Transnational Narratives From The Caribbean

This book offers a timely intervention in current debates on diaspora and diasporic identity by affirming the importance of narrative as a discursive mode to understand the human face of contemporary migrations and dislocations. Focusing on the Caribbean double-diaspora, Pulitano offers a close-reading of a range of popular works by four well-known writers currently living in the United States: Jamaica Kincaid, Michelle Cliff, Edwidge Danticat, and Caryl Phillips. Navigating the map of fictional characters, testimonial accounts, and autobiographical experiences, Pulitano draws attention to the lived experience of contemporary diasporic formations. The book offers a provocative re-thinking of socio-scientific analyses of diaspora by discussing the embodied experience of contemporary diasporic communities, drawing on disciplines such as Caribbean, Postcolonial, Diaspora, and Indigenous Studies along with theories on "border thinking" and coloniality/modernity. Contesting restrictive, national, and linguistic boundaries when discussing literature originating from the Caribbean, Pulitano situates the transnational location of Caribbean-born writers within current debates of Transnational American Studies and investigates the role of immigrant writers in discourses of race, ethnicity, citizenship, and belonging. Exploring the multifarious intersections between home, exile, migration and displacement, the book makes a significant contribution to memory and trauma studies, human rights debates, and international law, aiming at a wide range of scholars and specialized agents beyond the strictly literary circle. This volume affirms the humanity of personal stories and experiences against the invisibility of immigrant subjects in most theoretical accounts of diaspora and migration.

This book offers a timely intervention in current debates on diaspora and diasporic identity by affirming the importance of narrative as a discursive mode to understand the human face of contemporary migrations and dislocations. Focusing on the Caribbean double-diaspora, Pulitano offers a close-reading of a range of popular works by four well-known writers currently living in the United States: Jamaica Kincaid, Michelle Cliff, Edwidge Danticat, and Caryl Phillips. Navigating the map of fictional characters, testimonial accounts, and autobiographical experiences, Pulitano draws attention to the lived experience of contemporary diasporic formations. The book offers a provocative re-thinking of socio-scientific analyses of diaspora by discussing the embodied experience of contemporary diasporic communities, drawing on disciplines such as Caribbean, Postcolonial, Diaspora, and Indigenous Studies along with theories on "border thinking" and coloniality/modernity. Contesting restrictive, national, and linguistic boundaries when discussing literature originating from the Caribbean, Pulitano situates the transnational location of Caribbean-born writers within current debates of Transnational American Studies and investigates the role of immigrant writers in discourses of race, ethnicity, citizenship, and belonging. Exploring the multifarious intersections between home, exile, migration and displacement, the book makes a significant contribution to memory and trauma studies, human rights debates, and international law, aiming at a wide range of scholars and specialized agents beyond the strictly literary circle. This volume affirms the humanity of personal stories and experiences against the invisibility of immigrant subjects in most theoretical accounts of diaspora and migration.

Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Page casts light on the role of citizenship, immigration, and transnational mobility in Caribbean migrant and diaspora fiction. Page's historical, socio-cultural study responds to the general trend in migration discourse that presents the Caribbean experience as unidirectional and uniform across the geographical spaces of home and diaspora. She argues that engaging the Caribbean diaspora and the massive waves of migration from the region that have punctuated its history, involves not only understanding communities in host countries and the conflicted identities of second generation subjectivities, but also interpreting how these communities interrelate with and affect communities at home. In particular, Page examines two socio-economic and political practices, remittance and deportation, exploring how they function as tropes in migrant literature, and as ways of theorizing such literature.

Contemporary Caribbean society emerged within a complex framework of extensive and exploitive interconnections on a global scale, and unequal, inter-cultural, social relations at the local level. This book explores the communities of belonging that Caribbean people have created and sustained, as they have carved out a life for themselves within this context of social, economic and cultural complexity. Caribbean narratives offer a fertile ground in which to explore notions and practices of belonging, because they are rich in empirical data on the lives experienced by various Caribbean people. At the same time they point to the shared socio-cultural orders that give meaning and purpose to these lives. By analyzing narratives as accounts of lived lives, as a way of structuring the past, and as modes of communication and performance, the chapters in this volume develop important insights into Caribbean culture and bring fresh perspectives to cross-cultural research on narratives and their articulation with fields of social relations and sites of cultural identity. The sixteen chapters by anthropologists, geographers, historians and sociologists are based on in-depth research from throughout the Caribbean region and among Caribbean migrants and their descendents in Europe and North America

This book analyzes the concept of the maroon to provide a better understanding of Caribbean literature.

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.

This book examines the concept of queer theory and combines it with the field of diaspora studies. By looking at the queer diasporic narratives in and from the Caribbean, it conducts an inquiry into the workings and underpinnings of both fields.

In 1831, three years before England abolished slavery in the British Caribbean, the narrative of Mary Prince was published in London. It was the first account written by a Caribbean slave to be published. Although narratives and stories of Caribbean women have appeared sporadically in subsequent years, it is only since 1970 that a wave of women's writing has innudated the field, thereby changing the horizons of Caribbean literature.