Memory and the Archival Turn in Caribbean Literature and Culture

Memory and the Archival Turn in Caribbean Literature and Culture
Author: Marta Fernández Campa
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2023-04-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030721353

This book discusses an archival turn in the work of contemporary Caribbean writers and visual artists across linguistic locations and whose work engages critically with various historical narratives and colonial and postcolonial records. This refiguration opens a critical space and retells stories and histories previously occluded in/by those records, and in spaces of the public sphere. Through poetics and aesthetics of fragmentation largely influenced by music and popular culture, their work encourages contrapuntal ways of (re)thinking histories; ways that interrogate the influence of colonial narratives in processes of silencing but also centre the knowledge found in oral histories and other forms of artistic archives outside official repositories. Discussing literature and selected artwork by artists from Britain, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and Trinidad and Tobago, Memory and the Archival Turn in Caribbean Literature and Culture demonstrates the historiographical significance of artistic and cultural production.

The Archive and the Repertoire

The Archive and the Repertoire
Author: Diana Taylor
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2003-09-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822385317

In The Archive and the Repertoire preeminent performance studies scholar Diana Taylor provides a new understanding of the vital role of performance in the Americas. From plays to official events to grassroots protests, performance, she argues, must be taken seriously as a means of storing and transmitting knowledge. Taylor reveals how the repertoire of embodied memory—conveyed in gestures, the spoken word, movement, dance, song, and other performances—offers alternative perspectives to those derived from the written archive and is particularly useful to a reconsideration of historical processes of transnational contact. The Archive and the Repertoire invites a remapping of the Americas based on traditions of embodied practice. Examining various genres of performance including demonstrations by the children of the disappeared in Argentina, the Peruvian theatre group Yuyachkani, and televised astrological readings by Univision personality Walter Mercado, Taylor explores how the archive and the repertoire work together to make political claims, transmit traumatic memory, and forge a new sense of cultural identity. Through her consideration of performances such as Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s show Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit . . . , Taylor illuminates how scenarios of discovery and conquest haunt the Americas, trapping even those who attempt to dismantle them. Meditating on events like those of September 11, 2001 and media representations of them, she examines both the crucial role of performance in contemporary culture and her own role as witness to and participant in hemispheric dramas. The Archive and the Repertoire is a compelling demonstration of the many ways that the study of performance enables a deeper understanding of the past and present, of ourselves and others.

Memories of the Classical Underworld in Irish and Caribbean Literature

Memories of the Classical Underworld in Irish and Caribbean Literature
Author: Madeleine Scherer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2021-09-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110675153

Classical Memories is an intervention into the field of adaptation studies, taking the example of classical reception to show that adaptation is a process that can be driven by and produce intertextual memories. I see ‘classical memories’ as a memory-driven type of adaptation that draws on and reproduces schematic and otherwise de-contextualised conceptions of antiquity and its cultural ‘exports’ in, broadly speaking, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These memory-driven adaptations differ, often in significant ways, from more traditional adaptations that seek to either continue or deconstruct a long-running tradition that can be traced back to antiquity as well as its canonical points of reception in later ages. When investigating such a popular and widespread set of narratives, characters, and images like those that remain of Graeco-Roman antiquity, terms like ‘adaptation’ and ‘reception’ could and should be nuanced further to allow us to understand the complex interactions between modern works and classical antiquity in more detail, particularly when it pertains to postcolonial or post-digital classical reception. In Classical Memories, I propose that understanding certain types of adaptations as intertextual memories allows us to do just that.

The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature

The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature
Author: Michael A. Bucknor
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 883
Release: 2011-06-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1136821732

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.

Cultural Memory, Memorials, and Reparative Writing

Cultural Memory, Memorials, and Reparative Writing
Author: Erica L. Johnson
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 120
Release: 2018-11-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030020983

Cultural Memory, Memorials, and Reparative Writing examines the ways in which memory furnishes important source material in the three distinct areas of critical theory, memoir, and memorial art. The book first shows how affect theorists have increasingly complemented more traditional archival research through the use of “academic memoir.” This theoretical piece is then applied to memoir works by Caribbean writers Dionne Brand and Patrick Chamoiseau, and the final case study in the book interprets as memorial art Kara Walker’s ephemeral 80,000 pound sugar sculpture of 2014. Memory as method; memory as archive; memorial as affect: this book looks at the interplay between archival sources on the one hand, and the affective memories, both personal and collective, that flow from, around, and into the constantly shifting record of the past.

