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The current drive in Caribbean literary studies stresses similarities and points of convergence between the various islands of the archipelago and their authors, the fundamental aim of which is to move closer to an all-encompassing theory of Caribbeanness. Martin Munro challenges this movement, and through a study of the work of Aime Cesaire and Rene Depestre, proposes an alternative vision of the present and future of Caribbean literature. The main areas of inquiry are: how these two Caribbean writers construct their sense of themselves; how they relate to the Caribbean and to the wider world; and how they have been influenced by the historical and cultural particularities of their respective islands. Aime Cesaire's sense of self and of the Caribbean is essentially shaped around the circuit triangulaire, the model of Africa/Europe/Caribbean interdependencies, ultimately inherited from the time of the slave trade. Munro shows how Cesaire views the Caribbean as a deeply traumatic, insubstantial space; how he looks to Africa for his lost sense of self; and how Europe is seen at once as the malevolent colonial power and also the home of poetry and learning. Rene Depestre's Caribbean 'shape' is quite different: Africa is relatively absent in Depestre's work; Europe is not presented as a threat; and Depestre, unlike Cesaire, sees in the Caribbean an energy and a creativity brought about by the historical fusion of disparate cultures. An important factor in 'shaping' Depestre's model of Caribbeanness is his long exile from Haiti, and Depestre's experience of exile is analysed in detail. The combination of broad contextualization, diverse theoretical approaches, and close analysis of these important writers' work, produces a strong argument against attempts to view and read writing from the Caribbean as one literature. Difference and diversity, it is argued, predominate as Caribbean writing embraces the new century, and the whole notion of Caribbeanness undergoes further processes of highly creative splintering and reshaping.
Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature provides readers with an excellent introduction to recent Haitian literature, one of the richest literary traditions in the Americas. Martin Munro focuses on works written after 1946, a period in which exile has become the dominant theme in Haitian literature. Using this notion of Haitian writing as a literature of exile, Munro analyzes key novels by the most important figures of each generation of the past sixty years, including Jacques Stephen Alexis, René Depestre, Émile Ollivier, Dany Laferrière, and Edwidge Danticat.
Since 1965, West Indians have been emigrating to the United States in record numbers, and to New York City in particular. Caribbean New York shows how the new immigration is reshaping American race relations and sheds much-needed light on factors that underlie some of the city's explosive racial confrontations. Philip Kasinitz examines how two forces--racial solidarity and ethnic distinctiveness--have helped to shape the identity of New York's West Indian community. He compares "new" (post-1965) immigrants with West Indians who arrived earlier in the century, and looks in detail at the economic, political, and cultural rules that Afro-Caribbean immigrants have played in the city during each period.
This study focuses on current healing practices from a cultural memory perspective.
Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), the novel born from Edwidge Danticat’s childhood in Haiti and immigration to New York City, was one of the great literary debuts of recent times, marking the emergence of an impressive talent in addition to opening up an entire culture to a broad general readership. This gifted author went on to win the American Book Award in 1999 for her novel, The Farming of Bones (1998), attracting further critical acclaim. Offering an accessible guide for readers and critics alike, this book is the first publication devoted entirely to Danticat’s unique and remarkable work. It is also distinctive in that it addresses all of her published writing up to The Dew Breaker (2004), including her writing for children, her travel writing, her short fiction, and her novels. The book contains an exclusive interview with Danticat, in which she discusses her recent memoir, Brother, I’m Dying (2007), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. It also includes an extensive bibliography. With contributions from Danticat’s fellow creative writers from both the Caribbean and the United States as well as leading scholars of Caribbean literature, this collection of essays aims to enrich readers’ understanding of the various geographical, literary, and cultural contexts of her work and to demonstrate how it both influences and is influenced by them. Contributors Madison Smartt Bell * Myriam J. A. Chancy * Maryse Condé * J. Michael Dash * Charles Forsdick * Mary Gallagher * Régine Michelle Jean-Charles * Carine Mardorossian * Nadève Ménard * Martin Munro * Nick Nesbitt * Mireille Rosello * Renee H. Shea * Évelyne Trouillot * Lyonel Trouillot * Kiera Vaclavik
The link between private corporations and U.S. world power has a much longer history than most people realize. Transnational firms such as the United Fruit Company represent an earlier stage of the economic and cultural globalization now taking place throughout the world. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources in the United States, Great Britain, Costa Rica, and Guatemala, Colby combines "top-down" and "bottom-up" approaches to provide new insight into the role of transnational capital, labor migration, and racial nationalism in shaping U.S. expansion into Central America and the greater Caribbean. The Business of Empire places corporate power and local context at the heart of U.S. imperial history. In the early twentieth century, U.S. influence in Central America came primarily in the form of private enterprise, above all United Fruit. Founded amid the U.S. leap into overseas empire, the company initially depended upon British West Indian laborers. When its black workforce resisted white American authority, the firm adopted a strategy of labor division by recruiting Hispanic migrants. This labor system drew the company into increased conflict with its host nations, as Central American nationalists denounced not only U.S. military interventions in the region but also American employment of black immigrants. By the 1930s, just as Washington renounced military intervention in Latin America, United Fruit pursued its own Good Neighbor Policy, which brought a reduction in its corporate colonial power and a ban on the hiring of black immigrants. The end of the company's system of labor division in turn pointed the way to the transformation of United Fruit as well as the broader U.S. empire.
