sense of toughness and sociopolitical enlightenment impossible elsewhere in Japan. I conclude that although these narratives usually include returns to a Japanese homeland appreciated anew, an ethnographic perspective on these issues - though not the focus of the paper - suggests that the experiences of less famous Japanese youth travelling to Jamaica might complicate these narratives offered to mainstream audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR].
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
396 p, Contents: Foreigners : Sao Paulo, 1900-1925 -- Fraternity : Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, 1925-1929 -- Nationals : Salvador da Bahia and São Paulo, 1930-1945 -- Democracy : São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, 1945-1950 -- Difference : São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Salvador da Bahia, 1950-1964 -- Decolonization : Rio de Janeiro, Salvador da Bahia, and São Paulo, 1964-1985 -- Epilogue : Brazil, 1985 to the new century.
Lamming,George (Author) and Bogues,Anthony (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2011
Published:
Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
452 p., George Lamming is one of the best known, certainly one of the most highly regarded contemporary writers from the Caribbean. Spanning nearly 60 years and encompassing fiction, poetry and critical essays, Lamming's writing covers the length and breadth of Caribbean intellectual, cultural, political and literary life. Credited as a part of that group of Caribbean activists who awoke the Caribbean to its identity and more specifically to its cultural identity, his works have focused on finding new political and social identity.
Lamming,George (Author) and Bogues,Anthony (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2011
Published:
Kingston ; Miami: Ian Randle
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
452 p., Anthony Bogues pulls together Lamming's critical works, some previously published, some given as addresses, lectures and interviews. Lamming is best known for his novels. In the Castle of My Skin and The Emigrants take place in England and are largely autobiographical. Of Age and Innocence and Season of Adventure are set on the fictional Caribbean island of San Cristobal. In Water with Berries, the plot of Shakespeare's The Tempest is used to unmask the imperfections of West Indian society while his final novel, Natives of My Person, gives account of the voyage of a slave-trading ship on the triangular trade route from Europe to Africa to the New World colonies.
