New World Studies – serie

How and why has Cuba's national identity been cast in terms of a cross-cultural synthesis called ""mestizaje"", and what roles have race, gender, sexuality and class played in the construction of that synthesis? What specific cultural, political and economic interests does ""mestizaje"" represent? Exploring these and other questions, the author focuses on images of the ""mulata"" in 19th- and 20th-century Cuban poetry, fiction and visual arts. These images, she argues, are at the heart of Cuba's peculiar form of multiculturalism. ""Mestizaje"" and related cross-cultural paradigms that have developed in other parts of the Caribbean, in Hispanic America and Brazil, are controversially tied to nationalist interests and ideologies. But do they really mark the promise of a diverse cross-culture? Or do they constitute a form of ethnic ""lynching""? According to Kutzinski, ""mestizaje"" in Cuba and elsewhere celebrates racial diversity, while at the same time refusing to acknowledge a historical reality of racial conflict. In ""Sugar's Secrets"", she examines traces of this fundamental paradox in Cuban literature and popular culture. The foundation of the author's argument is that Cuban ""mestizaje"" is a distinctly masculine concept. It articulates itself through the female racial stereotype of the ""mulata"", which becomes a symbol for the reconciliation of Spanish and African elements in Cuban culture. Women, especially non-white women, are excluded from this inter-racial vision of cultural and political bonding. Though ""mestizaje"" assumes heterosexual disguises, the unifying fiction it projects is often the product of male homoerotic desire, across racial lines. Kutzinski is interested in how the ""mulata"" has been used by Cuban cultural institutions, as well as by writers of various racial affiliations, either to maintain or expose that fiction. This study focuses on constructions of inter-racial masculinity hidden behind racially mixed femininity; constructions that have had the effect of legitimising male social, economic and political power.

The 1992 quincentennial of the encounter between the Old and New World resulted in a polarisation of hardened ideological positions on different ideas of America. This text demonstrates that both sides are interested in defending an idea of ""Americanness"".

This work explores two centuries of Caribbean literature from a comparative perspective. The author examines English, French and Spanish-speaking writers and aesthetic movements of the Caribbean, arguing that previous studies have ignored the modern, global and historical nature of the region.

Examines the ways in which the ""romance"" trope is employed within contemporary Caribbean popular culture and literature to idealize the newly independent postcolonial societies of the region. These essays situate this discourse of idealization within its historical and cultural contexts.

This historical romance is based on the author's experience of living on a Cuban slaveholder's plantation from 1833 to 1835. It centres on the visit of Helen Wentworth to a friend's plantation and the love affair between Juanita, a beautiful slave with whom the plantation owner's son falls in love.

A study of post-slavery literatures in the Americas. Examining major novels from 1880 to the 1970s, the author shows how fiction from different nations shares what he calls textual simultaneity in revealing parallel narrative anxieties about genealogy, narrative authority and racial difference.

John Jacob Thomas (1841-1889) was one of the leading members of a newly emergent intelligentsia in nineteenth-century Trinidad - a group that could be identified as both ""Victorian"" and ""Pan-Africanist"" - who not only challenged British imperialist accounts of Trinidad but also tried to show the interconnections, bloodlines, and origins of ""Caribbean"" and ""English"" identities usually perceived as separate and distinct. As a member of that emerging black lower middle class, Thomas was well known for his 1869 study of Trinidad's Creole language, as well as for Froudacity (1889), his pointed and witty response to the travel narrative of the Victorian James Anthony Froude, an early example of ""writing back to empire."" Responding to Trinidad's transformation by significant migrations from the eastern Caribbean, West Africa, and the Indian subcontinent, he sought to ""tame"" the working-class energies that radicalized his work and to bring them in line with ""modern"" conceptions of the nation. As a defender of francophone cultural production in a British colony, though a loyal subject of Queen Victoria, and as a pan-Africanist whose commitments were simultaneously diasporic and local, Thomas complicates current discussions of colonial and postcolonial intellectuals, Black Atlantic paradigms, and Victorian intellectual life. In Creole Recitations, the first full-length study of Thomas, Faith Smith puts his texts in dialogue with other narratives by local and international Pan-Africanists, Victorian intellectuals, and local and regional blacks, coloreds, and whites. Shedding light on the intellectual terrain of the late nineteenth century, she provides an important context for better-known figures of twentieth-century Caribbean literature such as C. L. R. James, V. S. Naipaul, and Jamaica Kincaid.

