Contemporary Caribbean Research Articles

Fictions of Feminine Citizenship: Sexuality and the Nation in Contemporary Caribbean Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Fictions of Feminine Citizenship: Sexuality and the Nation in Contemporary Caribbean Literature Adam Spanos Donette Francis. Fictions of Feminine Citizenship: Sexuality and the Nation in Contemporary Caribbean Literature. New York: Palgrave, 2010. vii + 191 pp. In a work of marked multidisciplinary scope, Donette Francis has changed the stakes of contemporary debates in postcolonial studies, feminist literary theory, and Caribbean studies. Her normative framework centers on sexual citizenship, whose terms she advances to encompass gendered, raced, and postcolonial bodies. The failure of Caribbean states to confer safety on women within the intimate sphere leads Francis to understand sexual citizenship as the term that designates the aporia in anticolonial and nationalist teleologies. But she adduces two academic failures that compound the damaging occlusions of the state by naturalizing its structures of disavowal. Theories that celebrate diaspora as a reprieve from postcolonial violence must confront the empirical and theoretical realities of pervasive sexual violence in a world beholden to the homogeneity of nation formation. Moreover, pessimistic treatments, which presume that an egalitarian politics can only take shape through an adequate accounting of the colonial and anticolonial past, tend to obscure present emergences that lack salient dialectical linkages to past political [End Page 363] struggles. Instead, Francis’s method is to juxtapose social, political, and academic claims that rationalize or repress the question of sexual abuse against those of a new literary movement that renders violence manifest. In so doing her work presents much that does not register in predominant accounts of contemporary Caribbean existence. Symptomatic of the failed promises of Caribbean anticolonial nationalism are the archives that discern neither sexual violations against women nor amorous experiences that contravene the new nations’ intraracial, heterosexual, and masculinist imperatives. The multiform violations of women confound the juridical norms of national citizenship that are predicated on an understanding of the anticolonial struggle as the horizon of all social wrongs. The archive remains silent on women’s liminal position because the imperial and national frames for thinking injustice have rendered women’s demands “unnarratable” (10). Against these closures Francis posits the transgressive capacity of literature to facilitate consideration of “intimate historical imaginings” (11). Literature atones for the structural deficit in national historiography by offering access to the extra-juridical dimension of lived experience, as it is imprinted on bodies and within “interior lives” (139). In all five of the novels that she discusses—Patricia Powell’s The Pagoda, Nelly Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints, Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory, Elizabeth Nunez’s Bruised Hibiscus, and Angie Cruz’s Soledad—Francis adduces critical events that she calls “sites of subjection and subjectivation” wherein socially nonrecognizable scenes of violence serve simultaneously to qualify and produce agency (12). Francis traces the ramifying effects of these otherwise hidden instances of sexual violation in the refiguration of women’s lives. Reading Danticat, for example, she refracts the chain of events linking the American military occupation, the repression of the women’s movement, the “long and continuous social history of rape in twentieth century Haiti” and the military state’s neutralization of abused women’s claims through the relations between the mother and daughter, the story’s protagonists (82). She both highlights the cycle of violence that informs the eventuation of sexual abuse—the mother’s rape by tonton macoutes (the police force of dictator Francois Duvalier), the tests she administers to ensure her daughter’s virginity, the daughter’s self-mutilation, the mother’s suicide—and suggests the paradoxical subjectivation that these incidents entail for the women who undergo them. Although the protagonists’ sexual and psychic lives are devastated, they also become skeptical of the social order founded on the dissemblance of violence. Francis understands these works as attesting to the emergence of a new “Caribbean feminist poetics” uniquely capable of demystifying [End Page 364] sexual assaults (3). She designates this genre the “antiromance” (4). This term takes the burden of three polemics, each of which targets a different discursive valence of the romance narratives that formed the horizon of prior Caribbean writing. The first antagonist is the mythology of the happy ending—supposed in previous generations’ depictions of heterosexual marital consummation as the telos of all intimate...

Nous sommes tous poursuivis par un monstre: postcolonial hauntologies in the works of Chamoiseau, Ollivier and Haneke

This article seeks to explore the usefulness of Jacques Derrida's notion of hauntology, whereby the past is always revenant and the repressed returns, through analysis of two acclaimed contemporary Caribbean novels by Patrick Chamoiseau and mile Ollivier, and a critically successful film by Austrian director Michael Haneke. A key theoretical concept, the philosopher's neologism is looked at in a postcolonial frame to explore how painful memory is often repressed or elided to mask historical events, and how the traumas of the past perpetually impinge on the present. This article contributes to the ever-growing rhetoric around memory in a postcolonial world deeply concerned with issues of remembrance and commemoration. It highlights the important role literature and film have to play in helping us retrieve our forgotten and fragmented past as we continually seek to make sense of the present.

