Bøker i New World Studies-serien

Focusing on the literary representation of performance practices in anglophone, francophone, and hispanophone Caribbean literature, Jeannine Murray-Romn shows how a shared regional aesthetic emerges from the descriptions of music, dance, and oral storytelling events. Because the historical circumstances that led to the development of performance traditions supersede the geopolitical and linguistic divisions of colonialism, the literary uses of these traditions resonate across the linguistic boundaries of the region. The author thus identifies the aesthetic that emerges from the act of writing about live arts and moving bodies as a practice that is grounded in the historically, geographically, and culturally specific features of the Caribbean itself. Working with twentieth- and twenty-first-century sources ranging from theatrical works and novels to blogs, Murray-Romn examines the ways in which writers such as Jacques Stephen Alexis, Zo Valds, Rosario Ferr, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Marlon James experiment with textually compensating for the loss of the corporeality of live relationship in performance traditions. Through their exploration of the interaction of literature and performance, she argues, Caribbean writers themselves offer a mode of bridging the disjunction between cultural and philosophical approaches within Caribbean studies.

In Market Aesthetics, Elena Machado Saez explores the popularity of Caribbean diasporic writing within an interdisciplinary, comparative, and pan-ethnic framework. She contests established readings of authors such as Junot Daz, Julia Alvarez, Edwidge Danticat, and Robert Antoni while showcasing the work of emerging writers such as David Chariandy, Marlon James, and Monique Roffey. By reading these writers as part of a transnational literary trend rather than within isolated national ethnic traditions, the author is able to show how this fiction adopts market aesthetics to engage the mixed blessings of multiculturalism and globalization via the themes of gender and sexuality.New World StudiesModern Language Initiative

A leader in the social movement that achieved Trinidad and Tobago's independence from Britain in 1962, Eric Williams (1911-1981) served as its first prime minister. Although much has been written about Williams as a historian and a politician, Maurice St. Pierre is the first to offer a full-length treatment of him as an intellectual. St. Pierre focuses on Williams's role not only in challenging the colonial exploitation of Trinbagonians but also in seeking to educate and mobilize them in an effort to generate a collective identity in the struggle for independence. Drawing on extensive archival research and using a conflated theoretical framework, the author offers a portrait of Williams that shows how his experiences in Trinidad, England, and America radicalized him and how his relationships with other Caribbean intellectuals-along with Aim Csaire in Martinique, Juan Bosch in the Dominican Republic, George Lamming of Barbados, and Frantz Fanon from Martinique-enabled him to seize opportunities for social change and make a significant contribution to Caribbean epistemology.

In the history of the early twentieth-century Americas, visions of hemispheric unity flourished, and the notion of a transnational American identity was embraced by artists, intellectuals, and government institutions. In The Pan American Imagination, Stephen Park explores the work of several Pan American modernists who challenged the body of knowledge being produced about Latin America, crossing the disciplinary boundaries of academia as well as the formal boundaries of artistic expression-from literary texts and travel writing to photography, painting, and dance. Park invests in an interdisciplinary approach, which he frames as a politically resistant intellectual practice, using it not only to examine the historical phenomenon of Pan Americanism but also to explore the implications for current transnational scholarship.

In Bodies and Bones, Tanya Shields argues that a repeated engagement with the Caribbean's iconic and historic touchstones offers a new sense of (inter)national belonging that brings an alternative and dynamic vision to the gendered legacy of brutality against black bodies, flesh, and bone. Using a distinctive methodology she calls "e;feminist rehearsal"e; to chart the Caribbean's multiple and contradictory accounts of historical events, the author highlights the gendered and emergent connections between art, history, and belonging. By drawing on a significant range of genres-novels, short stories, poetry, plays, public statuary, and painting-Shields proposes innovative interpretations of the work of Grace Nichols, Pauline Melville, Fred D'Aguiar, Alejo Carpentier, Edwidge Danticat, Aim Csaire, Marie-Hlne Cauvin, and Rose Marie Desruisseau. She shows how empathetic alliances can challenge both hierarchical institutions and regressive nationalisms and facilitate more democratic interaction.

The idea of "e;world literature"e; has served as a crucial though underappreciated interlocutor for African diasporic writers, informing their involvement in processes of circulation, translation, and revision that have been identified as the hallmarks of the contemporary era of world literature. Yet in spite of their participation in world systems before and after European hegemony, Africa and the African diaspora have been excluded from the networks and archives of world literature. In Sounding the Break, Jason Frydman attempts to redress this exclusion by drawing on historiography, ethnography, and archival sources to show how writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Alejo Carpentier, Derek Walcott, Maryse Cond and Toni Morrison have complicated both Eurocentric and Afrocentric categories of literary and cultural production. Through their engagement with and revision of the European world literature discourse, he contends, these writers conjure a deep history of "e;literary traffic"e; whose expressions are always already cosmopolitan, embedded in the long histories of cultural and economic exchange between Africa, Asia, and Europe. It is precisely the New World American location of these writers, Frydman concludes, that makes possible this revisionary perspective on the idea of (Old) World literature.

The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) reshaped the debates about slavery and freedom throughout the Atlantic world, accelerated the abolitionist movement, precipitated rebellions in neighboring territories, and intensified both repression and antislavery sentiment. The story of the birth of the world's first independent black republic has since held an iconic fascination for a diverse array of writers, artists, and intellectuals throughout the Atlantic diaspora. Examining twentieth-century responses to the Haitian Revolution, Philip Kaisary offers a profound new reading of the representation of the Revolution by radicals and conservatives alike in primary texts that span English, French, and Spanish languages and that include poetry, drama, history, biography, fiction, and opera. In a complementary focus on canonical works by Aim Csaire, C. L. R. James, Edouard Glissant, and Alejo Carpentier in addition to the work of Ren Depestre, Langston Hughes, and Madison Smartt Bell, Kaisary argues that the Haitian Revolution generated an enduring cultural and ideological inheritance. He addresses critical understandings and fictional reinventions of the Revolution and thinks through how, and to what effect, authors of major diasporic texts have metamorphosed and appropriated this spectacular corner of black revolutionary history.