It is hard to ignore the hotels. They rise like mammoths of iron and concrete above the homes, the office buildings, the trees of New Providence, island of my birth. So begins Ian Strachan's history of the idea of the Caribbean as paradise. The modern image of the Bahamas as a carefree tourist oasis has its origins in much earlier cultural mythology: the first colonizers conceptualized the Caribbean as a place beyond time, beyond the real, and the region produced profit seemingly without work. Yet an Edenic experience was made possible only by the existence of the plantation - the very opposite of paradise for the Amerindians, whose homeland was colonized, and for those brought as slaves. Examining poetry, plays, novels, travelogues, magazine ads, postcards, posters, brochures, stamps, popular songs, paintings, and illustrations, Paradise and Plantation presents telling links between the myth of a Caribbean paradise and colonial ideologies and economics. Strachan considers the cultural, economic, and social effects of tourism's ""brochure discourse"" in the modern Caribbean, specifically in the Bahamas, and he enriches his discussion with a fascinating exploration of the ways postcolonial Caribbean writers such as V. S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, Paule Marshall, Jamaica Kincaid, and Michelle Cliff have responded to the paradise-plantation dichotomy. The conspicuous disparity between the Caribbean's reputation as paradise and the stark social, economic, and political realities of the region is not news. Ian Strachan's genealogy of the paradise-plantation myth goes far beyond the established discourse in paradise studies, however, providing a new and interdisciplinary approach to further the discussion.

In Voicing Memory Nick Nesbilt argues that the aesthetic practices of twentieth-century French Caribbean writers reconstruct a historical awareness that had been lost amid the repressive violence of slavery, the plantation system, and colonial exploitation. Drawing on the work of Aime Cesaire, Edouard Glissant, Daniel Maximin, Maryse Conde, and Edwidge Danticat, he shows how these writers use the critical force of the aesthetic imagination to transform the parameters of Antillean experience. The author takes the aesthetic practices of the black Atlantic - Antillean poetry, literature, and theater, but also Haitian vodou and visual arts, American jazz, and West African musical traditions - to constitute the models informing this Caribbean vernacular historiography. At the same time, Nesbitt shows how concepts from Cesaire's ""negritude"" to Glissant's ""relation"" critically rework European theoretical influences to construct a black Atlantic historical self-consciousness. In so doing, Nesbitt points beyond the regionalism of Antillean exoticism to describe French Caribbean literature as a decisive intervention in the construction of a global modernity.

James Clifford tells us that modernism has become a ""traveling culture"" because it reflects the ""discrepant cosmopolitanism"" of the twentieth century - that is, a world in which people are paradoxically migratory yet rooted, international yet local. Perhaps modernism has traveled so well because it has been transformed by its journey; this is the suggestion Charles Pollard makes in New World Modernisms, a fascinating first step in mapping the migration of modernism. Pollard looks to recent Caribbean poetry as a means of reassessing modernism's cosmopolitanism; in particular, his book redefines the cosmopolitan influence of T. S. Eliot's modernism by examining how his ideas have been transformed by the two leading Anglophone Caribbean poets, Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite. Pollard concentrates on three of Eliot's modernist principles: tradition, poetry's relation to speech, and poetry's social function. He then traces Walcott's and Brathwaite's transformations of these ideas in their use of diverse cultural fragments to construct alternative Caribbean traditions, in their revitalization of poetic language with the rhythms and diction of Caribbean speech, and in their rearticulation of the poet's public role in a Caribbean context. By examining these formative postcolonial expressions of modernism, Pollard challenges the prevailing critical approach that sets postcolonialism in opposition to modernism, an approach that assumes that a modernist aesthetic necessarily advances a colonial ideology. New World Modernisms reinvigorates Eliot scholarship by tracing his international influence while providing the most comprehensive evaluation to date of the complementary contributions of Walcott and Brathwaite to the development of a New World modernist aesthetic.

