A History Of Literature In The Caribbean Cross Cultural Studies

Cross-Cultural Studies is the culminating effort of a distinguished team of international scholars who have worked since the mid-1980s to create the most complete analysis of Caribbean literature ever undertaken. Conceived as a major contribution to postcolonial studies, cultural studies, cultural anthropology, and regional studies of the Caribbean and the Americas, Cross-Cultural Studies illuminates the interrelations between and among Europe, the Caribbean islands, Africa, and the American continents from the late fifteenth century to the present. Scholars from five continents bring to bear on the most salient issues of Caribbean literature theoretical and critical positions that are currently in the forefront of discussion in literature, the arts, and public policy. Among the major issues treated at length in Cross-Cultural Studies are: The history and construction of racial inequality in Caribbean colonization; The origins and formation of literatures in various Creoles; The gendered literary representation of the Caribbean region; The political and ideological appropriation of Caribbean history in creating the idea of national culture in North and South America, Europe, and Africa; The role of the Caribbean in contemporary theories of Modernism and the Postmodern; The decentering of such canonical authors as Shakespeare; The vexed but inevitable connectedness of Caribbean literature with both its former colonial metropoles and its geographical neighbors. Contributions to Cross-Cultural Studies give a concrete cultural and historical analysis of such contemporary critical terms as hybridity, transculturation, and the carnivalesque, which have so often been taken out of context and employed in narrowly ideological contexts. Two important theories of the simultaneous unity and diversity of Caribbean literature and culture, propounded by Antonio Benítez-Rojo and +douard Glissant, receive extended treatment that places them strategically in the debate over multiculturalism in postcolonial societies and in the context of chaos theory. A contribution by Benítez-Rojo permits the reader to test the theory through his critical practice. Divided into nine thematic and methodological sections followed by a complete index to the names and dates of authors and significant historical figures discussed, Cross-Cultural Studies will be an indispensable resource for every library and a necessary handbook for scholars, teachers, and advanced students of the Caribbean region.

For the first time the Dutch-speaking regions of the Caribbean and Suriname are brought into fruitful dialogue with another major American literature, that of the anglophone Caribbean. The results are as stimulating as they are unexpected. The editors have coordinated the work of a distinguished international team of specialists. Read separately or as a set of three volumes, the History of Literature in the Caribbean is designed to serve as the primary reference book in this area. The reader can follow the comparative evolution of a literary genre or plot the development of a set of historical problems under the appropriate heading for the English- or Dutch-speaking region. An extensive index to names and dates of authors and significant historical figures completes the volume. The subeditors bring to their respective specialty areas a wealth of Caribbeanist experience. Vera M. Kutzinski is Professor of English, American, and Afro-American Literature at Yale University. Her book Sugar's Secrets: Race and The Erotics of Cuban Nationalism, 1993, treated a crucial subject in the romance of the Caribbean nation. Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger has been very active in Latin American and Caribbean literary criticism for two decades, first at the Free University in Berlin and later at the University of Maryland. The editor of A History of Literature in the Caribbean, A. James Arnold, is Professor of French at the University of Virginia, where he founded the New World Studies graduate program. Over the past twenty years he has been a pioneer in the historical study of the Négritude movement and its successors in the francophone Caribbean.

Beyond Borders is a multidisciplinary collection of essays with a focus on contemporary issues in Caribbean cultural studies. Culture and cultural identification are, without a doubt, highly charged political Goliaths with local and global ramifications. As a result, there is a growing demand for information in the field for both research and teaching purposes. The essays in this collection explore cross-cultural themes and issues across a range of disciplines that include literature, language, education, history and popular culture. The issues of cultural survival and negotiation, with which most of these essays deal, serve to foreground a history of domination, resistance and marvellous transformations within and beyond the borders of this archipelago. It is no longer possible to pass culture off as simply a matter of commonalities, interests and values, as if politics and power were innocent of influencing what gets defined and consumed as culture. Beyond Borders offers a forum for contemporary debates on Caribbean culture in its ongoing process of evolution. Book jacket.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Caribbean and Latin American studies, social and cultural history, women and gender studies, and diasporic studies. In addition, given the transnational and transdisciplinary nature of the books themes, it will also attract the attention of academics whose research focuses more generally on ethnic, postcolonial and Atlantic studies. The volume complements existing Caribbean titles across linguistic borders. However, its distinguishing feature is the intertextual unity, quality and visual imagery of the essays. The book explores the ways in which Caribbean writers, artists and literary scholars explore in their narratives a historical process embedded in genocidal, spatial and ecocidal violence seared in their pasts and their present. It draws attention intertextually to the way history shapes the memories of Caribbean writers, literary critics and artists, and the inventive ways they have found to remember the afterlife of those practices.

The Caribbean has traditionally been understood as a region that did not develop a significant ‘native’ literary culture until the postcolonial period. Indeed, most literary histories of the Caribbean begin with the texts associated with the independence movements of the early twentieth century. However, as recent research has shown, although the printing press did not arrive in the Caribbean until 1718, the roots of Caribbean literary history predate its arrival. This collection contributes to this research by filling a significant gap in literary and historical knowledge with the first collection of essays specifically focused on the literatures of the early Caribbean before 1850.

From wide-ranging overviews of the entire region to close readings of specific works, this volume opens a fascinating window on the literatures and cultures of the Caribbean, covering texts in the multiplicity of languages used in the wider Caribbean: Spanish, English, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and the region’s many creoles. Authors and works discussed range from luminaries such as Derek Walcott to hitherto practically unknown works in Antillean creole languages. Underlying is the idea to foster the study of the Caribbean literary, artistic and visual text through a comparative lens, a firm proposal to think beyond the persisting linguistic barriers and scholarly divides in the field. As such, Caribbeing: Comparing Caribbean Literatures and Cultures brings a new approach to the Caribbean embracing the region’s linguistic multiplicity and complexity without eschewing the many theoretical challenges and obstacles such a scholarly endeavor entails. Because of its ample scope this book will appeal to scholars and students working on the Caribbean and Latin America, but also to those interested in the broader fields of postcolonial and cultural studies. “This book is much more than a book on the Caribbean: it underlines the global dimensions and relevance of Caribbean Studies in the twenty-first century. Following carefully the crossroads of literatures and cultures, it shows new routes allowing us to rethink our world(s) in a transarchipelagic mode. An eye-opener: accelerated globalization is unthinkable without the Caribbean.” (Ottmar Ette, University of Potsdam) “Rarely have the multiple flows and enduring traumas of Caribbean culture been explored from such a boldly wide-ranging and profoundly comparative set of perspectives. An indispensable work that sets a new standard for Caribbeanist scholarship.” (Maarten van Delden, Universtiy of California, Los Angeles)