Explores the way writers address the formation and fate of the contemporary American working class in an age of neoliberal globalization. Specifically, the essay examines Russell Banks's 1985 novel Continental Drift, which interweaves the stories of two characters who pull up stakes and head to Florida in search of a better life: an oil furnace repair man from New Hampshire and a young, single mother from Haiti.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
310 p., Relates current theoretical debates about hospitality and cosmopolitanism to the actual conditions of refugees. Examines literary works by such writers as Edwidge Danticat, Nikl Payen, Kamau Brathwaite, Francisco Goldman, Julia Alvarez, Ivonne Lamazares, and Cecilia Rodriguez Milans, Jacques Derrida, Edouard Glissant, and Wilson Harris.
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
The erasure and denial of the female body and of female sexuality in the fiction of Erna Brodber and Jamaica Kincaid represent the erasure and denial of the colonized Caribbeans by their European colonizers. The female characters of both Brodber and Kincaid, however, retrieve their bodies through various means, from education to a realization of the power of their sexuality. This retrieval of the female body symbolizes freedom of the Caribbean body from colonization.
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.
Cambridge [England] New York NY USA: Cambridge University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
313 p, "Discrepant Engagement addresses work by a number of authors not normally grouped under a common rubric--black writers from the United States and the Caribbean and the so-called Black Mountain poets. Nathaniel Mackey examines the ways in which the experimental aspects of their work advance a critique of the assumptions underlying conventional perceptions and practice." (Google);