James Clifford tells us that modernism has become a ""traveling culture"" because it reflects the ""discrepant cosmopolitanism"" of the twentieth century - that is, a world in which people are paradoxically migratory yet rooted, international yet local. Perhaps modernism has traveled so well because it has been transformed by its journey; this is the suggestion Charles Pollard makes in New World Modernisms, a fascinating first step in mapping the migration of modernism. Pollard looks to recent Caribbean poetry as a means of reassessing modernism's cosmopolitanism; in particular, his book redefines the cosmopolitan influence of T. S. Eliot's modernism by examining how his ideas have been transformed by the two leading Anglophone Caribbean poets, Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite. Pollard concentrates on three of Eliot's modernist principles: tradition, poetry's relation to speech, and poetry's social function. He then traces Walcott's and Brathwaite's transformations of these ideas in their use of diverse cultural fragments to construct alternative Caribbean traditions, in their revitalization of poetic language with the rhythms and diction of Caribbean speech, and in their rearticulation of the poet's public role in a Caribbean context. By examining these formative postcolonial expressions of modernism, Pollard challenges the prevailing critical approach that sets postcolonialism in opposition to modernism, an approach that assumes that a modernist aesthetic necessarily advances a colonial ideology. New World Modernisms reinvigorates Eliot scholarship by tracing his international influence while providing the most comprehensive evaluation to date of the complementary contributions of Walcott and Brathwaite to the development of a New World modernist aesthetic.

In ""Reclaiming Difference"", Carine Mardorossian examines the novels of four women writers - Jean Rhys (Dominica/UK), Maryse Conde (Guadeloupe/USA), Edwidge Danticat (Haiti/USA), and Julia Alvarez (Dominican Republic/USA) - who have radically reformulated the meanings of the national, geographical, sexual, and racial concepts through which postcolonial studies has long been representing difference. Coming from the anglophone, francophone, and hispanophone Caribbean, these writers all stage and identify with transcultural experiences that undermine the usual classification of literary texts in terms of national and regional literatures. By doing so they challenge the idea that racial and cultural identities function as stable points of reference in our unstable world. Focusing on the transformations that have taken place in postcolonial studies since the field has turned to theory, Mardorossian shows not only how these writers make use of the styles of creolization and hybridity that have dominated Caribbean and postcolonial studies in recent years but also how they distinguish themselves from the movement's leading figures by offering new articulations of the ties that link race and nation to gender and class. By extending the notion of hybridity away from racial and cultural differences in isolation from each other to a set of interdependent and criss-crossing categories, these writers challenge our simpler, normative, figurations and call for a fundamental recasting of the field's foundational terms. For scholars in postcolonial studies, Caribbean studies, literary feminist studies, and studies in comparative literature, ""Reclaiming Difference"" represents a new phase in postcolonial studies that calls for a fundamental rethinking of the field's terminology and assumptions.

