Shifting Homelands, Travelling Identities

Shifting Homelands, Travelling Identities
Author: Jasbir Jain
Publisher: Ian Randle Publishers
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2009
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

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.

Writers of the Caribbean Diaspora

Writers of the Caribbean Diaspora
Author: Jasbir Jain
Publisher: New Dawn Press(IL)
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2008-04
Genre:
ISBN: 9781932705775

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.

Exploring Cultural Identities in Jean Rhys’ Fiction

Exploring Cultural Identities in Jean Rhys’ Fiction
Author: Cristina-Georgiana Voicu
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2014-10-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3110368129

Using a theoretical approach and a critical summary, combining the perspectives in the postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis and narratology with the tools of hermeneutics and deconstruction, this book argues that Jean Rhys’s work can be subsumed under a poetics of cultural identity and hybridity. It also demonstrates the validity of the concept of hybridization as the expression of identity formation; the cultural boundaries variability; the opposition self-otherness, authenticity-fiction, trans-textuality; and the relevance of an integrated approach to multiple cultural identities as an encountering and negotiation space between writer, reader and work. The complexity of ontological and epistemological representation involves an interdisciplinary approach that blends a literary interpretive approach to social, anthropological, cultural and historical perspectives. The book concludes that in the author’s fictional universe, cultural identity is represented as a general human experience that transcends the specific conditionalities of geographical contexts, history and culture. The construction of identity by Jean Rhys is represented by the dichotomy of marginal identity and the identification with a human ideal designed either by the hegemonic discourse or metropolitan culture or by the dominant ideology. The identification with a pattern of cultural authenticity, of racial, ethnic, or national purism is presented as a purely destructive cultural projection, leading to the creation of a static universe in opposition to the diversity of human feelings and aspirations. Jean Rhys’s fictional discourse lies between “the anxiety of authorship” and “the anxiety of influence” and shows the postcolonial era of uprooting and migration in which the national ownership diluted the image of a “home” ambiguous located at the boundary between a myth of origins and a myth of becoming. The relationship between the individual and socio-cultural space is thus shaped in a dual hybrid position.

Critical Perspectives on Indo-Caribbean Women's Literature

Critical Perspectives on Indo-Caribbean Women's Literature
Author: Joy Allison Indira Mahabir
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2013
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 041550967X

This book is the first collection on Indo-Caribbean women's writing and the first work to offer a sustained analysis of the literature from a range of theoretical and critical perspectives, such as ecocriticism, feminist, queer, post-colonial and Caribbean cultural theories. The essays not only lay the framework of an emerging and growing field, but also critically situate internationally acclaimed writers such as Shani Mootoo, Lakshmi Persaud and Ramabai Espinet within this emerging tradition. Indo-Caribbean women writers provide a fresh new perspective in Caribbean literature, be it in their unique representations of plantation history, anti-colonial movements, diasporic identities, feminisms, ethnicity and race, or contemporary Caribbean societies and culture. The book offers a theoretical reading of the poetics, politics and cultural traditions that inform Indo-Caribbean women's writing, arguing that while women writers work with and through postcolonial and Caribbean cultural theories, they also respond to a distinctive set of influences and realities specific to their positioning within the Indo-Caribbean community and the wider national, regional and global imaginary. Contributors visit the overlap between national and transnational engagements in Indo-Caribbean women's literature, considering the writers' response to local or nationally specific contexts, and the writers' response to the diasporic and transnational modalities of Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean communities.

The West Indian Generation

The West Indian Generation
Author: Amanda Bidnall
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2017
Genre: History
ISBN: 1786940035

Between Britain's imperial victory in the Second World War and its introduction of race-based immigration restriction 'at home, ' London's relationship with its burgeoning West Indian settler community was a cauldron of apprehension, optimism, ignorance, and curiosity. The West Indian Generation: Remaking British Culture in London, 1945-1965 revisits this not-quite-postcolonial moment through the careers of a unique generation of West Indian artists that included actors Earl Cameron, Edric Connor, Pearl Connor, Cy Grant, Ronald Moody, Barry and Lloyd Reckord, and calypso greats Lord Beginner and Lord Kitchener. Colonial subjects turned British citizens, they tested the parameters of cultural belonging through their work. Drawing upon familiar and neglected artifacts from London's cultural archives, Amanda Bidnall sketches the feathery roots of this community as it was both nurtured and inhibited by metropolitan institutions and producers hoping variously to promote imperial solidarity, educate mainstream audiences, and sensationalize racial conflict. Upon a shared foundation of language, education, and middle-class values, a fascinating collaboration took place between popular West Indian artists and cultural authorities like the Royal Court Theatre, the Rank Organisation, and the BBC. By analyzing the potential-and limits-of this collaboration, Bidnall demonstrates the mainstream influence and perceptive politics of pioneering West Indian artists. Their ambivalent and complicated reception by the British government, media, and populace draws a tangled picture of postwar national belonging. The West Indian Generation is necessary reading for anyone interested in the cultural ramifications of the end of empire, New Commonwealth migration, and the production of Black Britain.

