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Caribbean Migrant Writers and the Politics of Return

Angelique V. Nixon

in Resisting Paradise: Tourism, Diaspora, and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture

Chapter two focuses on well-known Afro-Caribbean women writers, Jamaica Kincaid and Edwidge Danticat, who reside in the United States and make a significant contribution to “resistance culture.” ... More

Chapter two focuses on well-known Afro-Caribbean women writers, Jamaica Kincaid and Edwidge Danticat, who reside in the United States and make a significant contribution to “resistance culture.” Through narratives of return, Kincaid and Danticat challenge exploitative consumption and tourism in their literary works by exposing and utilizing the power that lies in the production of history. They do this by using their mobility and prominence in North American literary markets to inform potential tourists and fellow Caribbeans abroad of the injustices of the tourist industry that are rooted in the history of slavery and colonialism. Kincaid directly confronts and criticizes the tourist industry in her satirical essay/memoir A Small Place; while Danticat participates in and critiques the tourist industry with her travel guide/memoir After the Dance. They produce alternative travel narratives that resist the travel guide genre, which has historically defined “natives” (the other) outside of history, modernity, and humanity.Less

Introduction the Consequences of Ex-Centricity

in Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon

Taking as a point of departure the notion that critical appreciation of writers in the French–speaking Caribbean is connected to a given author's theoretical training in France, this introductory ... More

Taking as a point of departure the notion that critical appreciation of writers in the French–speaking Caribbean is connected to a given author's theoretical training in France, this introductory chapter examines what happens to writers — like Frankétienne, Fignolé, and Philoctète — who choose or are obliged to remain physically anchored in the space of their island. What are the consequences for those who refuse the voyage to Paris along with certain of the theory–centric underpinnings of literature this voyage implies? Further, in what ways might franco–theory–centric approaches be deployed in analyzing New World literature in French without abstracting or de–specifying regional or local traditions?Less

Black Female Travel: Diasporic Connections and Revolutionary Desire

Angelique V. Nixon

in Resisting Paradise: Tourism, Diaspora, and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture

The Caribbean American writers examined in chapter three, Paule Marshall and Audre Lorde, seek a spiritual home in the Caribbean, the home of their parents and ancestors. More specifically, they ... More

The Caribbean American writers examined in chapter three, Paule Marshall and Audre Lorde, seek a spiritual home in the Caribbean, the home of their parents and ancestors. More specifically, they write and thereby claim multiple homes in transnational spaces through the Caribbean and an African diasporic identity. Both Marshall and Lorde directly challenge neocolonial discourse and tourism by creating alternative Black female travel narratives that represent diasporic travel, identity, and multiple homespaces. They both introduce new forms of tourism and possibilities for resistance to neocolonialism, while uncovering the strong continuities between the racial, sexual, and gender dynamics of colonialism (and slavery) and neocolonialism (and tourism).Less

Endangered Species Caribbean Ecology and the Discourse of the Nation

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert

in Displacements and Transformations in Caribbean Cultures

This chapter discusses how Caribbean writers have addressed the ecological revolution brought about by colonization first, and the sugar plantation, and in the beginning of the twentieth century the ... More

This chapter discusses how Caribbean writers have addressed the ecological revolution brought about by colonization first, and the sugar plantation, and in the beginning of the twentieth century the dependence on the tourist economy. The chapter argues that deforestation, the depletion of resources, and the permanent alteration of pre-encounter topographies that followed in the wake of the colonial encounter initiated a process. The consequences of this process have brought the island nations of the Caribbean to desperate ecological straits.Less

Contexts and Intertexts

Wendy Knepper

in Patrick Chamoiseau: A Critical Introduction

This chapter first sets out the book’s purpose, which is to introduce Chamoiseau’s oeuvre and the growing field of related critical studies. By taking into account the various facets of Chamoiseau’s ... More

This chapter first sets out the book’s purpose, which is to introduce Chamoiseau’s oeuvre and the growing field of related critical studies. By taking into account the various facets of Chamoiseau’s output and experience, this work aims to offer a broad overview of his accomplishments and contributions to postcolonial writing. The chapter then provides an overview of the author’s strategies of masquerade in Martinican and Caribbean contexts, his main phases of writing as defined through role-play, and an overview of his reputation as an artist and activist.Less

The Novel in English in the Caribbean to 1950

Leah Rosenberg

in The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 9: The World Novel in English to 1950

This chapter explores English-language novels in the Caribbean. The West Indian novel was seen as a post-Second World War literary phenomenon, the creation of male authors who, born in Britain's ... More

