Download or read book Shifting Homelands Travelling Identities written by Jasbir Jain and published by Ian Randle Publishers. This book was released on 2009 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shifting Homelands, Travelling Identities: Writers of the Caribbean Diaspora is a multifaceted collection of essays that unfolds the charge of the Caribbean writer to represent a region with a complicated history and an even more complex future. It encompasses the work of Caribbean writers living and writing abroad, rather than at home and thus, evaluates, critiques and reflects on Caribbean identity and reality from the perspectives of exiled authors. Questions of race, nation-building and postcolonial separation/connection, the Caribbean landscape, and navigating the minefield of culture are thoroughly examined. The essays have been chosen by editors Jasbir Jain and Supriya Agarwal from presentations at a seminar on Indo-Caribbean writing held in Jaipur, India. The selections are as rich and varied as the Caribbean itself, presenting and examining the work of authors such as Jean Rhys, the three NAipauls - Shiva, V.S. and Seepersad - Austin Clarke, Jamaica Kincaid, Caryl Phillips, George Lamming, and Arnold Itwaru among others. An excellent read for anyone interested in Caribbean Literature and the study of Caribbean Writers, Shifting Homelands, travelling Identities: Writers of the Caribbean Diaspora is also a tribute to the Caribbean itself.
Download or read book Transnational Negotiations in Caribbean Diasporic Literature written by Kezia Page and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-09-13 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Caribbean Diaspora in USA written by Bettina E. Schmidt and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Caribbean Diaspora in the USA presents a new cultural theory based on an exploration of Caribbean religious communities in New York City. The Caribbean culture of New York demonstrates a cultural dynamism which embraces Spanish speaking, English speaking and French speaking migrants. All cultures are full of breaks and contradictions as Latin American and Caribbean theorists have demonstrated in their ongoing debate. This book combines unique research by the author in Caribbean New York with the theoretical discourse of Latin American and Caribbean scholars.
Download or read book Writers of the Caribbean Diaspora written by Jasbir Jain and published by New Dawn Press(IL). This book was released on 2008-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An attempt to understand Caribbean histories, patterns of migration, and race relations, this collection of essays has taken up most of the representative authors of the region, either by addressing their work or through contributions by the writers themselves. Caribbean writing covers landscape, plantation background, use of folklore, Creole speech, slave histories, and the memory of transmitted cultures. Its political world attracts interference and its presence is felt in different parts of the world, becomming a living culture that is experienced in multiple ways and that takes upon itself the responsibility of validating the very act of living.
Download or read book Disturbers of the Peace written by Kelly Baker Josephs and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2013-10-11 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the prevalence of madness in Caribbean texts written in English in the mid-twentieth century, Kelly Baker Josephs focuses on celebrated writers such as Jean Rhys, V. S. Naipaul, and Derek Walcott as well as on understudied writers such as Sylvia Wynter and Erna Brodber. Because mad figures appear frequently in Caribbean literature from French, Spanish, and English traditions—in roles ranging from bit parts to first-person narrators—the author regards madness as a part of the West Indian literary aesthetic. The relatively condensed decolonization of the anglophone islands during the 1960s and 1970s, she argues, makes literature written in English during this time especially rich for an examination of the function of madness in literary critiques of colonialism and in the Caribbean project of nation-making. In drawing connections between madness and literature, gender, and religion, this book speaks not only to the field of Caribbean studies but also to colonial and postcolonial literature in general. The volume closes with a study of twenty-first-century literature of the Caribbean diaspora, demonstrating that Caribbean writers still turn to representations of madness to depict their changing worlds.
Download or read book Writers of the Caribbean Diaspora written by Jasbir Jain and published by . This book was released on 2008-12-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Histories are important and histories have a way of travelling. West Indies is one example of a society constructed artificially of imported populations, who have gone on to build their own power structures, political histories and national identities. The Caribbean is one such society where multi-culturalism has been put to test. This book is an attempt to understand Caribbean histories, patterns of migration and race-relations. It is a collection of essays by Caribbean writers like V.S. Naipaul, Paule Marshall, Jean Rhys, Austin Clarke, Caryl Phillips and Cyril Dabydeen. The essays in this book have taken up most of the representative authors of the Caribbean, either by addressing their work or through contributions by the writers themselves. The attempt has been to provide a chronological history of the Caribbean and to give representation to writers living now in different host cultures. Some papers are gender-oriented and locate the position of the women in the West Indies.
