Caribbean Literature OER : Home

This is a speech and reading given by author Paule Marshall as part of the Metropolitan State College Bridge Speaker series on March 11, 2003.

Sovereignty. Sugar. Revolution. These are the three axes this book uses to link the works of contemporary women artists from Haiti—a country excluded in contemporary Latin American and Caribbean literary studies—the Dominican Republic, and Cuba. In From Sugar to Revolution: Women's Visions of Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, Myriam Chancy aims to show that Haiti's exclusion is grounded in its historical role as a site of ontological defiance. Her premise is that writers Edwidge Danticat, Julia Alvarez, Zoé Valdés, Loida Maritza Pérez, Marilyn Bobes, Achy Obejas, Nancy Morejón, and visual artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons attempt to defy fears of “otherness” by assuming the role of “archaeologists of amnesia.” They seek to elucidate women's variegated lives within the confining walls of their national identifications—identifications wholly defined as male. They reach beyond the confining limits of national borders to discuss gender, race, sexuality, and class in ways that render possible the linking of all three nations. Nations such as Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba are still locked in battles over self-determination, but, as Chancy demonstrates, women's gendered revisionings may open doors to less exclusionary imaginings of social and political realities for Caribbean people in general.

In Autochthonomies, Myriam J. A. Chancy engages readers in an interpretive journey. She lays out a radical new process that invites readers to see creations by artists of African descent as legible within the context of African diasporic historical and cultural debates. By invoking a transnational African/diasporic lens and negotiating it through a lakou or ”yard space,” we can see such identities transfigured, recognized, and exchanged. Chancy demonstrates how the process can examine the salient features of texts and art that underscore African/diasporic sensibilities and render them legible.

A letter to the editor responding to a review of her book.

Excerpt of Book

Includes:
"Sea Grapes"
"Names"
"The Season of Phantasmal Peace"
"A Sea-Chantey"

Excerpt from his book, "It's Just a Movie."

Customs

Excerpt from the book, "Salt."

Poem

A New York Times New and Noteworthy Book Édouard Glissant's novels, closely tied to the theories he developed in Poétique de la Relation (Poetics of relation), are rich explorations of a deported and colonized people's loss of their own history and the ever-evolving social and political effects this sense of groundlessness has caused in Martinique. In Mahagony Glissant identifies both the malaise of and the potential within Martinican society through a powerful collective narrative of geographic identity explored through multiple narrators. These characters'lives are viewed back and forth over centuries of time and through tales of resistance, linked always by the now-ancient mahogany tree. Attempting to untangle the collective memory of Martinique, Mathieu, the contemporary narrator, creates a conscious history of these people in that place—a record that unearths the mechanics of misrepresentation to get at the fundamental, enduring truths of that history, perhaps as only the mahogany tree knows it.

When the Walls Fall is a manifesto written by Glissant and Chamoiseau against the creation of the Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity, and Co-development established in 2007 by French president Nicolas Sarkozy. The manifesto is a call against the building of walls that separate us rather than relate us one to another in a society. Walls are contradictory to the notion of Relation that Glissant and Chamoiseau advocate, where one would be open to the unpredictable and unforeseeable. Both authors criticize the notion of a national identity that would be fixed and firmly established.

The article presents a speech by the author Édouard Glissant, delivered at the Facing 2000 AD and Beyond Lecture Series held at the University of the West Indies, Mona, on April 30, 1992. It examines the idea of creolisation in the Americas. Particular focus is given to the experience of diversity in the Caribbean and to the distinctions between creole language, pidgin, and dialect. Other topics include identity, the idea of utopia, and the plantation system.

Poem. Scroll down to translation in English.

Presents excerpts from book `Tout-Monde' and `Traite du Tout-Monde' by Edouard Glissant.

Poem.

In original and insightful ways, Caribbean writers have turned to Jewish experiences of exodus and reinvention, from the Sephardim expelled from Iberia in the 1490s to the'Calypso Jews'who fled Europe for Trinidad in the 1930s. Examining these historical migrations through the lens of postwar Caribbean fiction and poetry, Sarah Phillips Casteel presents the first major study of representations of Jewishness in Caribbean literature. Bridging the gap between postcolonial and Jewish studies, Calypso Jews enriches cross-cultural investigations of Caribbean creolization.Caribbean writers invoke both the 1492 expulsion and the Holocaust as part of their literary archaeology of slavery and its legacies. Despite the unequal and sometimes fraught relations between Blacks and Jews in the Caribbean before and after emancipation, Black-Jewish literary encounters reflect sympathy and identification more than antagonism and competition. Providing an alternative to U.S.-based critical narratives of Black-Jewish relations, Casteel reads Derek Walcott, Maryse Condé, Michelle Cliff, Jamaica Kincaid, Caryl Phillips, David Dabydeen, and Paul Gilroy, among others, to reveal a distinctive interdiasporic literature.