1. Introduction -- 2. Envisioning social landscapes of interconnection -- 3. Reshaping difference and interdependence : the transformation of family life and divisions of labour into the twentieth century -- 4. Contemporary transformations in gender, work and family -- 5. Disposition and position : norms, attitudes and commitments to children, work and self -- 6. Life course transitions and the changing landscape of opportunity and constraint --7. Ethnicity and contexts of belonging and exclusion -- 8. Difference, hierarchy and perceptions of social justice -- 9. Conclusion.
Crossing the Line examines a group of early nineteenth-century novels by white creoles, writers whose identities and perspectives were shaped by their experiences in Britain’s Caribbean colonies. Colonial subjects residing in the West Indian colonies "beyond the line," these writers were perceived by their metropolitan contemporaries as far removed—geographically and morally—from Britain and "true" Britons. Routinely portrayed as single-minded in their pursuit of money and irredeemably corrupted by their investment in slavery, white creoles faced a considerable challenge in showing they were driven by more than a desire for power and profit. Crossing the Line explores the integral role early creole novels played in this cultural labor. The emancipation-era novels that anchor this study of Britain's Caribbean colonies question categories of genre, historiography, politics, class, race, and identity. Revealing the contradictions embedded in the texts’ constructions of the Caribbean "realities" they seek to dramatize, Candace Ward shows how these white creole authors gave birth to characters and enlivened settings and situations in ways that shed light on the many sociopolitical fictions that shaped life in the anglophone Atlantic.
From Zora Neale Hurston to Derek Walcott to Toni Morrison, New World black authors have written about African-derived religious traditions and spiritual practices. The Sacred Act of Reading examines religion and sociopolitical power in modern and contemporary texts of a variety of genres from the black Americas. By engaging with spiritual traditions such as Vodou, Kumina, and Protestant Christianity while drawing on canonical Eurocentric literary theory, Anne Margaret Castro presents a novel, nuanced reading of power through the physical and metaphysical relationships portrayed in these great works of New World black literature. Castro examines prophecy in the dramas of Derek Walcott, preaching in the ethnography of Zora Neale Hurston, and liturgy in the novels of Toni Morrison, offering comparative readings alongside the works of Afro-Colombian anthropologist Manuel Zapata Olivella, Jamaican sociologist Erna Brodber, and Canadian fiction writer Nalo Hopkinson. The Sacred Act of Reading is the first book to bring together literary texts, historical and contemporary anthropological studies, theology, and critical theory to show how black authors in the Americas employ spiritual phenomena as theoretical frameworks for thinking within, against, and beyond structures of political dominance, dependence, and power.
Drawing on narratives from Martinique by Aimé Césaire, Édouard Glissant, Ina Césaire, and Patrick Chamoiseau, among others, Christina Kullberg shows how these writers turn to ethnography—even as they critique it—as an exploration and expression of the self. They acknowledge its tradition as a colonial discourse and a study of others, but they also argue for ethnography’s advantage in connecting subjectivity to the outside world. Further, they find that ethnography offers the possibility of capturing within the hybrid culture of the Caribbean an emergent self that nonetheless remains attached to its collective history and environment. Rather than claiming to be able to represent the culture they also feel alienated from, these writers explore the relationships between themselves, the community, and the environment. Although Kullberg’s focus is on Martinique, her work opens up possibilities for intertextual readings and comparative studies of writers from every linguistic region in the Caribbean—not only francophone but also Hispanic and anglophone. In addition, her interdisciplinary approach extends the reach of her work beyond postcolonial and literary studies to anthropology and ecocriticism.