Creolizing the Metropole

Creolizing the Metropole
Author: H. Adlai Murdoch
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2012-06-08
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0253001323

A study of how Caribbean immigrants to France and the UK from 1948–1998 and their descendants portray their metropolitan identities in literature and film. Creolizing the Metropole is a comparative study of postwar West Indian migration to the former colonial capitals of Paris and London. It studies the effects of this population shift on national and cultural identity and traces the postcolonial Caribbean experience through analyses of the concepts of identity and diaspora. Through close readings of selected literary works and film, H. Adlai Murdoch explores the ways in which these immigrants and their descendants represented their metropolitan identities. Though British immigrants were colonial subjects and, later, residents of British Commonwealth nations, and the French arrivals from the overseas departments were citizens of France by law, both groups became subject to otherness and exclusion stemming from their ethnicities. Murdoch examines this phenomenon and the questions it raises about borders and boundaries, nationality and belonging. “An outstanding contribution to scholarship. Theoretically grounded and meticulously researched, it examines the complexities inherent in constructing new diaspora identities that are at once ethnic, national, and fluid.” —Renée Larrier, Rutgers University “In these expansive, fresh, adroit interpretations of Maryse Condé, Gisèle Pineau, Zadie Smith-White, and Andrea Levy, the author exposes the stark reality that race, and the prejudices attached to it, is a barrier to unequivocal assimilation. This study affirms that a diasporic duality persists as creolization slowly alters the metropole. Overall, an interesting read.” —Choice “[This] book provides an extremely valuable contribution to the fields of postcolonial studies and European literary and film studies in at least three ways: it theoretically refines the concept of creolization, it contributes to much-needed redefinitions of France and the United Kingdom as multicultural, and it foregrounds the aesthetic qualities of the works under study.” —Research in African Literatures

The Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature (1945–2010)

The Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature (1945–2010)
Author: Deirdre Osborne
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2016-10-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1316849104

This Companion offers a comprehensive account of the influence of contemporary British Black and Asian writing in British culture. While there are a number of anthologies covering Black and Asian literature, there is no volume that comparatively addresses fiction, poetry, plays and performance, and provides critical accounts of the qualities and impact within one book. It charts the distinctive Black and Asian voices within the body of British writing and examines the creative and cultural impact that African, Caribbean and South Asian writers have had on British literature. It analyzes literary works from a broad range of genres, while also covering performance writing and non-fiction. It offers pertinent historical context throughout, and new critical perspectives on such key themes as multiculturalism and evolving cultural identities in contemporary British literature. This Companion explores race, politics, gender, sexuality, identity, amongst other key literary themes in Black and Asian British literature. It will serve as a key resource for scholars, graduates, teachers and students alike.

The African-Jamaican Aesthetic

The African-Jamaican Aesthetic
Author: Lisa Tomlinson
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2017-01-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004342338

The African- Jamaican Aesthetics Cultural Retention and Transformation Across Borders centres on the use of African Jamaican Aesthetics in Jamaica’s literary traditions and its transformation and transmission in the diaspora.

The Body in Francophone Literature

The Body in Francophone Literature
Author: El Hadji Malick Ndiaye
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 183
Release: 2016-05-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1476625360

Much of Francophone literature is a response to an elaborate discourse that served to bolster colonial French notions of national grandeur and to justify expansion of French territories overseas. A form of colonial exoticism saw the colonized subject as a physical, cultural, aesthetic and even sexual singularity. Francophone writers sought to rehabilitate the status of non-Western peoples who, through the use of anthropometric techniques, had been racially classified as inferior or primitive. Drawing on various Francophone texts, this collection of new essays offers a compelling study of the literary body--both corporeal and figurative. Topics include the embodiment of diasporic identity, the body politic in prison writing, women's bodies, and the body's expression of trauma inflicted by genocidal violence.

Violent Waters: Literary Border Crossings in a Global Age

Violent Waters: Literary Border Crossings in a Global Age
Author: Alexandra Campana
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2020-08-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3110678608

The experience of witnessing and undertaking border crossings has become a pillar of the contemporary human condition. In order to respond to our global, multidimensional social reality, writers need to generate innovative forms of narration that expand the confines of literary tradition. This study discusses four types of border crossing (migration, intercultural dialogue, multicultural identities, military invasion) and presents literary aesthetics that unfold in Algeria, China, France, Germany, Romania, Switzerland, Trinidad and Tobago, the UK, and the USA. These analyses move from the fall of the Iron Curtain to the rise of the internet, and from the turn of the millennium to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Positioned in the field of comparative literature, this book draws upon an extensive background of theoretical thought (e.g. Adorno/Horkheimer, Arendt, Dawkins, Fanon, Freud, Kristeva, Žižek) and reaches into other academic disciplines (such as religious studies). Border crossings thus serve as both theme and methodology, which not only leads to a new definition of post-modern writing, but also underlines literature's relevance in a global society driven by public discourse.