African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
358 p, Chancy aims to show that Haiti’s exclusion is grounded in its historical role as a site of ontological defiance. Her premise is that writers Edwidge Danticat, Julia Alvarez, Zoé Valdés, Loida Maritza Pérez, Marilyn Bobes, Achy Obejas, Nancy Morejón, and visual artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons attempt to defy fears of “otherness” by assuming the role of “archaeologists of amnesia.” They seek to elucidate women’s variegated lives within the confining walls of their national identifications—identifications wholly defined as male. They reach beyond the confining limits of national borders to discuss gender, race, sexuality, and class in ways that render possible the linking of all three nations.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
247 p., Explores the literary tradition of Caribbean Latino literature written in the U.S. beginning with José Martí and concluding with 2008 Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, Junot Díaz. The contributors consider the way that spatial migration in literature serves as a metaphor for gender, sexuality, racial, identity, linguistic, and national migrations. The essays in this collection reveal the multiple ways that writers of this tradition use their unique positioning as both insiders and outsides to critique U.S. hegemonic discourses while simultaneously interrogating national discourses in their home countries.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
194 p., Includes Marie-José Nzengou-Tayo's "Prejuicios acerca de la independencia haitiana : viento negro, Bosque del Caiman de Carlos Esteban Deive," Silvia Valero's "De 'negros' y 'mulatos' en la literatura cubana contemporánea : Elíseo Altunaga, Marta Rojas y la re-escritura de la historia," and Felix Ayoh'Omidire's "La identidad frente al poder : la asimetría ritual de Yemayá en Africa y América Latina."
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
248 p., Case studies dealing with a variety of black British and ethnic American writers, Home, identity, and mobility in contemporary diasporic fiction shows how new identities and homes are constructed in the migrants' new homelands. Includes chapter on Black British perspectives. From black Britain to the Caribbean : the return of the (im)migrant in Caryl Phillips's A state of independence.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
212 p., Examines writers, such as Louise Bennett, Aimé Césaire, Junot Díaz, Zora Neale Hurston, Derek Walcott, and Anthony Winkler, who engage humor to challenge representations of people of African descent within canonical Western texts and forms.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
226 p., Investigates how these entrenched notions of paradise, which islands have traditionally represented metonymically, are contested in the works of four postcolonial authors: Jamaica Kincaid, Lawrence Scott, Romesh Gunesekera, and Jean Arasanayagam, from the island nations of the Caribbean and Sri Lanka.
