Caribbean Literature

En el cincuentenario de CARIBBEAN STUDIES: algunas notas sobre las universidades del Caribe y sus revistas académicas

by Humberto Garcia-Muniz

Article published in CARIBBEAN STUDIES vol. 39, nos. 1-2 (Jan-Dec 2011), pp. 3-42.

These commemorative notes on the fiftieth anniversary of Caribbean Studies are an initial endeavor to discuss academic... more These commemorative notes on the fiftieth anniversary of Caribbean Studies are an initial endeavor to discuss academic journals published by universities in the Caribbean region. The first part deals with thedevelopment of higher education institutions and the creation of university-based academic journals in the Hispanic-and English-speaking Caribbean. The next section addresses the development of the first academic journals with a regional perspective—Caribbean Quarterly and Social and Economic Studies—until their becoming peer-reviewed journals. In the third part, the article centers on the origin and development of Caribbean Studies, including also a bibliometric analysis ofseveral aspects, such as the the origin of authors, fields of study, andothers. The essay closes with a rapid view of the present panorama of journals dedicated to the Caribbean and with a brief conclusion.

“Lo humano es una historia, un cuento de hadas”: entrevista a Pedro Cabiya

by Kerstin Oloff

An interview with Pedro Cabiya about his new zombie novel.

Pedro Cabiya (1971), antes conocido como Diego Deni, figura entre los escritores recientes más originales del Caribe;... more Pedro Cabiya (1971), antes conocido como Diego Deni, figura entre los escritores recientes más originales del Caribe; su ya considerable obra demuestra eso que Juan Duchesne Winter entiende como una “voluntad estética inconforme” (35). Nació en Puerto Rico y reside desde hace diez años en la República Dominicana, algo que, según él mismo refiere, le acercó más a la “realidad del Caribe” (Rodríguez 2008). En Santo Domingo dirige el Centro de Lenguas y Culturas Modernas de la Universidad Iberoamericana (Unibe). Ha publicado varios textos literarios importantes, entre ellos las colecciones de cuentos Historias tremendas (1999) e Historias atroces (2003), y las novelas La cabeza(2007), Trance (2007) y, más recientemente, Malas hierbas (2010).

Claude McKay's Constabulary Aesthetics: The Social Poetics of the Jamaican Dialect Poems

by Walt Hunter

forthcoming in Modern Philology

This essay recasts McKay’s sonnets from _Harlem Shadows_ in the light of his early ballads, written while he worked as... more This essay recasts McKay’s sonnets from _Harlem Shadows_ in the light of his early ballads, written while he worked as a constable in Kingston. By looking closely at the poems published in the Kingston _Daily Gleaner_, I show how the commitment to poetic form and to dialect engenders an unexpected solidarity with those excluded from political and aesthetic representation. Deploying schemes of rhyme, refrain, and chiasmus in concert with the linguistic formations of Jamaican patois, McKay’s poems map out the points of tension and contestation, as well as collusion and imbrication, between the language of a literary tradition and the spoken dialect of the prostitute, the policeman, and the lover “at the cottage door” in early twentieth-century Jamaica.

Lux, Christina. “The House Facing the Sea." Translation from the French of “La Maison face à la mer” by Marie-Célie Agnant. Metamorphoses: The Five College Faculty Seminar on Literary Translation, 11.1 (Spring 2003): 193-199.

by Christina Lux

also listed under translator's former name, "Vander Vorst"

Translation of a short story by Haitian author Marie-Célie Agnant; originally appeared in the collection Le Silence... more Translation of a short story by Haitian author Marie-Célie Agnant; originally appeared in the collection Le Silence comme le sang (1997).

Keywords: Haiti, short story, Agnant, Canada, women, gender, violence, conflict, Caribbean

Lección errante: Mayra Santos Febres y el Caribe contemporáneo

by Nadia Celis

Publicado por Isla Negra: San Juan, 2011 y co-editado por Juan Pablo Rivera.

Lección errante: Mayra Santos Febres y el Caribe contemporáneo es el primer libro de ensayos críticos sobre Mayra... more Lección errante: Mayra Santos Febres y el Caribe contemporáneo es el primer libro de ensayos críticos sobre Mayra Santos Febres, una de los escritoras más versátiles del Caribe hoy, y la primera Afro-hispana de significativo reconocimiento en Latinoamérica. La colección examina el singular universo poético de Santos Febres, poblado de seres "errantes" –inmigrantes, travestis y prostitutas— cuyas voces en la ficción responden a su ancestral marginación socio-histórica...
Entre los colaboradores se encuentran Debra Castillo, Carmen Oquendo-Villar, Annette Passapera, Rubén Ríos Ávila, Radost Rangelova, Irune del Río Gabiola, Rosana Díaz-Zambrana, Margaret Shrimpton, Elvira Sánchez-Blake, Guillermo Irizarry y Chrissy B. Arce.

Issue 3.2 Masquerade: Caribbean Issue, Editorial

by Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings

Issue 3.2 Masquerade: Caribbean Issue, Table of Contents

by Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings

“Gendering Diasporic Migration in Erna Brodber’s Louisiana”

by Simone Drake

MaComère: Journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars. 8 (2006): 112-135.

