Just below South: Intercultural Performance in the Caribbean and the U.S. South, eds. Jessica Adams, Michael P. Bibler, Cécile Accilien (original) (raw)
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Performing Poetry, Race, and the Caribbean: Eusebia Cosme and Luis Palés Matos
Revista Hispánica Moderna, 2008
jill s. kuhnheim the university of kansas I n Postnationalism Prefigured: Caribbean Borderlands, Charles Carnegie asserts that ''Western modernity has excelled in the production of discrete, stable, manageable categories'' (65). These categories, such as race and nation, are social phenomena that, like Judith Butler's notion of gender, must be continually reproduced, or performed, to be maintained. Carnegie, a social scientist, argues that the need to impose order in academic disciplines has led to privileging the national at the expense of mobile or drifting, transnational cultural flows. Adverse to ambiguity, he finds that his colleagues have often been unable to convey ''the significance of lives that transect the borders and boundaries of place and race'' (70). Arjun Appadurai extends Carnegie's thinking when he proposes that ''cultural differences are no longer taxonomic but interactive and refractive'' (60). He says: ''Culture is less a 'habitus' '' (Pierre Bourdieu's term which refers to a tacit realm of reproducible practices and dispositions) and ''more an arena for conscious choice, justification, representation''-the latter often to multiple and spatially dislocated audiences (44). Both of these writers offer more interactive models of cultural identity that seem particularly apt to this moment, when ''transnational'' and ''global'' are buzz words, but their undoing of rigid concepts also allows us to see the past in a new light, to recognize people and practices that have slipped between or moved among more strictly defined categories. The Caribbean offers particular challenges to many concepts of category, as it encompasses diverse languages, cultures, ethnic and racial identities, within and across various nations. The issue of categorization is compounded by the facts of migration and transnational drift, both historical and present day. The Caribbean is a permanent example of continual transformation, for it is composed of hybrid sites that are ''neither one nor the other, but something else besides, which contests the territory of both'' (28). Homi Bhaba's definition of ''interspace'' resonates with Fernando Ortiz's early twentieth-century definition of transculturation, and both characterizations draw attention to the fact that theories can construct regional identities as much as describe them. Paulla Ebron has developed this perception relative to Africa and, in her book, Performing Africa, she proposes that regional identity is the result of performance: ''we have learned to imagine regions through repetitive tropes,'' she states (10). Transcult
Caribbean Literature in Transition, vol 3, edited by Ronald Cummings and Alison Donnell (Cambridge University Press: 2020), 2020
The intermixing of literary, oral and performance cultures has long been the bedrock of Caribbean writing. Through an analysis of contemporary writing by Anthony Joseph, Nalo Hopkinson, Monique Roffey, Marcia Douglas, Robert Antoni, Nicolás Guillén and Tanya Shirley, this essay demonstrates how contemporary Caribbean writing embraces popular culture to challenge Euro- and American-centric ideologies and destabilize the perceived boundaries between oral and scribal cultures. Popular culture in these texts challenges the writer to experiment with form, language and rhythm rooted in call-and-response, folklore traditions, and Caribbean musical forms such as reggae, calypso, dancehall, mento, zouk, bélé and Afro-Cuban drumming. Drawing from conceptualizations of Caribbean culture in the work of critics Gerard Aching, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Kevin Adonis Browne, Carolyn Cooper and Kwame Dawes, this essay demonstrates how the oral is always whispering below the surface of the written text as Caribbean authors permeate their writings with soundscapes of Caribbean languages and music. Importantly too, drawing from the rich cultural traditions of the region also becomes a means through which the poetic and literary become explicitly political. These writers fulfil Kamau Brathwaite’s celebrated call in ‘Jazz and the West Indian Novel’ for the Caribbean artist to draw from and acclaim their indigenous, local cultural forms and commu- nity; yet they also adapt and adopt popular culture with a critical eye, particularly in relation to the misogyny and sexism often performed within dancehall and carnival cultures.
Writers Playin' Mas': Carnival and the Carnivalesque in the Contemporary Caribbean Novel
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.
Rhythms of Locality. A Travel through Caribbean Performances and Literature
La Deleuziana, 2019
The paper aims to give an insight on various concepts created and developed within the Caribbean literary context, in order to find some strategic elements capable of allowing us reframe the idea and meaning of locality. The necessity of such an operation lies in the urgency of rethinking the political dimension of locality due to its reactionary and repressive use by alt-right and fascist movements, in particular in Europe and the US. In this vein, concepts such as "polyrhythm", "meta-archipelago" (Benítez Rojo), "tidalectics" (Brathwaite), "poetics of relation", "creolization", "trans-nation" and "commonplace" (Glissant), become of strategic use as a way of opening up the idea of locality, which we aim to conceive precisely as a kind of social openness. Beside this conceptual reframing of locality, developed through the analysis of Benítez Rojo and Kamau Brathwaite's rhythmical concepts, the reader can find, on the one hand, the concept of performance as the very engine of such a reframing, and, on the other end, an attempt to show how the concepts we analyse are deeply intertwined with those of Deleuze and Guattari, in particular multiplicity, difference and repetition, and rhizome. This article has been produced in the context of the International Research Project Real Smart Cities, Marie Sklodowska Curie Action (MSCA), program RISE/Horizon 2020, agreement n. 777707.
Review essay: Caribbean Popular Culture: Everyday Lives, Racial Politics and Transnational Movements
European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 2016
Review essay of – Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age, by Lara Putman. Chapell Hill: University of Carolina Press, 2013. – Remixing Reggaetón: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico, by Petra R. Rivera-Rideau. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015. – Roy Cape: A Life on the Calypso and Soca Bandstand, by Joycelyne Guilbault and Roy Cape. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014. – Broadcasting Modernity: Cuban Commercial Television, 1950-1960, by Yeidy M. Rivero. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015.
Just Below South: Intercultural Performance in the Caribbean and the U.S. South
African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter, 2009
Reviewed for H-Southern-Lit by James H. Watkins, Berry College Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes Just Below South, the latest entry in the University of Virginia Press's New World Studies series, is a substantial addition to an ongoing critical conversation that has energized U.S. southern studies in recent years. Beginning in the midnineties with groundbreaking works, such as Barbara Ladd's Nationalism and the Color Line (1996), and spurred on by international scholarly conferences; special issues in the Mississippi Quarterly, American Literature, and theSouthern Quarterly; and a host of excellent books, such as Look Away: The U.S. South in a Global Perspective, coedited by Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn (2004), the global approach to the study of the literature of the South has clearly established itself as the dominant emerging trend in the field.[1] In doing so, it has been especially fruitful in deploying critical reconsiderations of various forms of U.S. nationalisms to challenge lingering assumptions of regional exceptionalism in southern studies. This ambitious, eclectic collection of essays circumnavigates a broad spatial area that extends, in the words of geographer Bonham Richardson, from "'Little Rock at the northwest corner [to] French Guiana at the southeast..., [incorporating] the eastern rim of Central America as well as the Bahamas'" (pp. 2-3). Along the way the ten critical essays in Just Below South trace other circular routes, beginning and ending with intercultural interrogations of canonical U.S. texts (Uncle Tom's Cabin [1852] and Absalom, Absalom! [1936], respectively) but with less familiar ports of call, ranging from translation issues in contemporary Creole Louisiana poetry to the postcolonial politics of 1