Los Angeles, CA: University of California, Los Angeles
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
456 p., Ethnographic study of an Afro-Brazilian center in Salvador, Bahia Brazil contributes to theoretical conversations in the anthropology of the body, medical and psychological anthropology, and relational psychoanalysis.
WORLD'S FASTEST man Usain Bolt success could be due to simply human evolution says Canadian Olympic 100m gold medallist Donovan Bailey Following up on a promising youth career, Bolt has gone on to dominate world sprinting since bursting on to the scene big time, with three gold medals at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.
Discusses the popular notions of sexuality that lay behind the women's bodily displays during Trinidad Carnival, the iconic Carnival experience in the region, and contrasts these to some Christian notions of the body and sexuality, which see the body ('the flesh') and sexuality, as problematic even sinful.
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:
196 p., Argues that cultural and literary expressions of illness, suffering, and subjectivity in the postcolonial context are always in dialogue with seemingly external discourses and practices of health. Thus, through sustained analyses of historical, biomedical and sociocultural currents in the context of eight Francophone novels from 1968 to 2003, the book advances a new theory of critical conditions. These critical conditions represent the conjunction of bodily, psychic, and textual states that defy conventional definitions of health and well-being.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
196 p., Focuses on Francophone women writers who offer striking commentaries on the experience of illness and/or disability and its attendant discourses: Haitian writer Marie Chauvet; Guadeloupian-Senegalese writer Myriam Warner-Vieyra; Guadeloupian writer Maryse Condé; Senegalese writers Ken Bugul, Fama Diagne Sène, and Fatou Diome; and Swiss-Gabonese writer Bessora.
This article examines how Aphra Behn employs the language of spectacle and extreme visuality in Oroonoko (1688) as a strategy for conveying exoticism to the reader's gaze. The novella presents the New World landscape, Native American customs, Oroonoko's black body, and his heroism and victimization with a degree of excessive and hyperbolic intensity. I argue that Behn's novella grasps, in a way no other work of its time does, the transformation of the black body into a commodity at the moment of its insertion into circuits of commercial exchange in the Atlantic basin. By focusing on the female narrator's vicarious response to the spectacle of Oroonoko's public execution, I also suggest that the novella formulates fundamental dilemmas intrinsic to scenes of sympathy, dilemmas that would continue to shape the English citizens' engagement with Caribbean slaves throughout the long eighteenth century.