This chapter explores English-language novels in the Caribbean. The West Indian novel was seen as a post-Second World War literary phenomenon, the creation of male authors who, born in Britain's Caribbean colonies, began arriving in England in the 1950s as part of a larger wave of Caribbean immigrants. Despite the diverse origins and perspectives of the Anglophone Caribbean's many writers, several dominant themes emerge. West Indian novels comprised a spectrum of direct, indirect, partial, and unwitting deviations from and challenges to English literary genres and ideologies. Novelists were particularly engaged with the ideologies of race and domesticity and the closely linked genre of romance. Nearly all West Indian novels of the nineteenth century were romances featuring elite West Indian heroes who excelled their English counterparts in domestic and civic virtue, while the twentieth century saw the emergence of literature that so revelled in social and sexual disorder that it constituted anti-romance.Less

The Caribbean Difference: Imagining Trans-Status Communities

Marta Caminero-Santangelo

in Documenting the Undocumented: Latino/a Narratives and Social Justice in the Era of Operation Gatekeeper

Chapter 3 extends the analysis of a developing, constructed sense of group identity around issues of the trauma of illegality by looking at fiction by Caribbean Latino/a writers. Drawing on Anthony ... More

Chapter 3 extends the analysis of a developing, constructed sense of group identity around issues of the trauma of illegality by looking at fiction by Caribbean Latino/a writers. Drawing on Anthony Appiah’s explication of the notion of “partial cosmopolitanism,” the chapter argues that Caribbean-origin writers seek ways of extending a group identity so that it tentatively includes both undocumented immigrants and other groups of Latinos (such as Cubans or Puerto Ricans) who are not subjected in the same way to the conditions and risks of “illegality.” Junot Díaz’s story “Negocios” (in Drown) puts the trope of family at the center of contested versions of latinidad that might—or might not—successfully create communities of solidarity around both U.S. citizens and undocumented Latinos. Cristina García’s A Handbook to Luck and Julia Alvarez’s young adult novel Return to Sender construct an ethics of solidarity across difference that recognizes immigration status as a problem that requires an ethical response across national-origin lines.Less

Vernacular Forms and Wandering Genres

Wendy Knepper

in Patrick Chamoiseau: A Critical Introduction

This chapter offers close readings of Chronique des sept misères and Solibo Magnifique, which bring related but distinctive narrative strategies to the inscription of a shared set of concerns about ... More

This chapter offers close readings of Chronique des sept misères and Solibo Magnifique, which bring related but distinctive narrative strategies to the inscription of a shared set of concerns about Martinique’s sense of community, the role of vernacular culture, and the role of neoimperialism. Reading these two novels in dialogue highlights Chamoiseau’s quest for a new form of narration that would represent creatively and critically the dislocated realities and guises of life and culture in Martinique under colonization and departmentalization. Where Chronique explores the demise of market culture in the twentieth century, Solibo interrogates the erosion of vernacular culture, especially oral storytelling traditions.Less

Initiating the Warrior of the Imaginary

Wendy Knepper

in Patrick Chamoiseau: A Critical Introduction

This chapter examines an experimental phase of Chamoiseau’s writing, during which he articulated his theory of the émerveille (“marvel”) and introduced a new figure, the Warrior of the Imaginary. ... More

This chapter examines an experimental phase of Chamoiseau’s writing, during which he articulated his theory of the émerveille (“marvel”) and introduced a new figure, the Warrior of the Imaginary. Through innovative poetic forms and narrative figures, Chamoiseau created a poetic vocabulary that shaped his writing through much of the 1990s and up to the present. The works analyzed include a screenplay Chamoiseau wrote for Guy Deslaurier’s L’Exil du roi Béhanzin; a collection of children’s tales titled Émerveilles (1998); and the texts Écrire en pays dominé and L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse.Less

Insurgent Performance Works

Wendy Knepper

in Patrick Chamoiseau: A Critical Introduction

This chapter examines Chamoiseau’s early body of work, namely his comics and his theatrical works. Chamoiseau’s comic books, particularly in the oppositional use of French-Creole language, reflect a ... More

This chapter examines Chamoiseau’s early body of work, namely his comics and his theatrical works. Chamoiseau’s comic books, particularly in the oppositional use of French-Creole language, reflect a rebel sensibility. His plays serve as a kind of theater of the imaginary for the author, which means that his meta-theatrical approach to performance, which brings together storytelling, dance, drumming, and song; incorporates textual and linguistic hybridity; and introduces experimental approaches to modes of narration, can be seen as a “rehearsal” of the polyphonic performative techniques that come to characterize his approach to prose. The chapter offers readings of several works including the comic book Les Antilles sous Bonaparte (1981), and the plays L’Époque Delgrès (1974) and Une manière d’Antigone (1975).Less