Download or read book Saga Boy written by Antonio Michael Downing and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Black immigrant journeys from the Caribbean to Canada—and through multiple musical personas—in a “deeply moving” memoir “suffused with poetic prose” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). As a clever, willful boy in a tiny village in the tropical forests of Trinidad—raised by his indomitable grandmother, Miss Excelly, and her King James Bible—Antonio Michael Downing is steeped in the legacies of his scattered family, the vibrant culture of the island, and the weight of its colonial history. But after Miss Excelly’s death, everything changes. The eleven-year-old seems to fall asleep in the jungle and wake up in a blizzard: he is sent to live with his devoutly evangelical Aunt Joan in rural Canada, where they are the only Black family in a landscape starkly devoid of the warm lushness of his childhood. Isolated and longing for home, Downing begins a decades-long journey to transform himself through music and performance. A reunion with his birth parents, whom he’s known only through story, closes more doors than it opens. Instead, Downing seeks refuge in increasingly extravagant musical personalities: “Mic Dainjah,” a boisterous punk rapper; “Molasses,” a soul crooner; and, finally, an eccentric dystopian-era pop star clad in leather and gold, “John Orpheus.” In his mid-thirties, increasingly addicted to escapism, attention, and sex, Downing realizes he has become a “Saga Boy”—a Trinidadian playboy archetype—like his father and grandfather before him. When his choices land him in a jail cell, Downing must face who he has become. “Lush language and sensory details make the fascinating events of this memoir pop. An authentic, entertaining, and timely account of a creative immigrant’s experiences.” —Booklist “Downing’s elegant, engaging memoir will have particular significance to readers from the Caribbean diaspora, but it will be understood by any reader who has ever had their world suddenly upended and needed to make it whole again.” —Library Journal “A rich memoir about how far some folks have to travel just to arrive where they began.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
Download or read book Transnational Narratives from the Caribbean written by Elvira Pulitano and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-10 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Writing Across Worlds written by John Connell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-11 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a wide range of migrants' writings, this collection reveals an extraordinary diversity of global migratory experience while illustrating the realities and emotions shared by all who leave their home and culture and must adapt to another.
Download or read book Creole Renegades written by Bénédicte Boisseron and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2022-05-31 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Caribbean Philosophical Association Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award Caribbean Studies Association Barbara T. Christian Literary Award, Honorable Mention In Creole Renegades, Bénédicte Boisseron looks at exiled Caribbean authors—Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid, V. S. Naipaul, Maryse Condé, Dany Laferriére, and more—whose works have been well received in their adopted North American countries but who are often viewed by their home islands as sell-outs, opportunists, or traitors. These expatriate and second-generation authors refuse to be simple bearers of Caribbean culture, often dramatically distancing themselves from the postcolonial archipelago. Their writing is frequently infused with an enticing sense of cultural, sexual, or racial emancipation, but their deviance is not defiant. Underscoring the typically ignored contentious relationship between modern diaspora authors and the Caribbean, Boisseron ultimately argues that displacement and creative autonomy are often manifest in guilt and betrayal, central themes that emerge again and again in the work of these writers. Publication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Download or read book Building a Nation written by Eric D. Duke and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2018-10-15 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Caribbean Studies Association Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Award - Honorable Mention The initial push for a federation among British Caribbean colonies might have originated among colonial officials and white elites, but the banner for federation was quickly picked up by Afro-Caribbean activists