This essay examines the production of cultural voice in the work of Linton Kwesi Johnson,the African/Caribbean/European dub poet. It suggests that the double-displacement of an African-Caribbean Black living in England, diaspora upon diaspora, comes with a double-indemnity-making and history.
Reviews books on Afro-Hispanic and Caribbean literature. Includes The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin; Fifty Caribbean Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Daryl Cumber Dance; Nicolas Guillen: Popular Poet of the Caribbean, by Ian Isidore Smart.;
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
256 p., This book explores the common links and differences between the works of two modern Caribbean poets, Kamau Braithwaite and Dereck Walcott. The study focuses on the engagement of the two with the mythology of the Caribbean's African experience, defining each poet's contribution to the development of modern Caribbean poetics.
The author examines race, language, and identity in Derek Walcott's poetry, reading Walcott's poetry as an extended meditation on the question of whether it is possible to exist within the English language and an Afro-Caribbean tradition, drawing poetic nourishment from each, or whether the attempt is a betrayal of both. Of mixed racial ancestry, a native speaker of French Creole who was formally educated in British colonial schools, raised Methodist on the Catholic island of St. Lucia, Derek Walcott occupies a peripheral place with respect to both English and Caribbean culture, it is noted. Throughout the course of his poetic career he has been criticized from both perspectives, either for "appropriating the Other" and putting it to use in the service of the dominant culture or for not assimilating that dominant (English) culture fully enough.;
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
228 p, Poesía negra en Colombia; Based on the author’s thesis (doctoral--Indiana University) entitled La poesía negra en Colombia a través de la obra de Candelario Obeso.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
317 p., While a great deal of postcolonial criticism has examined how the processes of hybridity, mestizaje, creolization, and syncretism impact African diasporic literature, Oakley employs the heuristic of the "commonplace" to recast our sense of the politics of such literature. Her analysis of commonplace poetics reveals that postcolonial poetic and political moods and aspirations are far more complex than has been admitted. African Atlantic writers summon the utopian potential of Romanticism, which had been stricken by Anglo-European exclusiveness and racial entitlement, and project it as an attain.