Pathologies of Paradise presents the rich complexity of anglophone Caribbean literature from pluralistic perspectives that contest the reduction of the region to Edenic or infernal stereotypes. But rather than reiterate the familiar critiques of these stereotypes, Supriya Nair draws on the trope of the detour to plumb the depths of anti-paradise discourse, showing how the Caribbean has survived its history of colonization and slavery. In her reading of authors such as Jamaica Kincaid, Michelle Cliff, V. S. Naipaul, Zadie Smith, Junot Daz, and Pauline Melville, among others, she examines dominant symbols and events that shape the literature and history of postslavery and postcolonial societies: the garden and empire, individual and national trauma, murder and massacre, contagion and healing, grotesque humor and the carnivalesque. In ranging across multiple contexts, generations, and genres, the book maps a syncretic and flexible approach to Caribbean literature that demonstrates the supple literary cartographies of New World identities.

Drawing on narratives from Martinique by Aime Cesaire, Edouard Glissant, Ina Csaire, and Patrick Chamoiseau, among others, Christina Kullberg shows how these writers turn to ethnography-even as they critique it-as an exploration and expression of the self. They acknowledge its tradition as a colonial discourse and a study of others, but they also argue for ethnography's advantage in connecting subjectivity to the outside world. Further, they find that ethnography offers the possibility of capturing within the hybrid culture of the Caribbean an emergent self that nonetheless remains attached to its collective history and environment. Rather than claiming to be able to represent the culture they also feel alienated from, these writers explore the relationships between themselves, the community, and the environment. Although Kullberg's focus is on Martinique, her work opens up possibilities for intertextual readings and comparative studies of writers from every linguistic region in the Caribbean-not only francophone but also Hispanic and anglophone. In addition, her interdisciplinary approach extends the reach of her work beyond postcolonial and literary studies to anthropology and ecocriticism.

Although the questions of modernity and postmodernity are debated as frequently in the Caribbean as in other cultural zones, the Enlightenment-generally considered the origin of European modernity-is rarely discussed as such in the Caribbean context. Paul B. Miller constellates modern Caribbean writers of varying national and linguistic traditions whose common thread is their representation of the Enlightenment and the Age of Revolution in the Caribbean. In a comparative reading of such writers as Alejo Carpentier (Cuba), C. L. R. James (Trinidad), Marie Chauvet (Haiti), Maryse Cond (Guadeloupe), Reinaldo Arenas (Cuba), and Edgardo Rodrguez Juli (Puerto Rico), Miller shows how these authors deploy their historical imagination in order to assess and reevaluate the elusive and often conflicted origins of their own modernity.Miller documents the conceptual and ideological shift from an earlier generation of writers to a more recent one whose narrative strategies bear a strong resemblance to postmodern cultural practices, including the use of parody in targeting their discursive predecessors, the questioning of Enlightenment assumptions, and a suspicion regarding the dialectical unfolding of history as their precursors understood it. By positing the Cuban Revolution as a dividing line between the earlier generation and their postmodern successors, Miller confers a Caribbean specificity upon the commonplace notion of postmodernity.The dual advantage of Elusive Origins's thematic specificity coupled with its inclusiveness allows a reflection on canonical writers in conjunction with lesser-known figures. Furthermore, the inclusion of Francophone and Anglophone writers in addition to those from the Hispanic Caribbean opens up the volume geographically, linguistically, and nationally, expanding its contribution to a nonessentialist understanding of the Caribbean in a Latin American, Atlantic, and global context.

Exhibiting Slavery examines the ways in which Caribbean postmodern historical novels about slavery written in Spanish, English, and French function as virtual museums, simultaneously showcasing and curating a collection of "e;primary documents"e; within their pages. As Vivian Nun Halloran attests, these novels highlight narrative "e;objects"e; extraneous to their plot-such as excerpts from the work of earlier writers, allusions to specific works of art, the uniforms of maroon armies assembled in preparation of a military offensive, and accounts of slavery's negative impact on the traditional family unit in Africa or the United States. In doing so, they demand that their readers go beyond the pages of the books to sort out fact from fiction and consider what relationship these featured "e;objects"e; have to slavery and to contemporary life. The self-referential function of these texts produces a "e;museum effect"e; that simultaneously teaches and entertains their readers, prompting them to continue their own research beyond and outside the text.

The first essay collection to consider the Caribbean's relationship to Jewishness through a literary lens. Although Caribbean novelists and poets regularly incorporate Jewish motifs in their work, scholars have neglected this strain in studies of Caribbean literature.

The first essay collection to consider the Caribbean's relationship to Jewishness through a literary lens. Although Caribbean novelists and poets regularly incorporate Jewish motifs in their work, scholars have neglected this strain in studies of Caribbean literature.

Argues that the Haitian Revolution nonetheless had an enduring cultural and political impact, particularly on peoples and communities that have been marginalized in the historical record and absent from the discourses of Western historiography. This book interrogates the literary, historical, and political discourses that the Revolution produced.

A study of post-slavery literatures in the Americas. Examining major novels from 1880 to the 1970s, the author shows how fiction from different nations shares what he calls textual simultaneity in revealing parallel narrative anxieties about genealogy, narrative authority and racial difference.

The 1992 quincentennial of the encounter between the Old and New World resulted in a polarisation of hardened ideological positions on different ideas of America. This text demonstrates that both sides are interested in defending an idea of ""Americanness"".