In ""Reclaiming Difference"", Carine Mardorossian examines the novels of four women writers - Jean Rhys (Dominica/UK), Maryse Conde (Guadeloupe/USA), Edwidge Danticat (Haiti/USA), and Julia Alvarez (Dominican Republic/USA) - who have radically reformulated the meanings of the national, geographical, sexual, and racial concepts through which postcolonial studies has long been representing difference. Coming from the anglophone, francophone, and hispanophone Caribbean, these writers all stage and identify with transcultural experiences that undermine the usual classification of literary texts in terms of national and regional literatures. By doing so they challenge the idea that racial and cultural identities function as stable points of reference in our unstable world. Focusing on the transformations that have taken place in postcolonial studies since the field has turned to theory, Mardorossian shows not only how these writers make use of the styles of creolization and hybridity that have dominated Caribbean and postcolonial studies in recent years but also how they distinguish themselves from the movement's leading figures by offering new articulations of the ties that link race and nation to gender and class. By extending the notion of hybridity away from racial and cultural differences in isolation from each other to a set of interdependent and criss-crossing categories, these writers challenge our simpler, normative, figurations and call for a fundamental recasting of the field's foundational terms. For scholars in postcolonial studies, Caribbean studies, literary feminist studies, and studies in comparative literature, ""Reclaiming Difference"" represents a new phase in postcolonial studies that calls for a fundamental rethinking of the field's terminology and assumptions.

Unique in its inclusion of Brazil in a comparative study of literary texts and their engagement with Western modernity, ""Cannibal Modernities"" is the first post colonial study to show how the ""peripheral"" replications of modernity in contemporary Caribbean and Latin American texts differ crucially from their European models. Luis Madureira addresses issues that so many post colonial theorists have struggled with, particularly the complex interactions and antagonisms between indigenous cultures and the imperial cultures imposed upon them and the effort to ""provincialize the West."" Madureira's book diverges from existing critical texts, however, in crucial, thought-provoking ways. The specific literary traditions compared here - Brazilian modernism, negritude theory and poetry, as well as Caribbean literary theory and historical discourses in French, English, and Spanish - have not been brought together in a single study before. In addition, the book's theoretical model of comparison focuses on the complexities of colonial and post colonial identity and of nationhood and globalization, as well as on their agonistic engagement with Europe's enlightenment philosophy. ""Cannibal Modernities"" shows us it is precisely in those New World avant-garde movements that have been traditionally designated as imitative that the emergence of post-coloniality resides and, moreover, that Europe's foundational discourses of modernity are enabled and sustained by the very peoples and cultures that have been relegated to the margins by modernity.

In ""Guarding Cultural Memory"", Flora Gonzalez Mandri examines the vibrant and uniquely illuminating post-Revolutionary creative endeavors of Afro-Cuban women. Taking on the question of how African diaspora cultures practice remembrance, she reveals the ways in which these artists restage the confrontations between modernity and tradition. Gonzalez Mandri considers the work of the poet and cultural critic Nancy Morejon, the poet Excilia Saldana, the filmmaker Gloria Rolando, and the artists Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons and Belkis Ayon. In their cultural representations these women conflate the artistic, the historical, and the personal to produce a transformative image of the black woman as a forger of Cuban culture. They achieve this in several ways: by redefining autobiography as a creative expression for the convergence of the domestic and the national; by countering the eroticized image of the mulatta in favor of a mythical conception of the female body as a site for the engraving of cultural and national conflicts and resolutions; and by valorizing certain aesthetic and religious traditions in relation to a postmodern artistic sensibility. Placing these artists in their historical context, Gonzalez Mandri shows how their accomplishments were consistently silenced in official Cuban history and culture and explores the strategies through which culturally censored memories survived - and continue to survive - in a Caribbean country purported to have integrated its Hispanic and African peoples and heritages into a Cuban identity. The picture that finally emerges is one not only of exceptional artistic achievement but also of successful redefinitions of concepts of race, gender, and nation in the face of almost insurmountable cultural odds.