Issue 7.1 Familial and Other Conversations: Special Issue on Caryl Phillips, Table of Contents

by Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings

La forma como conducto a la revisión de la historia en Concierto barroco (1974) de Alejo Carpentier

by Maristela Verastegui

11.1, Locating the Caribbean, Editorial

by Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings

Table of Content, Issue 11.1, Locating the Caribbean

by Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings

Ferdydurke on the Island: The Subject's Constricted Space in Virgilio Piñera

by Juan Manuel Espinosa

Published in 'Chasqui: Revista de literatura latinoamericana' 40:2, November 2011.

Policing the Miscegenate: Dougla Illegitimacy and the Archive

by Kaneesha Parsard

Presented at Intersections: A Conversation between African American Studies and Asian American Studies, University of Pennsylvania, November 2011.

In the Caribbean, mixed-race peoples of African and Indian parentage, or douglas, are distinctly postcolonial... more In the Caribbean, mixed-race peoples of African and Indian parentage, or douglas, are distinctly postcolonial subjects, with roots in both the memory of the Middle Passage and chattel slavery, the kala pani and indenture. Taboos against mutual sympathies and mixing between African and Indian Caribbean peoples had enabled the continued marginalization of douglas in social reality and in textual representation. A September 1951 letter written to V.S. Naipaul from his father—included in Between Father and Son: Family Letters—details the so-called lamentable choices of his maturing female cousins. The consequences of their sort of "modernity" are evident in their rejection of "all things Indian," and particularly in their respective attractions to a Muslim and a dougla man, described as a "coal-black," masquerading Indian. Likewise, the 1909 compilation of travel writings, Sailing Sunny Seas, features impressions of a white American woman traveling throughout Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago. Fears of miscegenation, highlighted in the writer’s brief preoccupation with the fraught beauty of a mixed-race woman, reify a traditional colonial black-white binary and illuminates the absence of douglas. Drawing on Along the Archival Grain and its treatment of a mixed-race Netherlands Indies population, Ann Stoler observes that "[e]veryone knew about [them], but few agreed on who and how many they were. Nor did naming…call upon and secure a common set of attributes." How might Naipaul's personal writings, bridging the literary and personal, be constitutive of an archive of later Afro-Indo relations, douglas, resulting anxieties, and their exclusion—adding to a physical, legal archive of dougla illegitimacy?

“Douglarise de nation”: Politicized Intimacies and the Literary Dougla

by Kaneesha Parsard

Undergraduate honors thesis in English (Advisor: Dr. David Eng). Presented excerpts at Kind(s) of Real, Penn Undergraduate Humanities Forum, March 2011

A Poetics of Belonging: Caribbean Sovereignties and Hybrid Homelands



by Kaneesha Parsard

Presented at 2011 meeting of the Caribbean Studies Association, Willemstad,  Curaçao, May 2011.

The Caribbean archipelago—the site of convergence for imperial powers, enslaved Africans, Asian indentured laborers or... more The Caribbean archipelago—the site of convergence for imperial powers, enslaved Africans, Asian indentured laborers or “coolies,” and indigenous peoples—bears markers of cultural, linguistic, and racial hybridity. Afro- and Indo-Caribbeans, specifically, maintain a tenuous relation to representations of ‘old’ Africa and India, and mixed-race figures such as douglas are bifurcated by disparate sites of origin. Further, the descendants of enslaved Africans and indentured South Asians alternately inherit and resist colonial legacies. In particular, Hugh C. Stollmeyer's 1933 poem "The Time Has Come" laments the ways in which "chains of iron [are] engendering other chains" and supplicates Africans and Indians to eschew the colonial presence. Likewise, contemporary poet Christian Campbell presents current political landscapes in "Curry Powder": the dougla speaker illustrates the generational process of marrying away from Mother India, speaking at once to choices that advance creolization, its political consequences, as well as to the interiority of those who occupy bodies in-between. Ultimately, I seek to illuminate how Afro-, Indo-, and mixed-race Caribbean peoples negotiate their subjectivity in relation to imagined homelands and, often, reinscribe old, colonial forms of power to create hierarchies in the postcolonial moment.

'David Dabydeen's A Harlot's Progress: Re-preseting the Slave Narrative Genre' in Talking Words: New Essays on the Work of David Dabydeen, ed. by Lynne Macedo (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2011), pp. 73-83.

by Abigail Ward

"I have become the sea’s craft": Authorial Subjectivity in Walcott’s Omeros and Dabydeen’s "Turner"

by Stephanie Pocock Boeninger

‘“Not Equatorial black, not Mediterranean white”: Denis Williams’ Other Leopards’

by John Thieme

Essay in African Athena: New Agendas, ed. Daniel Orrells, Gurminder Bhambra and Tessa Roynon, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 311-25. Just published in UK; US publication by OUP 2012.

A contribution to a volume exploring the impact of the modern African diaspora on Western notions of history and... more A contribution to a volume exploring the impact of the modern African diaspora on Western notions of history and culture, acknowledging the role played by Martin Bernal's Black Athena in the contestation of dominant white Euro-American constructions of the classical past.                                                                                                                                                                                My own essay considers ways in which the identity quest of the Guyanese protagonist of Other Leopards, an archaeological draughtsman working in the Sudanic region of Africa, relates to the excavation of broader issues concerning the relationship between African and classical European cultures                                         

Gendered Legacies of Romantic Nationalism in the Works of Michelle Cliff

by Jocelyn Stitt