Contemporary Caribbean Writing And Deleuze

Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze maps a new intellectual and literary history of postcolonial Caribbean writing and thought spanning from the 1930s surrealist movement to the present, crossing the region's language blocs, and focused on the interconnected principles of creativity and commemoration. Exploring the work of René Ménil, Édouard Glissant, Wilson Harris, Derek Walcott, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Pauline Melville, Robert Antoni and Nalo Hopkinson, this study reveals the explicit and implicit engagement with Deleuzian thought at work in contemporary Caribbean writing. Uniting for the first time two major schools of contemporary thought - postcolonialism and post-continental philosophy - this study establishes a new and innovative critical discourse for Caribbean studies and postcolonial theory beyond the oppositional dialectic of colonizer and colonized. Drawing from Deleuze's writings on Bergson, Nietzsche and Spinoza, this study interrogates the postcolonial tropes of newness, becoming, relationality and a philosophical concept of immanence that lie at the heart of a little-observed dialogue between contemporary Caribbean writers and Deleuze.

Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze maps a new intellectual and literary history of postcolonial Caribbean writing and thought spanning from the 1930s surrealist movement to the present, crossing the region's language blocs, and focused on the interconnected principles of creativity and commemoration. Exploring the work of René Ménil, Édouard Glissant, Wilson Harris, Derek Walcott, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Pauline Melville, Robert Antoni and Nalo Hopkinson, this study reveals the explicit and implicit engagement with Deleuzian thought at work in contemporary Caribbean writing. Uniting for the first time two major schools of contemporary thought - postcolonialism and post-continental philosophy - this study establishes a new and innovative critical discourse for Caribbean studies and postcolonial theory beyond the oppositional dialectic of colonizer and colonized. Drawing from Deleuze's writings on Bergson, Nietzsche and Spinoza, this study interrogates the postcolonial tropes of newness, becoming, relationality and a philosophical concept of immanence that lie at the heart of a little-observed dialogue between contemporary Caribbean writers and Deleuze.

Postcolonial studies took shape in response to the nationalist and decolonization movements of the twentieth century. Today, a resurgent interest in world literature reflects an increased awareness of globalization. These twin projects are torn between a criticism that finds in the text the trace of capitalist modernity and one that accounts for the revolutionary potential of literature to challenge our global present. Postcolonialism After World Literature exposes what is at stake in this critical choice through a line of philosophical enquiry – Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Rancière – that poses an alternative to the materialist strand of world literary criticism pioneered by Pascale Casanova and Franco Moretti. Engaging with these theorists and others, Lorna Burns contests world-systems theory as the basis for thinking about contemporary postcolonial and world literatures, and proposes a renewed framework that promotes literature's capacity to provoke dissent; to imagine new forms of belonging and relation for both national and world citizens; and to stage the shared equality of all. Moving between theory and the novels of Roberto Bolaño, J. M. Coetzee, Kamel Daoud, Dany Laferrière, Pauline Melville, Arundhati Roy and Kamila Shamsie, Postcolonialism After World Literature presents the case for rethinking world literature in light of the legacies of postcolonialism, and for reshaping postcolonial studies in an era of world literature. Lorna Burns is Lecturer in Postcolonial Literatures at the University of St Andrews, UK. She is the author of Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze (Bloomsbury, 2012).

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.

This book links postcolonial theory with structuralism and poststructuralism to show how analysis of the textual illuminates the political and ideological positions of French Caribbean writers.

Diagnosing Postcolonial Literature is a fresh and needed intervention into the study of postcolonial literature and the postcolonial condition. Deleuze's notion that literature is an enterprise of health, and that great authors consequently are diagnosticians of their culture, can be applied to postcolonial literature. The methodology, however, goes beyond the Deleuzian approach and offers a rich synthesis of Deleuze and Guattari with a range of different frameworks including health and human rights issues, the capabilities approach of Sen and Nussbaum, and the quantitative formalism of Moretti. This book majorly seeks to combine the study of postcolonial literature (a field in which Deleuze and Guattari are often used) with social sciences and quantitative methods. The work is genuinely interdisciplinary and breaks new ground both for the study of postcolonial literature and applications of Deleuze and Guattari. It does this while maintaining a focus on 'health', broadly conceived in as an assemblage, in Deleuzian fashion.

A career-spanning assessment of Glissant’s work as a philosophical project. With a career spanning more than fifty years as a writer, scholar, and public intellectual, Édouard Glissant produced an astonishingly wide range of work, including poems, novels, essays, pamphlets, and theater. In Think Like an Archipelago, Michael Wiedorn offers a fresh interpretation of Glissant’s work as a cohesive and explicitly philosophical project, paying particular attention to the last two decades of his career, which have received much less attention in the English-speaking world despite their remarkable productivity. Focusing his study on the idea of paradox, Wiedorn argues that it is fundamental to Caribbean culture and thought, and at the heart of Glissant’s philosophy. The question of difference has long played a central role in the literary and philosophical traditions of the West, however to think differently, Glissant suggests focusing elsewhere: on the post-plantation societies of the Caribbean, and the Americas more broadly. For Glissant, paradoxical lessons drawn from the natural and cultural realities of the Caribbean can point to new ways of thinking and being in the world: in other words, to the creation of what Glissant calls a “new category of literature,” and in turn to the attainment of his utopian political vision. Thinking through such paradoxes, Wiedorn demonstrates, can offer new perspectives on the old questions of totality, alterity, teleology, and the potential of philosophy itself. “The book’s use of the central concept of paradox is both original and convincing, and allows Wiedorn to reframe many of the issues surrounding Glissant’s thought in a new and illuminating way.” — Celia Britton, author of Édouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance

Bringing together high profile scholars in the fields of Deleuze and postcolonial studies, this book highlights the overlooked connections between two major schools of contemporary criticism and establishes a new critical discourse for postcolonial literature and theory.