Archiving Cultures

Archiving Cultures
Author: Jeannette A. Bastian
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 76
Release: 2023-03-29
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 100088905X

Archiving Cultures defines and models the concept of cultural archives, focusing on how diverse communities express and record their heritage and collective memory and why and how these often-intangible expressions are archival records. Analysis of oral traditions, memory texts and performance arts demonstrate their relevance as records of their communities. Key features of this book include definitions of cultural heritage and archival heritage with an emphasis on intangible cultural heritage. Aspects of cultural heritage such as oral traditions, performance arts, memory texts and collective memory are placed within the context of records and archives. It presents strategies for reconciling intangible and tangible cultural expressions with traditional archival theory and practice and offers both analog and digital models for constructing cultural archives through examples and vignettes. The audience includes archivists and other information workers who challenge Western archival theory and scholars concerned with interdisciplinary perspectives on tangible and intangible cultural heritage. This book is relevant to scholars involved with non-textual materials and will appeal to a range of academic disciplines engaging with "the archive".

Archiving Caribbean Identity

Archiving Caribbean Identity
Author: John Aarons
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2022-06-12
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1000590712

Archiving Caribbean Identity highlights the "Caribbeanization" of archives in the region, considering what those archives could include in the future and exploring the potential for new records in new formats. Interpreting records in the broadest sense, the 15 chapters in this volume explore a wide variety of records that represent new archival interpretations. The book is split into two parts, with the first part focusing on record forms that are not generally considered "archival" in traditional Western practice. The second part explores more "traditional" archival collections and demonstrates how these collections are analysed and presented from the perspective of Caribbean peoples. As a whole, the volume suggests how colonial records can be repurposed to surface Caribbean narratives. Reflecting on the unique challenges faced by developing countries as they approach their archives, the volume considers how to identify and archive records in the forms and formats that reflect the postcolonial and decolonized Caribbean, how to build an archive of the people that documents contemporary society and reflects Caribbean memory, and how to repurpose the colonial archives so that they assist the Caribbean in reclaiming its history. Archiving Caribbean Identity demonstrates how non-textual cultural traces function as archival records and how folk-centred perspectives disrupt conventional understandings of records. The book should thus be of interest to academics and students engaged in the study of archives, memory, culture, history, sociology, and the colonial and postcolonial experience.

Dreams of Archives Unfolded

Dreams of Archives Unfolded
Author: Jocelyn Fenton Stitt
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2021-06-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1978806566

The first book on pan-Caribbean life writing, Dreams of Archives Unfolded reveals the innovative formal practices used to write about historical absences within contemporary personal narratives. Although the premier genres of writing postcoloniality in the Caribbean have been understood to be fiction and poetry, established figures such as Erna Brodber, Maryse Condé, Lorna Goodison, Edwidge Danticat, Saidiya Hartmann, Ruth Behar, and Dionne Brand and emerging writers such as Yvonne Shorter Brown, and Gaiutra Bahadur use life writing to question the relationship between the past and the present. Stitt theorizes that the remarkable flowering of life writing by Caribbean women since 2000 is not an imitation of the “memoir boom” in North America and Europe; instead, it marks a different use of the genre born out of encountering gendered absences in archives and ancestral memory that cannot be filled with more research. Dreams of Archives makes a significant contribution to studies of Caribbean literature by demonstrating that women’s autobiographical narratives published in the past twenty years are feminist epistemological projects that rework Caribbean studies’ longstanding commitment to creating counter-archives.

Immaterial Archives

Immaterial Archives
Author: Jenny Sharpe
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2020-03-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0810141590

In this innovative study, Jenny Sharpe moves beyond the idea of art and literature as an alternative archive to the historical records of slavery and its aftermath. Immaterial Archives explores instead the intangible phenomena of affects, spirits, and dreams that Caribbean artists and writers introduce into existing archives. Through the works of Frantz Zéphirin, Edouard Duval-Carrié, M. NourbeSe Philip, Erna Brodber, and Kamau Brathwaite, Immaterial Archives examines silences as black female spaces, Afro-Creole sacred worlds as diasporic cartographies, and the imaginative conjoining of spirits with industrial technologies as disruptions of enlightened modernity.

Working Memory

Working Memory
Author: Marlene Kadar
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
Total Pages: 399
Release: 2015-07-31
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1771120371

Working Memory: Women and Work in World War II speaks to the work women did during the war: the labour of survival, resistance, and collaboration, and the labour of recording, representing, and memorializing these wartime experiences. The contributors follow their subjects’ tracks and deepen our understanding of the experiences from the imprints left behind. These efforts are a part of the making of history, and when the process is as personal as many of our contributors’ research has been, it is also the working of memory. The implication here is that memory is intimate, and that the layering of narrative fragments that recovery involves brings us in touching distance to ourselves. These are not the stories of the brave little woman at home; they are stories of the woman who calculated the main chance and took up with the Nazi soldier, or who eagerly dropped the apron at the door and picked up a paintbrush, or who brazenly bargained for her life and her mother’s with the most feared of tyrants. These are stories of courage and sometimes of compromise— not the courage of bravado and hype and big guns, but rather the courage of hard choices and sacrifices that make sense of the life given, even when that life seems only madness. Working Memory brings scholarly attention to the roles of women in World War II that have been hidden, masked, undervalued, or forgotten.