Arising in the heyday of the music recently made famous by the Buena Vista Social Club, Afrocubanismo was an artistic and intellectual movement in Cuba in the 1920s and 1930s that tried to convey a national and racial identity. Through poetry, this movement was the first serious attempt on the part of mostly white Cuban intellectuals to produce a national literature that incorporated elements from the Afro-Cuban traditions of lower-class urban blacks. One of its main objectives was to project an image of Cuban identity as a harmonious process of fusion between black and white people and cultures. The notion of a unified nation without racial conflicts and the idea of a mulatto Cuban culture and identity continue to play a prominent role in the Cuban imagination. The first book-length treatment of the poetry of this movement, ""Writing Rumba: The Afrocubanista Movement in Poetry"" questions the assumption that the poetry did manage to symbolize racial reconciliation and unification. At the same time, it reveals a process of literary transculturation by which the dominant literature of European origins was radically transformed through the incorporation of formal principles from Afro-Cuban dance and music forms. To make his case, Miguel Arnedo-Gomez establishes the nature of the movement's connections to Cuban blacks during this time, analyzes the poetry's links with the represented cultures on the basis of anthropological and ethnographic research, and explores the thought of leading figures of the movement, tying their discourse to specific sociocultural factors in Cuba at the time. Relating the poetry to music and dance, he further illuminates the interplay of power and culture in a social context. Essential for understanding Cuban nationalism and race relations today, ""Writing Rumba"" will appeal to an inter-disciplinary audience not only in regional, cultural, and anthropological fields but also in the fields of music, dance, and literature.

Arising in the heyday of the music recently made famous by the Buena Vista Social Club, Afrocubanismo was an artistic and intellectual movement in Cuba in the 1920s and 1930s that tried to convey a national and racial identity. Through poetry, this movement was the first serious attempt on the part of mostly white Cuban intellectuals to produce a national literature that incorporated elements from the Afro-Cuban traditions of lower-class urban blacks. One of its main objectives was to project an image of Cuban identity as a harmonious process of fusion between black and white people and cultures. The notion of a unified nation without racial conflicts and the idea of a mulatto Cuban culture and identity continue to play a prominent role in the Cuban imagination. The first book-length treatment of the poetry of this movement, ""Writing Rumba: The Afrocubanista Movement in Poetry"" questions the assumption that the poetry did manage to symbolize racial reconciliation and unification. At the same time, it reveals a process of literary transculturation by which the dominant literature of European origins was radically transformed through the incorporation of formal principles from Afro-Cuban dance and music forms. To make his case, Miguel Arnedo-Gomez establishes the nature of the movement's connections to Cuban blacks during this time, analyzes the poetry's links with the represented cultures on the basis of anthropological and ethnographic research, and explores the thought of leading figures of the movement, tying their discourse to specific sociocultural factors in Cuba at the time. Relating the poetry to music and dance, he further illuminates the interplay of power and culture in a social context. Essential for understanding Cuban nationalism and race relations today, ""Writing Rumba"" will appeal to an inter-disciplinary audience not only in regional, cultural, and anthropological fields but also in the fields of music, dance, and literature.

Diaspora studies have tended to privilege urban landscapes over rural ones, wanting to avoid the racial homogeneity, conservatism, and xenophobia usually associated with the latter. In ""Second Arrivals: Landscape and Belonging in Contemporary Writing of the Americas"", Sarah Phillips Casteel examines the work of writers such as Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipaul, Jamaica Kincaid, Philip Roth, and Joy Kogawa, among others, to show how it expresses the appeal that rural and wilderness spaces can hold for the diasporic imagination. Casteel proposes an alternative to postmodern celebrations of rootlessness, bringing together writers from the Caribbean and North America who uniquely reimagine the New World landscape from the vantage point of cultural and geographical dislocation. As represented in a range of genres and media - fiction, poetry, garden writing, and installation art - these alternative forms of belonging reinterpret New World nature as infused with history and as subject to competing claims, generating a new poetics of American place. The author's transnational approach also gives significant attention to Canadian material, which has largely been overlooked in hemispheric studies of the literature of the Americas. Contributing to the growing movement of comparative American studies, ""Second Arrivals"" will appeal to scholars and students of inter-American studies, Caribbean studies, Canadian studies, diaspora studies, postcolonial studies, and ecocriticism.