POST-GRENADA, POST-CUBA, POSTCOLONIAL

This essay argues for understanding Caribbean postcoloniality as a particular relationship to the Caribbean revolutionary tradition embodied by the Cuban and Grenada revolutions. Looking at how Dionne Brand's In Another Place, Not Here invokes both of those revolutionary moments sheds light on what makes contemporary Caribbean literature postcolonial. In Another Place, Not Here locates itself as a postcolonial text through its relationship to the anticolonial project, both paying homage to and critiquing the limitations of that model. Brand's novel most obviously engages with the legacy of Caribbean revolution through the close resemblances of its unnamed setting to Grenada in the early 1980s; but the novel also directly deploys and rewrites some of the forms of discourse most closely associated with the Cuban Revolution. In particular, the stories of Elizete and Verlia employ two of the genres that came out of Cuba during the 1960s: the testimonio and the story of the intellectual stepping away from privilege to join the revolution. By positioning itself in the aftermath of these milestones in the Caribbean revolutionary tradition, In Another Place, Not Here suggests how we might understand postcolonialism as a simultaneous desire to live up to and critique the political projects of the decolonization era.

Performance and the Gendered Body in Jamaica Kincaid's “Girl” and Oonya Kempadoo's Buxton Spice

Abstract Jamaica Kincaid's compact and succinct story “Girl,” the lead story in the collection At the Bottom of the River (1983), has been lauded as one of the premier works in Kincaid's corpus, particularly her discourse on the making of “woman” in postcolonial Caribbean contexts. The text is essentially a set of instructions offered by an adult (assumed to be a mother), laying out the script for the performance of womanhood in the fictional society in which the female child is expected to live and perform her gender. “Girl”'s emphasis on performative acts reiterates the inextricable link between gender and performance. Undoubtedly, this landmark Kincaid story is in dialogue with Butler's theorization of the centrality of stylized acts in the creating and crafting of gendered selves. Less well known is Oonya Kempadoo's debut novel Buxton Spice (1999). Buxton Spice chronicles the experiences of four pubescent girls in 1970s Guyana as they learn about, participate in, and challenge some gender expectations of their immediate and wider communities. The story is told from the point of view of Lula, who keenly observes the ways in which gender roles are enacted and how these roles may be re-enacted. Her observations alert the reader to the novel's preoccupation with uncovering, or perhaps reconfiguring, how gender roles might be at once imagined and played out in contemporary Caribbean societies. Both texts illustrate how the tensions and contradictions surrounding the constructions of womanhood, and in Buxton Spice, manhood, are engaged through performative acts, some of which ostensibly conform to prescribed gender roles but that actually undermine them.

Whose Time Is It? Gender and Humanism in Contemporary Caribbean Feminist Advocacy

Research Article| March 01 2010 Whose Time Is It? Gender and Humanism in Contemporary Caribbean Feminist Advocacy Michelle V. Rowley Michelle V. Rowley Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Small Axe (2010) 14 (1 (31)): 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-2009-040 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Michelle V. Rowley; Whose Time Is It? Gender and Humanism in Contemporary Caribbean Feminist Advocacy. Small Axe 1 March 2010; 14 (1 (31)): 1–15. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-2009-040 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsSmall Axe Search Advanced Search Why has the category “gender” not figured transformatively in anti-colonial resistance, or nationalist politics in the region? This is a question posed in this forum by literary scholar Natasha Barnes (1991). Despite the centrality that Caribbean feminists have accorded to “gender” in their pursuit of social justice I argue that “gender's” analytical marginalization persists because the philosophical underpinnings of these nationalist/anti-colonialist projects have all but insisted upon the supplanting of gender by race. Toward this end, I examine the fraught role that “gender' plays in Frantz Fanon's work by revisiting his engagement with Mayotte Capécia's Je Suis Martiniquaise. For post-colonial subjects the assertion of one's humanity is simultaneously a claim of one's value. While, Caribbean feminists have deployed gender as the primary category through which a critique of human condition is invoked I argue that is now woefully inadequate when faced with the complex terrain of 21st century Caribbean feminist advocacy. The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Small Axe, Inc.2010 You do not currently have access to this content.