who saw in the possibility of a united West Indian nation a means of securing political power and more. In Building a Nation, Eric Duke moves beyond the narrow view of federation as only relevant to Caribbean and British imperial histories. By examining support for federation among many Afro-Caribbean and other black activists in and out of the West Indies, Duke convincingly expands and connects the movement's history squarely into the wider history of political and social activism in the early to mid-twentieth century black diaspora. Exploring the relationships between the pursuit of Caribbean federation and black diaspora politics, Duke convincingly posits that federation was more than a regional endeavor; it was a diasporic, black nation-building undertaking--with broad support in diaspora centers such as Harlem and London--deeply immersed in ideas of racial unity, racial uplift, and black self-determination. A volume in this series New World Diasporas, edited by Kevin A. Yelvington
Download or read book Rescuing Our Roots written by Andrea J. Queeley and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2017-05-16 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Contributes new perspectives on historical black identity formation and contemporary activism in Cuba."--Choice "Provides invaluable insight into the histories and lives of Cubans who trace their origins to the Anglo-Caribbean."--Robert Whitney, author of State and Revolution in Cuba: Mass Mobilization and Political Change, 1920-1940 "Adds a missing piece to the existing literature about the renewal of black activism in Cuba, all the while showing the links and fractures between pre- and post-1959 society."--Devyn Spence Benson, Davidson College In the early twentieth century, laborers from the British West Indies immigrated to Cuba, attracted by employment opportunities. The Anglo-Caribbean communities flourished, but after 1959, many of their cultural institutions were dismantled: the revolution dictated that in the name of unity there would be no hyphenated Cubans. This book turns an ethnographic lens on their descendants who--during the Special Period in the 1990s--moved to "rescue their roots" by revitalizing their ethnic associations and reestablishing ties outside the island. Based on Andrea J. Queeley's fieldwork in Santiago and Guantánamo, Rescuing Our Roots looks at local and regional identity formations as well as racial politics in revolutionary Cuba. Queeley argues that, as the island experienced a resurgence in racism due in part to the emergence of the dual economy and the reliance on tourism, Anglo-Caribbean Cubans revitalized their communities and sought transnational connections not just in the hope of material support but also to challenge the association between blackness, inferiority, and immorality. Their desire for social mobility, political engagement, and a better economic situation operated alongside the fight for black respectability. Unlike most studies of black Cubans, which focus on Afro-Cuban religion or popular culture, Queeley's penetrating investigation offers a view of strategies and modes of black belonging that transcend ideological, temporal, and spatial boundaries. A volume in the series Contemporary Cuba, edited by John M. Kirk
Download or read book Inside Babylon written by Winston James and published by Verso. This book was released on 1993 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The varied experience of the Caribbean diaspora in Britain, with its difficult and fractured history, is reflected in this distinctive and lively collection. The contributors to Inside Babylon show how employers and police, psychiatrists and welfare services, help to channel black people into residential and occupational ghettoes. Clive Harris, Bob Carter and Shirley Joshi analyse the economic destiny of Afro-Caribbeans in Britain. Going beyond the familiar prisms of race relations and reductionist class analysis they illuminate the radicalizing dynamic of British capitalism in the postwar period. Errol Francis provides a shocking account of the experience of black people at the hands of psychiatrists in Britain. Cecil Gutzmore finds the Notting Hill carnival to be a litmus test of racist formations in both the media and the state, as well as evidence of the resilience of the black community. Amina Mama and Claudette Williams explore the position of women in black communities while Gail Lewis focuses on their characteristic patterns of employment. In a powerful concluding essay Winston James charts the unfolding of a new Afro-Caribbean identity in Britain and debunks the notion that racist structures by themselves create a homogeneous black community."--Publisher.
