227 p., Considers the often-silenced, tangible traces that the Haitian Revolution and radical anti-slavery have left in the greater Caribbean as they emerge in contemporary cultural productions. The author looks at national trends in the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Jamaica in order to formulate an understanding of the uses of gendered images of slavery and blackness in modern nation-building campaigns. Critically assesses what is left out of these narratives and how these gaps serve specific purposes. Argues for the centrality of the Caribbean in any true understanding of the history of modernity and the contemporary nation-state by investigating the after-shocks of the Haitian Revolution and of radical anti-slavery.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
161 p, Contents: Introduction : Who were the masters in the Americas? / Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond -- The sugar daddy : Gilberto Freyre and the white man's love for Blacks / César Braga-Pinto -- Writing Brazilian culture / Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond -- Authority's shadowy double : Thomas Jefferson and the architecture of illegitimacy / Helena Holgersson-Shorter -- Race, nation, and the symbolics of servitude in Haitian noirisme / Valerie Kaussen -- Fanon as "metrocolonial" flaneur in the Caribbean post-plantation/Algerian colonial city / Nalini Natarajan -- From the tropics : cultural subjectivity and politics in Gilberto Freyre / Jossianna Arroyo -- Hybridity and mestizaje : sincretism or subversive complicity? Subalternity from the perspective of the coloniality of power / Ramón Grosfoguel -- The rhythm of Macumba : Lívio Abramo's engagement with Afro-Brazilian culture / Luiza Franco Moreira -- Blood, memory, and nation : massacre and mourning in Edwidge Danticat's The farming of bones / Shreerekha Subramanian.
203 p., Examines the presence of slave vocality in Black Atlantic literature, placing the North American tradition of slave narrative against works from authors throughout the United States and the Caribbean. Challenges existing approaches to slave narrative by viewing the genre as one based on the fundamental impossibility of expressing black subjectivity under the political, ethical, and psychic conditions of slavery. The slave narrative thus ceases to represent an attempt by former slaves to access freedom and agency through writing, along with its promises of reason and autonomy, but rather signals (or sounds) a process of expression built not upon meaning, but upon signification. In other words, rather than crafting themselves into legible objects for the sake of narration and perception, slave narrators performed their roles as exchangeable units, both discursive and political, in ways that exposed the underlying lacunae of being a slave-narrator, a significative protocol that persists in contemporary black fiction throughout the Atlantic, even in areas in which the slave narrative did not historically emerge.
In characterizing the desperate journeys undertaken by African and Haitian refugees as today's "middle passages," Caryl Phillips's A Distant Shore and Edwidge Danticat's "Children of the Sea" complicate the idea of a single origin to a transatlantic black Diaspora. The term 'middle passage' is more recently used to describe multiple crossings that transform the meaning of Diaspora into a vital and ongoing process.
