Lucy Evans
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9781781381182
- eISBN:
- 9781781384855
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781381182.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999) and Robert Antoni’s My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales (2000) present global Caribbean communities. Moon features an family spanning two ...
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Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999) and Robert Antoni’s My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales (2000) present global Caribbean communities. Moon features an family spanning two hundred years and moving between Trinidad, Europe, and North America. Through its representation of and address to varied audiences, Folktales evokes a globalised Trinidad where distinctions between insiders and outsiders, and authentic and commodified cultural products, are blurred. This chapter considers how Brand and Antoni move beyond the national and regional, presenting us with fluid, expansive fictional communities. The chapter considers how their fiction invokes and interrogates discourses of global culture. It argues that Brand’s story cycle questions the viability of oceanic metaphors as a basis for communal identifications within diaspora discourse of the 1980s and 90s. Equally, it contends, Antoni’s cycle complicates notions of a global audience, extending diaspora discourse to incorporate new ways of conceptualising reading communities.Less
Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999) and Robert Antoni’s My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales (2000) present global Caribbean communities. Moon features an family spanning two hundred years and moving between Trinidad, Europe, and North America. Through its representation of and address to varied audiences, Folktales evokes a globalised Trinidad where distinctions between insiders and outsiders, and authentic and commodified cultural products, are blurred. This chapter considers how Brand and Antoni move beyond the national and regional, presenting us with fluid, expansive fictional communities. The chapter considers how their fiction invokes and interrogates discourses of global culture. It argues that Brand’s story cycle questions the viability of oceanic metaphors as a basis for communal identifications within diaspora discourse of the 1980s and 90s. Equally, it contends, Antoni’s cycle complicates notions of a global audience, extending diaspora discourse to incorporate new ways of conceptualising reading communities.