Download or read book Resisting Paradise written by Angelique V. Nixon and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2015-09-25 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Caribbean Studies Association's 2016 Barbara T. Christian Award for Best Book in the Humanities Tourists flock to the Caribbean for its beaches and spread more than just blankets and dollars. Indeed, tourism has overly affected the culture there. Resisting Paradise explores the import of both tourism and diaspora in shaping Caribbean identity. It examines Caribbean writers and others who confront the region's overdependence on the tourist industry and the many ways that tourism continues the legacy of colonialism. Angelique V. Nixon interrogates the relationship between culture and sex within the production of “paradise” and investigates the ways in which Caribbean writers, artists, and activists respond to and powerfully resist this production. Forms of resistance include critiquing exploitation, challenging dominant historical narratives, exposing tourism's influence on cultural and sexual identity in the Caribbean and its diaspora, and offering alternative models of tourism and travel. Resisting Paradise places emphasis on the Caribbean people and its diasporic subjects as travelers and as cultural workers contributing to alternate and defiant understandings of tourism in the region. Through a unique multidisciplinary approach to comparative literary analysis, interviews, and participant observation, Nixon analyzes the ways Caribbean cultural producers are taking control of representation. While focused mainly on the Anglophone Caribbean, the study covers a range of territories including Antigua, the Bahamas, Grenada, Haiti, Jamaica, as well as Trinidad and Tobago, to deliver a potent critique.
Download or read book Diasporic Marvellous Realism written by María Alonso Alonso and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-07-14 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Diasporic Marvellous Realism highlights the interesting switch in perspective found in contemporary literary production where the supernatural is regarded from a diasporic perspective as marvellous rather than magical. The titular term is applied to the influence of transterritorialization on the works of first- and second generation immigrant writers when approaching and exploring the myths and legends of their culture of origin. The texts included in this analysis show that the employment of this literary philosophy and narrative technique in contemporary literature involves a fruitful refocusing of the rhetorical gaze regarding the importance of cultural heritage as vindicatory resistance to the lacunae of history and as celebratory re-enfranchisement of diasporic communities in host countries such as Canada and the UK.
Download or read book The Star Side of Bird Hill written by Naomi Jackson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-08-23 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two sisters are suddenly sent from their home in Brooklyn to Barbados to live with their grandmother, in Naomi Jackson’s stunning debut novel This lyrical novel of community, betrayal, and love centers on an unforgettable matriarchal family in Barbados. Two sisters, ages ten and sixteen, are exiled from Brooklyn to Bird Hill in Barbados after their mother can no longer care for them. The young Phaedra and her older sister, Dionne, live for the summer of 1989 with their grandmother Hyacinth, a midwife and practitioner of the local spiritual practice of obeah. Dionne spends the summer in search of love, testing her grandmother’s limits, and wanting to go home. Phaedra explores Bird Hill, where her family has lived for generations, accompanies her grandmother in her role as a midwife, and investigates their mother’s mysterious life. This tautly paced coming-of-age story builds to a crisis when the father they barely know comes to Bird Hill to reclaim his daughters, and both Phaedra and Dionne must choose between the Brooklyn they once knew and loved or the Barbados of their family. Naomi Jackson’s Barbados and her characters are singular, especially the wise Hyacinth and the heartbreaking young Phaedra, who is coming into her own as a young woman amid the tumult of her family. Praise for The Star Side of Bird Hill: “Once in a while, you’ll stumble onto a book like this, one so poetic in its descriptions and so alive with lovable, frustrating, painfully real characters, that your emotional response to it becomes almost physical. . . . The dual coming-of-age story alone could melt the sternest of hearts, but Jackson’s exquisite prose is a marvel too. . . . A gem of a book.” —Entertainment Weekly (A)
Download or read book Nationalism and Identity written by Stefano Harney and published by Zed Books. This book was released on 1996 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nation-state of Trinidad and Tobago offers a unique case for the study of the forces and ideologies of nationalism. This book reveals how this ethnically diverse nation (40% African origin, 40-45% East Indian origin, plus those of Syrian, Chinese, Portuguese, French and English descent), independent for less than forty years, has provided fertile ground for the creative tension between the imagination of the writer in his or her search for a habitable text of identity and the official discourse on nationalism in Trinidad and Tobago. This discourse has in turn been embedded in a struggle that propels the nation's story. Following on from this background, the study examines the changes and influences on the sense of nationalism and peoplehood caused by migration and the ethnicization of migrant communities in the metropoles.