Popular Gospel in the Caribbean: Gospel Video as a Site of Meaning

This essay provides a perspective on aspects of the current trends withinpopular gospel culture in the Caribbean. It represents an importantintervention, since there is relatively little published about this subject inacademic and critical journals. This essay, therefore, introduces the readerto Caribbean popular gospel culture; provides an overview of the state ofCaribbean gospel music culture; lists some of the global trends within gospelculture; zeros-in on the gospel music video as a site of cultural expression,and examines two main music video templates in western popular gospelculture; and shows how the Caribbean’s leading chorale group of the late1990s and early 2000s responds to and transgresses these western models.All in all, the essay provides a description of the kinds of influences thatcurrently drive contemporary Caribbean gospel-music culture.

From Fanon to Glissant: A Martinican Genealogy

The Martinican philosopher, psychiatrist, and social revolutionary Frantz Fanon is considered one of the pioneering figures of postcolonial studies. As an icon of postcolonialism, an increasingly institutionalized field, Fanon has thus come to be associated with what is primarily an anglophone critical enterprise and area of study. The resulting “anglicization” of this important francophone figure overlooks, I argue, the ways in which Fanon’s Martinican and francophone background is integral to his intellectual and political contributions and to his influence on later generations of writers and political figures. Most notably, I will show the ways in which his legacy can be traced in the work of the contemporary Caribbean philosopher and poet Edouard Glissant, whose brand of transnationalism in Le discours antillais develops the ramifications of Fanon’s thought in a way that has been obscured by anglophone criticism. This lacuna, I argue, is partly due to the unavailability of an unabridged translation in English of Glissant’s Discours as well as to the failure of Fanonian critics to account for his grounding in a specifically francophone Caribbean setting and culture.

Vulnerable States: Bodies of Memory in Contemporary Caribbean Fiction (review)

Vulnerable States: Bodies of Memory in Contemporary Caribbean Fiction (review)

The Other African Americans: Contemporary African and Caribbean Immigrants in the United States

The Other African Americans: Contemporary African and Caribbean Immigrants in the United States

The Social Relations of Bereavement in the Caribbean

The objectives of this article are to discuss the various types of behaviors associated with grief and bereavement, and to examine the relationships, consequences, and outcomes of bereavement practices among the various religious and ethnic groups in the English-speaking Caribbean Islands of Jamaica, Trinidad, Grenada, and Barbados. The rituals associated with death and grief differs across cultures and is greatly influenced by religious beliefs and traditions. How these rituals are played out depend on the culture of origin and level of acculturation of the various groups into mainstream society. In the Caribbean region, expressions of grief represent religious and cultural traditions that may have a significant impact on social relations, particularly in multi-ethnic and multicultural societies. In the English-speaking Caribbean Islands of Jamaica, Trinidad, Grenada, and Barbados, mourning follows the patterns of traditional religious practices which have remained consistent over time. While families and friends may offer social support before and after burial or cremation, the social aspects of bereavement may also have implications for inter-group relations. Insights into bereavement practices and what it holds for ethnic and religious groups in contemporary Caribbean are presented.

The contemporary Caribbean: history, life and culture since 1945

When tourists seek an escape from the worries and dilemmas of everyday life, the crystal blue waters and white sands of the islands seem like the answer to a prayer. Yet this idyllic image hides a tumultuous history marked by strife and division over race, political power and economic inequality. Olwyn M. Blouet explores the colourful history of the Caribbean' over the last 50 years, revealing it to be a region positioned at the heart of some the most prominent geopolitical issues of modern times. Navigating a rich melange of cultures and histories, Blouet unearths a complex narrative that is frequently overlooked in histories of the Americas. In stark contrast to widely-read guidebooks, this chronicle unflinchingly probes two strikingly different worlds in the islands those of the haves and the have-nots created by the volatile mixture of colonial politics, racial segregation and economic upheaval. strategic political relations between nations, Cuba in particular, and the world powers during the Cold War; the economic transformations instigated by tourism; and the modernizing efforts of nations in order to meet the demands of a globalizing twenty-first-century market are among the numerous issues explored by Blouet in her efforts to redress the historical record's imbalance. The Contemporary Caribbean also explores the nations' proud histories in sports such as cricket and baseball, their famed cuisines, and the uneasy balance today between local traditions and the vestiges of colonial influence. An informative and thought-provoking account, The Contemporary Caribbean is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand this flamboyant and diverse, yet troubled part of the world.

