Caribbean Cultural Identities

"The eight essays in this edition analyze Caribbean culture less as commodity to be consumed than as ontological device and discursive tool/weapon."--BOOK JACKET.

This revised edition is a re-affirmation of the validity of that persistent quest by the Jamaican and Caribbean people for place and purpose in a globalised world of continuous change.

Looking at the development of cultural identity in the global context, this text uses the approach of historical anthropology. It examines the way in which the West Indian Community of Nevis, has, since the 1600s, incorporated both African and European cultural elements into the framework of social life, to create an Afro-Caribbean culture that was distinctive and yet geographically unbounded - a "global culture". The book takes as its point of departure the processes of cultural interaction and reflectivity. It argues that the study of cultural continuity should be guided by the notion of cultural complexity involving the continuous constitution, development and assertion of culture. It emphasizes the interplay between local and global cultures, and examines the importance of cultural display for peoples who have experienced the process of socioeconomic marginalization in the Western world.

The Changing Face of Afro-Caribbean Cultural Identity: Negrismo and N gritude looks primarily at Negrismo and N gritude, two literary movements that appeared in the Francophone and Hispanic Caribbean as well as in Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century. It draws on speeches and manifestos, and use cultural studies to contextualize ideas. It poses the bases of both movements in the Caribbean and in Africa, and lays out the literary antecedents that influenced or shaped both movements. This book examines the search for cultural identity through the poetry of Nicolas Guill n, Manuel del Cabral, and Pal s Matos. This search is extended to the N gritude movement through the poems of L opold Senghor, L on-Gontran Damas, and Aim C saire. Mamadou Badiane further discusses the under-represented N gritude women writers who were silenced by their male counterparts during the first half of the twentieth century. Ultimately, this is a book on Caribbean cultural identity that shows it in a slippery and fluctuating zone. By demonstrating that while the founders of the N gritude movement both identified themselves as descendants of Africans and were proud to proclaim their African heritage, the members of the Antillanit and Cr olit movements see themselves as a product of miscegenation between different cultures.

"The Roots of Caribbean Identity has as its central elements race, place and language. The book presents a movement from a European construction of Caribbean identity towards a more Caribbean construction. The ways in which the identity of the Caribbean region and the identities of the separate islands within the region were shaped are set out in a chronological sequence, starting from the time of the European encounters with the Amerindians and finishing at the end of the nineteenth century."(extrait de la 4ème de couv.).

Using a theoretical approach and a critical summary, combining the perspectives in the postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis and narratology with the tools of hermeneutics and deconstruction, this book argues that Jean Rhys’s work can be subsumed under a poetics of cultural identity and hybridity. It also demonstrates the validity of the concept of hybridization as the expression of identity formation; the cultural boundaries variability; the opposition self-otherness, authenticity-fiction, trans-textuality; and the relevance of an integrated approach to multiple cultural identities as an encountering and negotiation space between writer, reader and work. The complexity of ontological and epistemological representation involves an interdisciplinary approach that blends a literary interpretive approach to social, anthropological, cultural and historical perspectives. The book concludes that in the author’s fictional universe, cultural identity is represented as a general human experience that transcends the specific conditionalities of geographical contexts, history and culture. The construction of identity by Jean Rhys is represented by the dichotomy of marginal identity and the identification with a human ideal designed either by the hegemonic discourse or metropolitan culture or by the dominant ideology. The identification with a pattern of cultural authenticity, of racial, ethnic, or national purism is presented as a purely destructive cultural projection, leading to the creation of a static universe in opposition to the diversity of human feelings and aspirations. Jean Rhys’s fictional discourse lies between “the anxiety of authorship” and “the anxiety of influence” and shows the postcolonial era of uprooting and migration in which the national ownership diluted the image of a “home” ambiguous located at the boundary between a myth of origins and a myth of becoming. The relationship between the individual and socio-cultural space is thus shaped in a dual hybrid position.