Perspectives on the 'other America': comparative approaches to Caribbean and Latin American culture.

Abstract

Uniting critical writing on novels, poetry, painting, and ritual, this volume takes a regional approach to the cultures of the Caribbean Basin. Ranging across the linguistic spectrum of the area, it examines cultural production from the Anglophone, Francophone, and Hispanophone islands, Suriname and the Guyanas, and ‘Latin’ and Central America. The interdisciplinary nature of the collection and the challenge it poses to the balkanization of the region within academic discourse will make it of especial interest to students and scholars of the Caribbean. Inspired by the category of the ‘Other America’ as developed by Édouard Glissant, the book offers a series of original and stimulating engagements with topics that include nationalism, migration and exile, landscape and the environment, gender and sexuality, and Postcolonial Studies and ‘world literature’. In addition to contributions by leading scholars such as Peter Hulme, Theo D’haen, and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, it contains interviews with two renowned novelists from the region, Lawrence Scott and Mayra Santos-Febres. Underpinning the collection is an interrogation of received ideas of the nation-state and a suggestion that regionalism might provide a better optic through which to view the circum-Caribbean – that national consciousness, in other words, must always also be a regional consciousness.

Citation

Oloff, K., & Niblett, M. (Eds.). (2009). Perspectives on the 'other America': comparative approaches to Caribbean and Latin American culture. Rodopi

• Book Type: Edited Book
• Publication Date: 2009
• Deposit Date: Sep 27, 2010
• Series Title: Textxet. Studies in Comparative Literature 60
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1131804
• Publisher URL: http://www.rodopi.nl/functions/search.asp?BookId=Textxet+60