Caribbean Perspectives On Modernity

Taking up the challenge of redefining modernity from a Caribbean perspective instead of assuming that the North Atlantic view of modernity is universal, Maria Cristina Fumagalli shows how the Caribbean's contributions to the modern world not only provide a more accurate account of the past but also have the potential to change the way in which we imagine the future. Fumagalli uses the myth of Medusa's gaze turning people into stone to describe the way North Atlantic modernity freezes its "others" into a state of perpetual backwardness that produces an ethnocentric narrative based on homogenization, vilification, and disempowerment that actively ignores what fails to conform to the story it wants to tell about itself. In analyzing narratives of modernity that originate in the Caribbean, the author explores the region's refusal to succumb to Medusa's spell and highlights its strategies to outstare the Gorgon. Reflecting a diversity of texts, genres, and media, the chapters focus on sixteenth-century engravings and paintings from the Netherlands and Italy, a scientific romance produced at the turn of the twentieth century by the king of the Caribbean island Redonda, contemporary collections of poetry from the anglophone Caribbean, a historical novel by the Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé, a Latin epic, a Homeric hymn, ancient Egyptian rites, fairy tales, romances from England and Jamaica, a long narrative poem by the Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott, and paintings by artists from Europe and the Americas spanning the seventeenth century to the present. Caribbean Perspectives on Modernity offers an original and creative contribution to what it means to be modern.

Reflecting a diversity of texts, genres, and media, the chapters focus on sixteenth-century engravings and paintings from the Netherlands and Italy, a scientific romance produced at the turn of the twentieth century by the king of the Caribbean island Redonda, contemporary collections of poetry from the anglophone Caribbean, a historical novel by the Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé, a Latin epic, a Homeric hymn, ancient Egyptian rites, fairy tales, romances from England and Jamaica, a long narrative poem by the Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott, and paintings by artists from Europe and the Americas spanning the seventeenth century to the present

perspectives on The Caribbean perspectives on The Caribbean “Genuflecting to no tried metaphors, this is a refreshing collection of cross-disciplinary voices that compel new ways of seeing and thinking about the still undiscovered Caribbean.” Patricia Mohammed, University of the west Indies, St Augustine Presenting a broad understanding of the complex region of the Caribbean, Perspectives on the Caribbean: A Reader in Culture, History, and Representation provides a variety of viewpoints on the rich spectrum of Caribbean culture. Essays, carefully chosen from a vast body of existing literature, expose readers to a variety of approaches, voices and topics that have emerged in Caribbean studies. Readings are interdisciplinary in nature and integrate themes from history, folklore, sociology, anthropology and political economy. Both contemporary viewpoints and classic readings reveal how the Caribbean has led scholars to new ways of exploring cultural hybridity in contemporary society. Each section includes brief introductions to put the readings in context with the connections between modern Caribbean culture and its historical roots, and also includes suggested readings for more in-depth study. Perspectives on the Caribbean offers revealing insights into one of the most diverse and complex regions in the Americas.

This volume examines the theme of fusion in Caribbean dance from a wide range of perspectives, including its socio-cultural-historical formation. The contributions are drawn from a conference entitled “Caribbean Fusion Dance Works: Rituals of Modern Society”, which focused primarily on the Caribbean as a unique locale. However, chapters on dance fusions in other diasporic locations and the sustainability of dance as an art form are also included here in order to offer a sense of an inevitable and, in some instances, desirable evolution due to the globalizing forces that continue to influence dance.

A study of the importance of debates about obeah, and state suppression of it, for Caribbean struggles about freedom and citizenship.

In contemporary Anglo-Caribbean literature, the dialectic interrelations of “exile” and “return” are essential for conveying meta-reflections on literature and language, as well as the role they play in the construction of personal and collective identities. While this volume focuses on the specificity of a cultural area whose history is marked by colonialism, diaspora, slavery and racial conflicts, it also raises epistemological questions surrounding the complexity of literature, and its function in a world which is ever more composite, hybrid and transcultural. By developing a new, systematic approach which combines post-colonial studies, theories of intertextuality and philosophy of language, it explores how contemporary literary texts reflect, elaborate and redefine the experiences of societies that are currently dealing with ever-growing global interdependencies and newly-formed cultural and semiotic context.

The Caribbean has played a crucial geopolitical role in the Western pursuit of economic dominance, yet Eurocentric research usually treats the Caribbean as a peripheral region, consequently labelling the inhabitants as beings without agency. Examining asymmetrical relations of power in the Greater Caribbean in historical and contemporary perspectives, this volume explores the region’s history of resistance and subversion of oppressive structures against the backdrop of the Caribbean’s central role for the accumulation of wealth of European and North American actors and the respective dialectics of modernity/coloniality, through a variety of experiences inducing migration, transnational exchange and transculturation. Contributors approach the Caribbean as an empowered space of opposition and agency and focus on perspectives of the region as a place of entanglements with a long history of political and cultural practices of resistance to colonization, inequality, heteronomy, purity, invisibilization, and exploitation. An important contribution to the literature on agency and resistance in the Caribbean, this volume offers a new perspective on the region as a geopolitically, economically and culturally crucial space, and it will interest researchers in the fields of Caribbean politics, literature and heritage, colonialism, entangled histories, global studies perspectives, ethnicity, gender, and migration.

Situated opposite the mouth of the Orinoco River, western Trinidad has long been considered an entrepôt to mainland South America. Trinidad’s geographic position—seen as strategic by various imperial governments—led to many heterogeneous peoples from across the region and globe settling or being relocated there. The calm waters around the Gulf of Paria on the western fringes of Trinidad induced settlers to construct a harbour, Port of Spain, around which the modern capital has been formed. From its colonial roots into the postcolonial era, western Trinidad therefore has played an especial part in the shaping of the island’s literature. Viewed from one perspective, western Trinidad might be deemed as narrating the heart of the modern state’s national literature. Alternatively, the political threats posed around San Fernando in Trinidad’s southwest in the 1930s and from within the capital in the 1970s present a different picture of western Trinidad—one in which the fractures of Trinidad and Tobago’s projected nationalism are prevalent. While sugar remains a dominant narrative in Caribbean literary studies, this book offers a unique literary perspective on matters too often perceived as the sole preserve of sociological, anthropological or geographical studies. The legacy of the oil industry and the development of the suburban commuter belt of East-West Corridor, therefore, form considerable discursive nodes, alongside other key Trinidadian sites, such as Woodford Square, colonial houses and the urban yards of Port of Spain. This study places works by well-known authors such as V. S. Naipaul and Samuel Selvon, alongside writing by Michel Maxwell Philip, Marcella Fanny Wilkins, E. L. Joseph, Earl Lovelace, Ismith Khan, Monique Roffey, Arthur Calder-Marshall and the largely neglected novelist, Yseult Bridges, who is almost entirely forgotten today. Using fiction, calypso, history, memoir, legal accounts, poetry, essays and journalism, this study opens with an analysis of Trinidad’s nineteenth century literature and offers twentieth century and more contemporary readings of the island in successive chapters. Chapters are roughly arranged in chronological order around particular sites and topoi, while literature from a variety of authors of British, Caribbean, Irish and Jewish descent is represented.