In ""Orphan Narratives"", Valerie Loichot investigates the fiction and poetry of four writers who emerged from the postslavery plantation world of the Americas - William Faulkner (USA), Edouard Glissant (Martinique), Toni Morrison (USA), and Saint-John Perse (Guadeloupe) - to show how these descendants from slaves and from slaveholders wrote both in relation and in resistance to the violence of plantation slavery. She uses the term ""orphan narrative"" to capture the ways in which this violence servered the child, the text, and history from a traceable origin. Black or white, male or female, Antillean or American, these writers share a common inheritance and transnational connection through which their texts maintain familial, temporal, and narrative patterns without having any central authority figure. The author specifically cites Saint-John Perse's ""Eloges"" (1911), Faulkner's ""Light in August"" (1932), Morrison's ""Song of Solomon"" (1977), and Glissant's ""La Case du commandeur"" (1981) as postslavery texts. Where the actual family is dismembered, these narrative accounts invent new familian links. Reciprocally, biological family ties endure despite the literal and discursive violence inflicted upon them. Breaking new ground in trans-American studies by juxtaposing texts from the francophone Lesser Antilles and the U.S. South, ""Orphan Narratives"" will be a valuable addition to Caribbean, American, and postcolonial studies, not to mention its appeal to scholars and students of Faulkner, Glissant, Morrison, and Saint-John Perse.

According to Martinican theorist Edouard Glissant, the twentieth century has been dominated in the Caribbean by a passion for the remembrance of colonial history. But while Glissant identifies this passion for memory in the thematizing of nature in Caribbean modernist life, scholar Guillermina De Ferrari claims it is the vulnerability of the human body that has become the trope to which Caribbean postmodernist authors largely appeal in their efforts to revise the discourse that has shaped postcolonial societies. In ""Vulnerable States: Bodies of Memory in Contemporary Caribbean Fiction"", De Ferrari offers a comparative study of novels from across the Caribbean, arguing that vulnerability (symbolic and therefore political) should be seen as the true foundation of Caribbeanness. While most theories of the region have traditionally emphasized corporeality as a constitutive aspect of Caribbean societies, they assume its uniqueness is founded on race, itself understood either as a ""fact"" of the body or as the ""ethnic"" fusion of distinctive cultures of origin. In reconceptualizing corporeality as vulnerability, De Ferrari proposes an alternative view of Caribbeanness based on affect - that is, on an emotional disposition that results from the alienating role historical, medical, and anthropological notions of the body have traditionally played in determining how the region understands itself. While vulnerability thus addresses the role historically played by race in determining systems of social and political powerlessness, it also prefigures other ways in which Caribbeanness is currently negotiated at local and international levels, ranging from the stigmatization of the ill to the global fetishization of the region's physical beauty, material degradation, and political stagnation. Positioned at the intersection of literary and anthropological study, ""Vulnerable States"" will appeal to Caribbeanists of the three major language areas of the region as well as to postcolonial scholars interested in issues of race, gender, and nation formation.

According to Martinican theorist Edouard Glissant, the twentieth century has been dominated in the Caribbean by a passion for the remembrance of colonial history. But while Glissant identifies this passion for memory in the thematizing of nature in Caribbean modernist life, scholar Guillermina De Ferrari claims it is the vulnerability of the human body that has become the trope to which Caribbean postmodernist authors largely appeal in their efforts to revise the discourse that has shaped postcolonial societies. In ""Vulnerable States: Bodies of Memory in Contemporary Caribbean Fiction"", De Ferrari offers a comparative study of novels from across the Caribbean, arguing that vulnerability (symbolic and therefore political) should be seen as the true foundation of Caribbeanness. While most theories of the region have traditionally emphasized corporeality as a constitutive aspect of Caribbean societies, they assume its uniqueness is founded on race, itself understood either as a ""fact"" of the body or as the ""ethnic"" fusion of distinctive cultures of origin. In reconceptualizing corporeality as vulnerability, De Ferrari proposes an alternative view of Caribbeanness based on affect - that is, on an emotional disposition that results from the alienating role historical, medical, and anthropological notions of the body have traditionally played in determining how the region understands itself. While vulnerability thus addresses the role historically played by race in determining systems of social and political powerlessness, it also prefigures other ways in which Caribbeanness is currently negotiated at local and international levels, ranging from the stigmatization of the ill to the global fetishization of the region's physical beauty, material degradation, and political stagnation. Positioned at the intersection of literary and anthropological study, ""Vulnerable States"" will appeal to Caribbeanists of the three major language areas of the region as well as to postcolonial scholars interested in issues of race, gender, and nation formation.