Infinite island: contemporary Caribbean art

Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art presents a diverse, exciting selection of recent work in painting, installation, photography, prints, drawings, video, and sculpture by forty-five emerging and established Caribbean artists who live and work in the region as well as abroad. The title Infinite Island, alluding to Columbus' voyages and the beginnings of colonialism, evokes the contradictions, complexities, and multiple perspectives that characterize the contemporary Caribbean and its presentation in art.The artists represented in this book reflect this fascinating hybrid culture and offer competing ideas about Caribbean identity in a variety of works done in the last six years in a wide range of media. Two introductory essays by contemporary-art historians survey the themes treated by the artists and offer insights into the different traditions and contemporary-art scenes in the region. The book contains 200 colour illustrations, including a colour plate section complemented by commentaries that place the individual works in the context of each artist's oeuvre. Artist biographies and a selected bibliography complete the volume.

Fracturing Subjectivities: International Space and the Discourse of Individualism in Colin Channer's Waiting in Vain and Jamaica Kincaid's Mr. Potter

This article addresses a concept of individualism that has emerged in some contemporary Caribbean fictions. I examine the evidence of this in a general way and then with reference to Jamaica Kincaid's Mr. Potter and Colin Channer's Waiting in Vain. I suggest that their individualism, though seemingly anomalous to diasporan thought, is in fact an “uncanny” product of the diasporan search for connections across borders.

“The Past is Still Right Here in the Present”: Second-Generation Bajan-Brit Transnational Migrants' Views on Issues Relating to Race and Colour Class

This paper deals with second-generation Barbadians or ‘Bajan-Brits’, who have decided to ‘return’ to the birthplace of their parents, focusing on their reactions to matters relating to race relations and racialised identities. The importance of race and the operation of the ‘colour-class’ system in the Caribbean are established at the outset. Based on fifty-two qualitative in-depth interviews, the paper initially considers the positive things that the second-generation migrants report about living in a majority black country and the salience of such racial affirmation as part of their migration process. The paper then presents an analysis of the narratives provided by the Bajan-Brits concerning their reactions to issues relating to race relations in Barbadian society. The impressions of the young returnees provide clear commentaries on what are regarded as (i) the ‘acceptance of white hegemony’ within Barbadian society, (ii) the occurrence of de facto ‘racial segregation’, (iii) perceptions of the ‘existence of apartheid’, and (iv) ‘the continuation of slavery’. The account then turns to the contemporary operation of the colour-class system. It is concluded that, despite academic arguments that the colour-class dimension has to be put to one side as the principal dimension of social stratification in the contemporary Caribbean, the second-generation migrants are acutely aware of the continued existence and salience of such gradations within society. Thus, the analysis not only serves to emphasise the continued importance of racial-based stratification in the contemporary Caribbean, but also speaks of the ‘hybrid’ and ‘in-between’ racialised identities of the second-generation migrants.

BLOUET, OLWYN M. The Contemporary Caribbean: History, Life and Culture since 1945. London: Reaktion Books (Contemporary Worlds), 2007. 160 pp. 14.95. ISBN 1-86189-313-2

Journal Article Blouet, Olwyn M. The Contemporary Caribbean: History, Life and Culture since 1945. London: Reaktion Books (Contemporary Worlds), 2007. 160 pp. £14.95. ISBN 1–86189–313–2 Get access Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 44, Issue 1, January 2008, Page 89, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqm127 Published: 01 January 2008

The Novels of Patricia Powell: Negotiating Gender and Sexuality Across the Disjunctures of the Caribbean Diaspora