Créolité, Community, and the Word Scratcher

Wendy Knepper

in Patrick Chamoiseau: A Critical Introduction

This chapter offers close readings of Chamoiseau’s works in the late 1980s and early 1990s—a period of intense analysis and incredible creativity as he articulated his ideas on the dynamics of ... More

This chapter offers close readings of Chamoiseau’s works in the late 1980s and early 1990s—a period of intense analysis and incredible creativity as he articulated his ideas on the dynamics of storytelling, creolization, and writing. These works include Éloge de la créolité, Lettres creoles and Au temps de l’antan. During this period, Chamoiseau also produced the first two of his three narrative accounts of childhood, Antan d’enfance (1990) and Chemin d’école (1993), which undermine or question the feasibility of realizing the Creolist objectives of recuperating interior vision and discovering an “authentic” voice.Less

Visual Texts and the Revolutionary Epic

Wendy Knepper

in Patrick Chamoiseau: A Critical Introduction

This chapter offers close readings of Chamoiseau’s works during the 1990s and first decade of the twenty-first century. These include the screenplays Passage du milieu (2000), Biguine (2002), ... More

This chapter offers close readings of Chamoiseau’s works during the 1990s and first decade of the twenty-first century. These include the screenplays Passage du milieu (2000), Biguine (2002), Nord-Plage (2003), and Aliker (2009); and the novels Biblique des derniers gestes (2002), Un dimanche au cachot (2007), and Les neuf consciences du Malifini (2009).Less

Activism and Tales of Initiation

Wendy Knepper

in Patrick Chamoiseau: A Critical Introduction

This chapter begins with an account of Chamoiseau’s activist concerns. It then presents readings of the tales of initiation and alternative paths to enlightenment as represented in Un dimanche au ... More

This chapter begins with an account of Chamoiseau’s activist concerns. It then presents readings of the tales of initiation and alternative paths to enlightenment as represented in Un dimanche au cachot and Les neuf consciences du Malfini. Chamoiseau’s professional experience working with delinquent children shapes the narrative of Un dimanche au cachot, which focuses on his efforts as educator. Malfini, another of Chamoiseau’s conversion narratives, which is part fable and part treatise, extends his longstanding interest in birds as metaphors for the liberation of the imaginary.Less

Autoethnographic Fictions of Childhood

Wendy Knepper

in Patrick Chamoiseau: A Critical Introduction

This chapter offers close readings of Chamoiseau’s fictional texts on childhood, which include Antan d’enfance (1990), Chemin-d’école (1994), and Á bout d’enfance (2005). By splitting childhood into ... More

This chapter offers close readings of Chamoiseau’s fictional texts on childhood, which include Antan d’enfance (1990), Chemin-d’école (1994), and Á bout d’enfance (2005). By splitting childhood into distinctive stages, Chamoiseau revives the slow drama of childhood development, and recognizes that childhood involves a series of dramatic transformations and ruptures of consciousness. The works are examples of “autoethnographic expression,” which is defined as “instances in which colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizer’s own terms.”Less

Conclusion: Some Remarks on the Critical Implications of Queer Black Marxism

Gary Edward Holcomb

in Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance

This conclusion offers some comments and remarks on the future of McKay studies including black literary studies, radical left historicism, and cultural studies. The conclusion notes that while ... More

This conclusion offers some comments and remarks on the future of McKay studies including black literary studies, radical left historicism, and cultural studies. The conclusion notes that while academies are geared to higher education and competencies, most readers of modernist literature particularly those of black radical writing will find it difficult to comprehend what is on the page in front of them. The conclusion suggests that until those who write about, teach, and publish subjects on Harlem Renaissance recognize the need for innovative skills and new methods of reading these deviant voices found in American literary texts particularly those of black Marxist literature, black writing of the modern moment will be misunderstood and several narratives and literatures of the period will be overlooked. Without a radical shift and change in the study of black modernist literature, the result will be a persistent failure to see and examine how the African American and Carribean writers during the interwar period concentrated on the intersection of nationalism and racism through black dialectical materialist acts of literary criticism. Until those who participate in generating the critical language of modern American literary history cultivate a far-reaching awareness of how black radical interwar writing worked in partnership with leftist commitment to disrobe the intimate coupling of state nationalist and racist ideology, those studying modernist literature will never comprehend its fullest import. The ultimate goal of this book has been to suggest ways through which it is possible to think of new ways to renovate and to modernize the analytic capacity of the reader in order to gain a better understanding of critical knowledge. It has aimed to regenerate lost, dangerous intelligence, and to revive the creative efforts of black Marxist modernist writing and to reiterate McKay's vision of “America.”Less