Border Fictions offers the first comparative analysis of multiethnic and transnational cultural representations about the United States' borders with Mexico and Canada. Blending textual analysis with theories of globalization and empire, Claudia Sadowski-Smith forges a new model of inter-American studies.Border Fictions places into dialogue a variety of hemispheric perspectives from Chicana/o, Asian American, American Indian, Latin American, and Canadian studies. Each chapter examines fiction that ranges widely, from celebrated authors such as Carlos Fuentes, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Alberto Ríos to writers whose contributions to border literature have not yet been fully appreciated, including Karen Tei Yamashita, Thomas King, Janette Turner Hospital, and emerging Chicana/o writers of the U.S.-Mexico border.Proposing a diverse and geographically expansive view of border and inter-American studies, Border Fictions links the work of these and numerous other authors to civil rights movements, environmental justice activism, struggles for land and border-crossing rights, as well as to anti-imperialist forms of nationalism in the United States’ neighboring countries. The book forces us to take into account the ways in which shifts in the nature of global relations affect literary production, especially in its hemispheric manifestations.

On January 1, 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared the independence of Haiti, thus bringing to an end the only successful slave revolution in history and transforming the colony of Saint-Domingue into the second independent state in the Western Hemisphere. The historical significance of the Haitian Revolution has been addressed by numerous scholars, but the importance of the Revolution as a cultural and political phenomenon has only begun to be explored.Although the path-breaking work of Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Sibylle Fischer has illustrated the profound silences surrounding the Haitian Revolution in Western historiography and in Caribbean cultural production in the aftermath of the revolution, contributors to this volume argue that, while suppressed and disavowed in some quarters, the Haitian Revolution nonetheless had an enduring cultural and political impact, particularly on peoples and communities that have been marginalized in the historical record and absent from the discourses of Western historiography."" Tree of Liberty"" interrogates the literary, historical, and political discourses that the Revolution produced and inspired across time and space and across national and linguistic boundaries. In so doing, it seeks to initiate a far-reaching discussion of the revolution as a cultural and political phenomenon that shaped ideas about the Enlightenment, freedom, postcolonialism, and race in the modern Atlantic world.

Maryse Conde is a Guadeloupean writer and critic whose work has challenged the categories of race, language, gender, and geography that inform contemporary literary and critical debates. In ""Signs of Dissent"", the first full-length study in English on Conde, Dawn Fulton situates this award-winning author's work in the context of current theories of cultural identity in order to foreground Conde's unique contributions to these discussions. Staging a dialogue between Conde's novels and the field of postcolonial studies, Fulton argues that Conde enacts a strategy of ""critical incorporations"" in her fiction, imitating and transforming many of the prevailing narratives of postcolonial theory so as to explore their theoretical and conceptual limits.By rejecting the facile classification of her work as ""Caribbean,"" ""African,"" or ""feminist,"" Conde has gained a reputation as an iconoclast. But Fulton proposes that behind this public image of provocation lies an incisive reflection on the burdens of representation imposed on the non-Western writer, and that Conde's novels expose the ways in which postcolonial criticism can be complicit in constructing such burdens even as it questions them. ""Signs of Dissent"" offers one of the most comprehensive assessments of Conde's literary production to date, illuminating its exceptional role in shaping a dialogue between francophone studies and the English-dominated field of postcolonialism.

