In Antoine Innocent's 1906 novel Mimola or the Story of a Casket, Mimola, daughter of Madame Georges, suffers from an incurable nervous disease. In desperation, Madame Georges goes on a pilgrimage to Ville-Bonheur in order to implore the African divinities to help her ailing daughter. She meets a cousin, whose son Léon, is suffering from a similar disorder. Léon rejects the voodoo beliefs, will sink into madness; ardently believing, Mimola will recover and be hounsi.
The essence of the matter -- The politics of Black friendship : Gadamer, Baldwin and the Black hermeneutic -- The Aardvark of history : Malcolm X, language and power -- Black aesthetic autonomy : Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka, and "literary Negro-ness" -- The revolutionary will not be hypnotized : Eldridge Cleaver and Black ideology -- Unrepeatable : Angela Y. Davis and Black critical theory -- Black aesthetic theory.
Together with its accompanying CD, this text captures the excitement of the vibrant, irreverent poetry scene of New York's Lower East Side in the 1960s. The text draws from personal interviews with many of the participants, from unpublished letters and from rare sound recordings.
This novel posing as a dissertation on León Fuertes, the fictional president of a made-up Banana Republic is “still fresh, funny, and disturbingly relevant” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). To fulfill his PhD requirement, Camilo Fuertes decides to write about his father León, the martyred president of Tinieblas, a small country in Latin America. As Camilo traces his family’s roots, we follow León along his twisted path through delinquency, learning, lust, and bravery to his historic position of leadership. At once a powerful vision of Latin American history and a brilliant parody of the academic form—complete with endnotes—The Dissertation is the second novel in Koster’s acclaimed Tinieblas trilogy, and an essential postmodern novel in the tradition of Vonnegut, Barth, and Nabokov. “One of the few books of the past 20 years that deserves to be called astonishing. It is a brilliant novel, structurally a marvel and, in all, a demonstration of elan as that quality seldom is experienced in a work of fiction.” —The Des Moines Register “Longtime Panama resident Koster portrays Latin America with a comedian’s sense of timing, a scholar’s sense of history, and a native’s fond despair.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Koster is that rare thing: a writer from the heart, passionate and uncompromising.” —John le Carré
Introduction: Black and white -- Little Foxes and little brown wrens -- The poetics of color in Jezebel -- Melodramas of blood in In This Our Life -- The whiteness of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? -- Bette Davis black and white.