The Novels of Patricia Powell:Negotiating Gender and Sexuality Across the Disjunctures of the Caribbean Diaspora Timothy Chin (bio) The fate of Caribbean people living in the UK, the US or Canada is no more 'external' to Caribbean history than the Empire was 'external' to the so-called domestic history of Britain, though that is, indeed how contemporary historiography constructs them. Stuart Hall, "Thinking the Diaspora: Home-Thoughts from Abroad" Sexuality is not only not essence, not timeless, it is also not fixed in place; sexuality is on the move. Benigno Sanchez-Eppler and Cindy Patton, Queer Diasporas Nation, Diaspora, Sexuality If questions of sexuality—particularly "non-normative" sexualities—have either been absent from Caribbean discourse or else fraught with tensions and controversy, it is not only because questions of sexuality are inevitably tied to concerns about gender and morality but also because they are inextricably linked to concerns about national identity. M. Jacqui Alexander's groundbreaking essay, "Redrafting Morality: The Postcolonial State and the Sexual Offences Bill of Trinidad and Tobago," exposed this linkage between dominant constructions of nation and the erasure of certain forms of sexuality.2 Alexander's essay traced the legal categories through which certain bodies—and the sexual practices and desires they enact—are constituted as "other" to and, thereby, effectively excluded from the nation. This erasure or occlusion of non hetero-normative sexualities in the name of the nation prevails in the realm of popular culture as well.3 Consequently, breaking the silence that surrounds issues of sexuality in Caribbean discourse necessitates a simultaneous interrogation of prevailing constructs of nation and national identity. In this regard, the usefulness of a diasporic perspective—whether embodied as a critical framework and/or reflected in the constitutive features of a literary text—might be especially salient for the articulation of gay, lesbian, and other non-normative sexualities. [End Page 533] Insofar as the transnational circuits and border zones generated by the contemporary diaspora experience are, as George Lipsitz and Roger Rouse remind us, linked to wider historical forces—for example, corporate globalization, post-Fordist accumulation strategies, etc.—the relations that structure the movement of populations, goods and services, information, ideas, and cultural products are often extremely uneven, to say the least.4 Transnational movement and diaspora might mean one thing for the Jamaican migrant worker who picks fruit or works in a logging camp in rural Maine, another for the Barbadian women who process data in an "off-shore" office, and yet another for the Caribbean scholar or writer who holds a series of "visiting" appointments at prestigious U.S. academic institutions.5 Similarly, the accessibility and popularity of reggae and dancehall music within U.S. consumer culture might mean one thing, while the impact of a largely U.S.-based global media culture on Jamaican youth living in the slums of Kingston means another.6 Nevertheless, the unevenness of the terrain on which globalization is currently taking place is also, paradoxically perhaps, what allows the possibility of resistance or strategic intervention, the possibility of "room for maneuver," to borrow a phrase from Ross Chambers. As the forces of global capital continue to create new markets and to find new sources of cheap labor, new "flows and circuits" are also created. The transnational spaces generated by these flows and circuits are by no means always liberating ones. But these spaces sometimes enable new perspectives, discursive positionings, and material possibilities that can be strategically exploited. As Benigno Sanchez-Eppler suggests, movement "provokes or enables refocusing" ("Reinaldo Arenas" 166). The border zones of the diaspora can, thus, become sites in which subjectivity is re-worked and reimagined. Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg refer to this strategic working of the border zones as a "guerrilla warfare of the interstices, where minorities rupture categories of race, gender, sexuality, class, nation, and empire in the center as well as on the margins" (13). Patricia Powell and the "Border Zones" of the Caribbean Diaspora Patricia Powell is a gifted and already prolific young writer who has emerged in the context of the contemporary Caribbean diaspora. Powell was born in Jamaica in 1966, and lived there until 1982, when she emigrated to the United...

Dreaming in Color: Race and the Spectacular in The Ag�ero Sisters and Praisesong for the Widow

