cv November 2017 final.docx

The Caribbean Writer as Warrior of the Imaginary / L’Ecrivain caribéen, guerrier de l’imaginaire, 2008

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.

French Caribbean literature is inextricably linked to the history of Antilles as well as to the cultural evolution of a Caribbean people often considered as a people without history, a people deprived of their identity and culture. A people without a collective memory and which 1 since some decades now has embarked on an identity search in view of taking its rightful position in the world. In their works, Caribbean writers have most often drawn inspiration from the mostly ugly historical experiences of the region: exploitation, slavery, colonization, and cultural imperialism. With this, a good number of literary critics view the rich Caribbean literature as one of denunciation, revolt and of protest against racial injustices and France persistent psychological and socio-cultural intimidation. Haigh captures this view in his statement that "La tradition littéraire antillaise a toujours fait preuve et de radicalisme et d'engagement dans la lutte contre l'aliénation socioculturelle engage par le colonialisme français" (21). Ajimase, sees french caribbean literature as a "product of multiple origins, languages and cultures which makes it difficult to actually have a precise definition.>>3o.This literature, like every African literature has oral and written characteristics. Francophone Caribbean writers like Chamoiseau sees literature as « Une littérature qui puise dans les profondeurs d'une culture fondée sur l'oralité ».242.

Cambridge History of African American Literature in Transition, 2021

Marlene Daut’s chapter focuses on Haiti as diasporic crossroads and argues that Haiti is both a geographical and an intellectual meeting place for African American writers at mid-century. For Daut, the stakes are at least twofold, one being to acknowledge African American writing as transnational, thereby altering the geography of American literature, and, second, what the Americas come to be when the Haitian Revolution appears at the center, as it did for these writers. The result, she argues, is to “expose the inherent Africanness of all American literature,” to consider African American literary tradition as multiple and linked to spaces beyond the nation, and finally to understand all American literature as diasporic, as determined not by borders and the geopolitical they assert but “by people and their movements.” In doing so, Daut examines Martin Delany’s Blake, Oneida Debois’s oratory, George Vashon’s and Pierre Faubert’s poetry, the first-known Trinidadian novel by Maxwell Phillip, Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends, William Wells Brown’s Clotel, “St. Domingo, Its Revolutions and Its Patriots,” John Beard’s The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture, Baron de Vastey’s Réflexions, and the work of James McCune Smith and Henry Bibb.

Studies in Romanticism, 2023

New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids

This essay explores the complex ways in which narrative may signify in the contemporary Caribbean cultural context. Specifically, it is concerned with a trilogy written by award-winning Surinamese author Astrid Roemer, set in the years of independence of the Caribbean country after 300 years of Dutch occupation. The analysis focuses not on the usual postcolonial themes but on structures of signification: allegory, materiality and media of language, affect, and the function of objects. Roemer’s texts demonstrate the relation between discourse and physical violence, her language being tied to material media, bodies, and earth. Not just postmodern, but posthuman too, the Surinamese narrative is characterized by the attempt to connect objects to language, objects to emotions, or nature to memories. Language brings us in touch with Caribbean reality and memory, all the while questioning its capacity to do so through allegory and metaphor.

Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, 2001

High Tide I n 1997 students in the Romance Studies Depart ment at Georgetown University organized a con ference under the provocative title: "Is the Caribbean Post-Colonial, Is the Post-Colonial Caribbean?" 1 What they meant, I believe, is that the Caribbean was always Post-Colonial, even in the heyday of Colonial expansion. The paradox dissolves if we situate, as Anthony Appiah suggested some time ago, the Post-Colonial in a certain relationship to the Post-Modern. 2 This is exactly what Homi Bhabha does in The Location of Culture when he asserts that: the encounters and negotiations of differential meanings and values within 'colonial' textuality, its governmental discourses and cultural practices, have anticipated, avant la lettre, many of the problematics of signification and judgment that have become current in contemporary theory-aporia, ambivalence, indeterminacy, the question of discursive closure, the threat to agency, the status of intentionality, the challenge to 'totalizing' concepts, to name but a few. (173) Today we know that something got distorted in the imperial voyage through which Western reason was deployed in the rest of the world. In this essay I discuss the thwarted cultural translation of modernity across the Atlantic and how this process affected the Horacio Legrás teaches Latin American Literature and Comparative Literature at Georgetown University. His research centers on the relationship between literature as a personal and communal experience (questions of taste, expression, pleasure) and the general demands put to literature by the development of the modern nation state. Articles and review essays by Horacio Legrás have appeared in Dispositio, Revista Iberoamericana and Nepantla. He is currently working on a book that matches critical concepts proposed as central for Latin American cultural criticism with the works of J.J.

1997

The rewriting of history has been a constant endeavor of twentieth-century Caribbean writers. Emerging from a common experience of colonialism and slavery, Caribbean authors have found a history written by the Other, reflecting the Eurocentric perspective of the colonial powers who ruled the islands for centuries. These "flawed" accounts of Caribbean historical development pointed to theneed to recast the region 's history into narratives that could serve as the basis for a reinterpreta tion of the roles played by Caribbean peoples in their own history, and by extension , for a reformulation of the prevailing concepts of Caribbean national and individual identities. The Caribbean has produced rich and varied interpretations of the historical process , many of which await critical analysis . , and others, have focused on the replaceme nt of the Eurocentric and logocentric approaches to history that have dominated Caribbean historiography with autochthonous approaches that reflect essential aspects of the struggles of Caribbean peoples to assert their own sociocultural values in opposition to those imposed by the various colonial metropolises. One of the chief avenues of opposition to official culture has been parody-the critical quotation of a received literary or cultural text for comic effect. A close look at the parodic spirit at work in contemporary Caribbean cultures and literatures illuminates the peoples' subversion of the history and identity imposed upon them by their metropolitan masters.

Latin American Theatre Review, 1996

Literary and cultural critics must invent a term that surpasses "marginalized" to describe Haiti's place in literary history. Now that so many are claiming that politically coveted spot on the margin, what are we to do with Haiti, the Western half of an island which in multiple ways really exists on the fringes? Haiti is a small country in a region that, aside from Cuba, is only beginning to receive attention in drama and theatre studies-the Caribbean. Rather than as a producer of literature in general or theatre in particular, it is Haiti's history that has been significant to the Caribbean and the Americas, most particularly, its 18th century slave rebellion. This insurrection's symbolic importance is evident in Cuban Alejo Carpentier's novel El reino de este mundo (1949), while Trinidadian C.L.R. James links Haití to Cuba's 1959 Revolution in his essay "From Toussaint L'Ouverture to Fidel Castro." James, in fact, repeatedly returns to Haiti in his writings, for his best-known work, The Black Jacobins, lends its title to both a play about L'Ouverture (1936) and a history of Haiti in this period (1938). Another West Indian, Derek Walcott, published a historical drama Henri Cristophe in 1950 and Aimé Césaire from Martinique continued this focus with his 1963 play, La Tragedie du roi Christophe. There is an indirect reference to the Haitian backdrop in North American Eugene O'Neill's 1920 play The Emperor Jones (set "on an island in the West Indies as yet not self-determined by white marines") and a direct allusion to it in Colombian Enrique Buenaventura and the Teatro Experimental de Cali's La tragedia de Henri Cristophe from 1963, continued in his 1979 drama, Historia de una bala de plata. Almost all of the works I have cited in some sense presage the most recent U.S. occupation of Haiti for, while foreign intervention is not the main theme in every case, each, in its concentration on Haitian history, foregrounds the force or risk of radical mass mobilization. This activity can be envisioned as either liberating or menacing; Allan Nairn in an article from the Nation (Oct. 3, 1994) calls attention to an American perception of the threat of the Haitian populations'