Maryse Conde is a Guadeloupean writer and critic whose work has challenged the categories of race, language, gender, and geography that inform contemporary literary and critical debates. In ""Signs of Dissent"", the first full-length study in English on Conde, Dawn Fulton situates this award-winning author's work in the context of current theories of cultural identity in order to foreground Conde's unique contributions to these discussions. Staging a dialogue between Conde's novels and the field of postcolonial studies, Fulton argues that Conde enacts a strategy of ""critical incorporations"" in her fiction, imitating and transforming many of the prevailing narratives of postcolonial theory so as to explore their theoretical and conceptual limits.By rejecting the facile classification of her work as ""Caribbean,"" ""African,"" or ""feminist,"" Conde has gained a reputation as an iconoclast. But Fulton proposes that behind this public image of provocation lies an incisive reflection on the burdens of representation imposed on the non-Western writer, and that Conde's novels expose the ways in which postcolonial criticism can be complicit in constructing such burdens even as it questions them. ""Signs of Dissent"" offers one of the most comprehensive assessments of Conde's literary production to date, illuminating its exceptional role in shaping a dialogue between francophone studies and the English-dominated field of postcolonialism.

Unlike the American and French Revolutions, the Haitian Revolution was the first in a modern state to implement human rights universally and unconditionally. Going well beyond the selective emancipation of white adult male property owners, the Haitian Revolution is of vital importance, Nick Nesbitt argues, in thinking today about the urgent problems of social justice, human rights, imperialism, torture, and, above all, human freedom.Combining archival research, political philosophy, and intellectual history, Nesbitt explores this fundamental event of modern history - the invention of universal emancipation - both in the context of the Age of Enlightenment (Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel) and in relation to certain key figures (Ranciere, Laclau, Habermas) and trends (such as the turn to ethics, human rights, and universalism) in contemporary political philosophy. In doing so, he elucidates the theoretical implications of Haiti's revolution both for the eighteenth century and for the twenty-first century. ""Universal Emancipation"" will be of interest not only to scholars and students of the Haitian Revolution and postcolonial francophone studies but also to readers interested in critical theory and its relation to history and political science.

Exhibiting Slavery examines the ways in which Caribbean postmodern historical novels about slavery written in Spanish, English, and French function as virtual museums, simultaneously showcasing and curating a collection of 'primary documents' within their pages. As Vivian Nun Halloran attests, these novels highlight narrative 'objects' extraneous to their plot - such as excerpts from the work of earlier writers, allusions to specific works of art, the uniforms of maroon armies assembled in preparation of a military offensive, and accounts of slavery's negative impact on the traditional family unit in Africa or the United States. In doing so, they demand that their readers go beyond the pages of the books to sort out fact from fiction and consider what relationship these featured 'objects' have to slavery and to contemporary life. The self-referential function of these texts produces a 'museum effect' that simultaneously teaches and entertains their readers, prompting them to continue their own research beyond and outside the text.

The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) reshaped the debates about slavery and freedom throughout the Atlantic world, accelerated the abolitionist movement, precipitated rebellions in neighbouring territories, and intensified both repression and antislavery sentiment. The story of the birth of the world’s first independent black republic has since held an iconic fascination for a diverse array of writers, artists, and intellectuals throughout the Atlantic diaspora. Examining twentieth-century responses to the Haitian Revolution, Philip Kaisary offers a profound new reading of the representation of the Revolution by radicals and conservatives alike in primary texts that span English, French, and Spanish languages and that include poetry, drama, history, biography, fiction, and opera. In a complementary focus on canonical works by Aimé Césaire, C. L. R. James, Edouard Glissant, and Alejo Carpentier in addition to the work of René Depestre, Langston Hughes, and Madison Smartt Bell, Kaisary argues that the Haitian Revolution generated an enduring cultural and ideological inheritance. He addresses critical understandings and fictional reinventions of the Revolution and thinks through how, and to what effect, authors of major diasporic texts have metamorphosed and appropriated this spectacular corner of black revolutionary history.