Dreaming in Color:Race and the Spectacular in The Agüero Sisters and Praisesong for the Widow Pascha A. Stevenson (bio) I cannot go to a film without seeing myself. I wait for me. In the interval, just before the film starts, I wait for me. The people in the theater are watching me, examining me, waiting for me. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks1 What Frantz Fanon articulates here is a kind of spectacular anxiety, a phenomenon that flourishes in an exhibitory environment: not so much the emblematic theater, but rather the color-bound society in which the theater operates. Fanon is a black man, a Martinican, and he sits quietly in the movie theater anticipating the coming spectacle of the screen. Those around him, white faces presumably, do the same, and yet a far more urgent, violent drama unfolds, one in which black skin slips uncomfortably into the role of spectacle (supplanting even the screen) by virtue of its distinction from and subordination to white skin. Even Fanon cannot help but position himself as the object of his own surveillance. He envisions himself waiting there in the theater, waiting to see himself yet again in the film at hand. The self-reflexive waiting and watching, and the awareness of those examining eyes around him also waiting and watching, produces a kind of nausea. Fanon wonders how the screen will represent him: no matter that he himself will not appear in the movie (he is no actor); the reductive fact of his darkness is sufficient to bind him inextricably to whatever representation of black men the film may offer. Will he be "battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetichism, racial defects, slave ships, and above all else, above all: 'sho' good eatin'"?2 Spectacle and "difference" go often together, frequently as cell mates. Fanon feels himself shift into his position as the object of the spectacle simply (and yet not so simply) because he is Afro-Caribbean, and he comes into the role with a profound conscious unwillingness, yet so entrenched are the ideas situating [End Page 141] him there that he can offer little resistance to the power of the spectacle. Indeed this is the real business of social spectacle: power. While Fanon's experience implies that spectacle derives from the subject's exoticism—from the subject's difference from an accepted standard and rarity within a given context (perhaps he is the only black man in a theater where most patrons are white)—there is more to social spectacle than the exploitation of difference. The relationship between spectacle and spectator is indeed a hegemonic one, defined by both power and powerlessness. It is in this sense that Fanon's individual and representative experience, concepts of social spectacle and what Guy Debord calls the "spectacular economy," begin to mobilize questions and ideas about exoticism as a white lens for viewing the nonwhite Caribbean.3 For here, too, within the mythology of exoticism, the relationship between object and spectator might seem to reveal the lure of difference, the seductive powers of the exotic, and indeed it does to a certain extent. Yet one must ask why the Caribbean makes for such fascinating spectacle? What is it that suits it so perfectly to this role? Is not the Caribbean also a kind of dark figure sitting in the dim theater of white Western tourism? Even now? "The spectacle is not a collection of images," says Debord, "rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images."4 That this "social relationship" abides by rules regarding race, gender, and class goes practically without saying, but I will say it anyway.5 Broadly defined, this project is concerned with the manner in which two contemporary Caribbean American authors contend with the complex function of spectacle in their respective Caribbeans. While Paule Marshall critiques and subverts the mythology of the exotic spectacle in the Caribbean, Cristina García seems to yield to it, and the gulf between the two authors reveals the scope and complexity of the Caribbean literary dialogue. Ultimately I look to fiction emerging from or written about the Caribbean to treat that region's...

Soul-Jahs: An Introduction to Contemporary Caribbean Poetry in English

Soul-Jahs: An Introduction to Contemporary Caribbean Poetry in English

Antic Histories: Narrating the Past in a Martinican Novel and a Sumatran Mock Family Memoir

Using the concept of the memory artist developed by Mary Steedly, and Ann Stoler and Karen Strassler, this paper offers an anthropology of print literature reading of a linguistically playful Caribbean novel (Patrick Chamoiseau's 1992Texaco) in relation to an equally antic and language‐obsessed historical text from Indonesia (Mangaradja Onggang Parlindungan's 1964Tuanku Rao). Contemporary Caribbean novels are generally analysed in terms of a Caribbean basin (and, sometimes, African diaspora) concept of Créolité cultural production, a field covering Creole literatures tied directly to Caribbean history, plantation slavery and the Caribbean's specific mix of Creole languages and metropolitan tongues, such as French or English. This paper, by contrast, proposes a comparative framework that reads novels like Texaco contrapuntally in relation to texts from a geographically distant, but socially resonant, other region: the former Dutch East Indies. Using close readings of passages from both books and relying on Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the novel as a linguistically omnivorous genre, this paper argues that literatures of the former East and West Indies can be productively compared in terms of their rhetorics of memory, their language play and their similar penchant for literary hilarity.

Cannibal modernities: postcoloniality and the avant-garde in Caribbean and Brazilian literature

Unique in its inclusion of Brazil in a comparative study of literary texts and their engagement with Western modernity, Cannibal Modernities is the first post colonial study to show how the peripheral replications of modernity in contemporary Caribbean and Latin American texts differ crucially from their European models. Luis Madureira addresses issues that so many post colonial theorists have struggled with, particularly the complex interactions and antagonisms between indigenous cultures and the imperial cultures imposed upon them and the effort to provincialize the West. Madureira's book diverges from existing critical texts, however, in crucial, thought-provoking ways. The specific literary traditions compared here - Brazilian modernism, negritude theory and poetry, as well as Caribbean literary theory and historical discourses in French, English, and Spanish - have not been brought together in a single study before. In addition, the book's theoretical model of comparison focuses on the complexities of colonial and post colonial identity and of nationhood and globalization, as well as on their agonistic engagement with Europe's enlightenment philosophy. Cannibal Modernities shows us it is precisely in those New World avant-garde movements that have been traditionally designated as imitative that the emergence of post-coloniality resides and, moreover, that Europe's foundational discourses of modernity are enabled and sustained by the very peoples and cultures that have been relegated to the margins by modernity.