Representations of madness in Indo-Caribbean literature

New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, 2015

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported (cc-by-nc 3.0) License.

Caribbean Studies, 2014

race issues have been for a long time at the heart of our daily lives, and at how they interact in rather perverse ways with the ways in which the global economy shaped and shapes Puerto Rico's possibilities. In this context, the work of scholars like Dinzey-Flores becomes not only interesting but urgent, and the dominant sentiment and impulse as I close the book is to say Gracias, thank you for a sensible, smart and brave book, for helping the project and the conversations get started.

2012

Ex-centric Writing: Essays on Madness in Postcolonial Writing, ed. Susanna Zinato and Annalisa Pes, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013: 95-118

2018

New Caribbean Studies series seeks to contribute to Caribbean selfunderstanding, to intervene in the terms of global engagement with the region, and to extend Caribbean Studies' role in reinventing various disciplines and their methodologies well beyond the Caribbean. The series especially solicits humanities-informed and interdisciplinary scholarship from across the region's language traditions.

2012

Century Caribbean Literary Fictions identifies a late twentieth and twenty-first-century (1980-2007) creative literary trend that is characterized by applications of quasi-gothic and traditional gothic literary conventions and features in Caribbean fictions, and extensively investigates the historical, cultural and literary origins of each contributing aspect of this phenomenon. This dissertation analyzes the interactive relationship between knowledge and discourse and its discursive power in the formation of representation processes. I, then, trace the historical origins and literary genealogies of x gothic literature to mark the cultural and discursive connections between Western European and Caribbean literatures. In addition to this literary genealogy, I present a psychoanalytical analysis that configures a psychological profile to explain an overarching thematic emphasis on madness in gothic literature. I examine the Western European historical and cultural preoccupation with madness and its diagnoses, a trend that influenced the formations of many late medieval, early modern and modern Western European social norms, cultural systems, political institutions, philosophical notions, ideological principles and literary production. It is within the context of Europe's sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies' development of a "cultural madness" that I connect Western European literature and gothic literary conventions to the development of Caribbean literature. I illustrate how this concept of madness permeated the discursive process that constructed the Caribbean region and its inhabitants within preconceptions formed by the Western European Imaginary. I, then, illustrate how Caribbean manifestations of Western European "culture of madness" have been internalized by generations of Caribbean inhabitants and show how these conventions and features function to reveal the hidden, unspoken unspeakable in late twentieth and twenty-first-century Caribbean literary works. I contend that this literary trend allows Caribbean writers to rewrite Caribbean subjectivities on their own terms, negating those constructed by the European Imaginary, and to address the general invisibility that shrouds the region and its peoples in the midst of global neocolonial indifference and exploitation.

Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature: On the Edge (Palgrave), 2018

The authors’ post-print version of this article is available in open access at http://orbi.uliege.be/handle/2268/223148?locale=en

2024

Madness has had numerous expressions in literature and culture traversing the miles and centuries. While the Baul tradition (of Bengal) is internationally esteemed a legacy of the ‗mad minstrels'; the totems, relics and rites of various other parts of the

Scrutiny2, 2019

The Zomba Mental Hospital in Malawi has gained mythical connotations in the history of its existence, both through its association with political detention and through serving as a reminder for the sane of the precariousness of their assumption of mental well-being. Some of the discourse surrounding the institution, and indeed surrounding the question of madness, has found its way into literary works. Within African literature, a fair share of attention has been devoted to exploring madness as presented in prose-such as novels and short stories-with a focus on the ties of madness to colonialism and patriarchy. However, there is a very evident gap in the literature when it comes to exploring madness as it has been presented in African poetry. This article contributes to the conversation by drawing on three Malawian poets-Bright Molande, Francis Moto, and Jack McBramsfocusing specifically on their poems about madness. Drawing on perspectives from disability studies, as well as Foucauldian insights into madness, the article examines how the poets expose the subversive nature of madness, showing how its portrayal in the poetry questions assumptions of sanity. This is pursued by investigating the encounter between madness and sanity, the source and nature of the fear of madness among the sane, and the portrayal of the mental asylum as a space of confinement.