Teaching Anglophone Caribbean Literature


Book Description

This volume in the Options for Teaching series recognizes that the most challenging aspect of introducing students to anglophone Caribbean literature--the sheer variety of intellectual and artistic traditions in Western and non-Western cultures that relate to it--also offers the greatest opportunities to teachers. Courses on anglophone literature in the Caribbean can consider the region's specific histories and contexts even as they explore common issues: the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and colonial education; nationalism; exile and migration; identity and hybridity; class and racial conflict; gender and sexuality; religion and ritual. While considering how the availability of materials shapes syllabi, this volume recommends print, digital, and visual resources for teaching. The essays examine a host of topics, including the following: the development of multiethnic populations in the Caribbean and the role of various creole languages in the literature oral art forms, such as dub poetry and reggae music the influence of anglophone literature in the Caribbean on literary movements outside it, such as the Harlem Renaissance and black British writing Carnival religious rituals and beliefs specific genres such as slave narratives and autobiography film and drama the economics of rum Many essays list resources for further reading, and the volume concludes with a section of additional teaching resources.




The Beacon


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Catalog of Copyright Entries


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Nationalism and the Formation of Caribbean Literature


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This book tells the story of how intellectuals in the English-speaking Caribbean first created a distinctly Caribbean and national literature. As traditionally told, this story begins in the 1950s with the arrival and triumph of V.S. Naipaul, George Lamming, and their peers in the London literary scene. However, Afro-Caribbeans were writing literature already in the 1840s as part of larger movements for political rights, economic opportunity, and social status. Rosenberg offers a history of this first one hundred years of anglophone Caribbean literature and a critique of Caribbean literary studies that explains its neglect. A historically contextualized study of both canonical and noncanonical writers, this book makes the case that the few well-known Caribbean writers from this earlier period, Claude McKay, Jean Rhys, and C.L.R. James, participated in a larger Caribbean literary movement that directly contributed to the rise of nationalism in the region. This movement reveals the prominence of Indian and other immigrant groups, of feminism, and of homosexuality in the formation of national literatures.




The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature


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The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature offers a comprehensive, critically engaging overview of this increasingly significant body of work. The volume is divided into six sections that consider: the foremost figures of the Anglophone Caribbean literary tradition and a history of literary critical debate textual turning points, identifying key moments in both literary and critical history and bringing lesser known works into context fresh perspectives on enduring and contentious critical issues including the canon, nation, race, gender, popular culture and migration new directions for literary criticism and theory, such as eco-criticism, psychoanalysis and queer studies the material dissemination of Anglophone Caribbean literature and generic interfaces with film and visual art This volume is an essential text that brings together sixty-nine entries from scholars across three generations of Caribbean literary studies, ranging from foundational critical voices to emergent scholars in the field. The volume's reach of subject and clarity of writing provide an excellent resource and springboard to further research for those working in literature and cultural studies, postcolonial and diaspora studies as well as Caribbean studies, history and geography.




The Autobiography of Alfred H. Mendes 1897-1991


Book Description

The Portuguese Creole author Alfred H. Mendes was an important member of the Beacon Group of writers in Trinidad in the 1930s. His autobiography offers a private perspective of the man behind a popular West Indian personality, and includes annotations and an introduction by Michele Levy.




Celebrating Flamenco's Tangled Roots


Book Description

This collection of essays poses a series of questions revolving around nonsense, cacophony, queerness, race, and the dancing body. How can flamenco, as a diasporic complex of performance and communities of practice frictionally and critically bound to the complexities of Spanish history, illuminate theories of race and identity in performance? How can we posit, and argue for, genealogical relationships within and between genres across the vast expanses of the African—and Roma—diaspora? Neither are the essays presented here limited to flamenco, nor, consequently, are the responses to these questions reduced to this topic. What all the contributions here do share is the wish to come together, across disciplines and subject areas, within the academy and without, in the whirling, raucous, and messy spaces where the body is free—to celebrate its questioning, as well as the depths of the wisdom and knowledge it holds and sometimes reveals.




Chican@ Artivistas


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As the lead singer of the Grammy Award–winning rock band Quetzal and a scholar of Chicana/o and Latina/o studies, Martha Gonzalez is uniquely positioned to articulate the ways in which creative expression can serve the dual roles of political commentary and community building. Drawing on postcolonial, Chicana, black feminist, and performance theories, Chican@ Artivistas explores the visual, musical, and performance art produced in East Los Angeles since the inception of NAFTA and the subsequent anti-immigration rhetoric of the 1990s. Showcasing the social impact made by key artist-activists on their communities and on the mainstream art world and music industry, Gonzalez charts the evolution of a now-canonical body of work that took its inspiration from the Zapatista movement, particularly its masked indigenous participants, and that responded to efforts to impose systems of labor exploitation and social subjugation. Incorporating Gonzalez’s memories of the Mexican nationalist music of her childhood and her band’s journey to Chiapas, the book captures the mobilizing music, poetry, dance, and art that emerged in pre-gentrification corners of downtown Los Angeles and that went on to inspire flourishing networks of bold, innovative artivistas.




The Trinidad Awakening


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Sander . . . presents a definitive, thoroughly researched, gracefully expressed study of literary activity in Trinidad in the 1930s, and its literary/cultural implications for West Indian literature in general. . . . In Caribbean literary studies, Sander's work is pioneering in its drawing of successful links between cultural productions and historical realities. The book's organization is clear and logical; its accessibility enhanced by a well-documented index. Choice This is the first comprehensive history of the Trinidadian literature that paved the way for the emergence over the past forty years of many major West Indian literary works. Sander contends that the sporadic nature of literary output in the island before the late 1920s can be explained in part as the consequence of Trinidad's linguistic diversity and its rapidly changing patterns of settlement. Until 1797 Trinidad had been a Spanish colony, with a large proportion of French-speaking inhabitants, and it was not until the end of the nineteenth century that English became more widely spoken. The burst of creative activity in the late 1920s was related to the new ascendancy of English and the fact that the society had begun to resolve itself into well-defined racial, social, and economic groupings.




Air and Fire


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At the turn of the century Théophile and Suzanne Valence sail into the Mexican copper-mining town of Santa Sofìa. Théo has travelled here to build a metal church designed by his mentor, the great engineer Gustave Eiffel. His wife Suzanne, wayward and graced with the gift of clairvoyance is deeply in love and has insisted on accompanying him. But the magical landscape inspires no answering passion in Théo. In her loneliness she turns to the American gold prospector Wilson Pharaoh, and soon he, like the town and its inhabitants, falls under her spell, an enchantment as seductive as Suzanne herself.