This collection of essays focuses on the notion of the ‘mark’, through its manifold dimensions, including heritage, race, genes, stereotypes, traumas and scars, in order to tackle contemporary phenomena and issues such as identity, queerness, emancipation and heritage. It does so by channelling reflections through a variety of art forms, including visual art, performance, cinema, distillery, and literature. Hybrid in its approaches, this collection gathers together self-portraits, analytical essays, and ethnographies to discuss self-determination at a crossroads between intimacy and geopolitics throughout postcolonial France and the French Caribbean.
Affirming Methodologies: Research and Education in the Caribbean centres local and indigenous ways of knowing in research and education praxis in the Caribbean. The research methodologies and pedagogies are presented in this book within an Affirming Methodologies framework. They bring forward localized epistemologies whereby Caribbean ways of being and knowing are affirmed, and the expected western hierarchies between researcher and researched are removed. The chapters present approaches to knowledge construction and knowledge sharing based on practices, lived experiences, traditions, language patterns, and rituals of Caribbean communities. The importance of an Affirming Methodologies approach is demonstrated, and the characteristics of culturally affirming research methodologies and pedagogies in diverse environments including Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica and the Caribbean diaspora in Aotearoa New Zealand and Canada are explored and presented. Grounded on an understanding of the authors’ Caribbean positionality, ontological distinctions within the Caribbean research context are considered. This book moves forward from a decolonizing methodology approach, and, as such, the chapters are written, not in opposition to, or tested against Eurocentric approaches to research, but deeply rooted in a Caribbean ethos. This book will engage researchers (both qualitative and quantitative), postgraduate students, academics, practitioners, policymakers, community workers, and lay persons who seek to employ culturally relevant local and indigenous research approaches in their work. Each chapter offers practical suggestions on the 'how' of research practice, making them accessible, relevant, and flexible for novice and seasoned researchers alike.
Odious Caribbean Women and the Palpable Aesthetics of Transgression examines the methods through which the works of French Caribbean women resist hedonistic conceptions of pleasure, “art for art’s sake” aestheticism, and commodification through representations of “uglified” spaces, transgressive “deglamorified” women’s bodies in pain and explicit corporeal and sexual behaviors. Gladys M. Francis offers an original approach through her reading together of the literary, visual, and performing arts (as well as traditional Caribbean dance, music, and oral practices) to arrive at a transregional (trans-Caribbean and transatlantic), trans-genre (with regard to forms of text), and transdisciplinary conversation in Francophone studies, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies. This interweaving is illustrated through the artistic engagements of artists such as Ina Césaire, Maryse Condé, Sylvaine Dampierre, Fabienne Kanor, Lénablou, Béatrice Mélina, Gisèle Pineau, Simone Schwarz-Bart, and Miriam Warner-Vieyra. How can we investigate, theoretically or critically, the aesthetically unpleasing found in depictions of odious female protagonists or female performers? What is the aesthetic value of transgressional women’s bodies? This book presents novel tools to understand how these women artists mark and re-instate embodied trauma, survival, and resistance into history. It posits that cultural performances can disrupt a culture-as-text ethnocentrism, for, these works provide the means to expose the tangible aesthetics through which the body becomes an archive that bears the psychological, physical and structural suffering. This project also demonstrates the ways through which the corporeal realm offered by these transgressive works (through explicit female perspectives on sex, love, and gender) challenges our moral sensibilities, works to sabotage the voyeuristic gaze, and stimulates a new methodology for reading the women’s body. It focuses on the complex layers of identity formation and bodily representations with respect to issues of sex, consumerism, commodification, violence, gender and women studies, and ethics and moral issues.
While there are differences between cultures in different places and times, colonial representations of indigenous peoples generally suggest they are not capable of literature nor are they worthy of being represented as nations. Colonial representations of indigenous people continue on into the independence era and can still be detected in our time. The thesis of this book is that there are various ways to decolonize the representation of Amerindian peoples. Each chapter has its own decolonial thesis which it then resolves. Chapter 1 proves that there is coloniality in contemporary scholarship and argues that word choices can be improved to decolonize the way we describe the first Americans. Chapter 2 argues that literature in Latin American begins before 1492 and shows the long arc of Mayan expression, taking the Popol Wuj as a case study. Chapter 3 demonstrates how colonialist discourse is reinforced by a dualist rhetorical ploy of ignorance and arrogance in a Renaissance historical chronicle, Agustin de Zárate's Historia del descubrimiento y conquista del Perú. Chapter 4 shows how by inverting the Renaissance dualist configuration of civilization and barbarian, the Nahua (Aztecs) who were formerly considered barbarian can be "civilized" within Spanish norms. This is done by modeling the categories of civilization discussed at length by the Friar Bartolomé de las Casas as a template that can serve to evaluate Nahua civil society as encapsulated by the historiography of Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, a possibility that would have been available to Spaniards during that time. Chapter 5 maintains that the colonialities of the pre-Independence era survive, but that Criollo-indigenous dialogue is capable of excavating their roots to extirpate them. By comparing the discussions of the hacienda system by the Peruvian essayist Manuel González Prada and by the Mayan-Quiché eye-witness to history Rigoberta Menchú, this books shows that there is common ground between their viewpoints despite the different genres in which their work appears and despite the different countries and the eight decades that separated them, suggesting a universality to the problem of the hacienda which can be dissected. This book models five different decolonizing methods to extricate from the continuities of coloniality both indigenous writing and the representation of indigenous peoples by learned elites.
This volume brings together scholars working in different languages—Creole, French, English, Spanish—and modes of cultural production—literature, art, film, music—to suggest how best to model courses that impart the rich, vibrant, and multivalent aspects of the Caribbean in the classroom. Essays focus on discussing how best to cross languages, histories, and modes of discourse. Instead of relying on available paradigms that depend on Western ways of thinking, the essays recommend methods to develop a pan-Caribbean perspective in relation to notions of the self, uses of language, gender hierarchies, and ideas of nationhood. Contributors represent various disciplines, work in one of the several languages of the Caribbean, and offer essays that reflect different cadres of expertise.
In Decolonizing Extinction Juno Salazar Parreñas ethnographically traces the ways in which colonialism, decolonization, and indigeneity shape relations that form more-than-human worlds at orangutan rehabilitation centers on Borneo. Parreñas tells the interweaving stories of wildlife workers and the centers' endangered animals while demonstrating the inseparability of risk and futurity from orangutan care. Drawing on anthropology, primatology, Southeast Asian history, gender studies, queer theory, and science and technology studies, Parreñas suggests that examining workers’ care for these semi-wild apes can serve as a basis for cultivating mutual but unequal vulnerability in an era of annihilation. Only by considering rehabilitation from perspectives thus far ignored, Parreñas contends, could conservation biology turn away from ultimately violent investments in population growth and embrace a feminist sense of welfare, even if it means experiencing loss and pain.
This book centers on visual and literary productions of Francophone Caribbean women. It investigates their aesthetics of violence, pain, the abhorrent, and the "uglification" of the feminine to unravel what makes them transgressive and uncommodifiable. It probes the ways in which these works destroy the regimentation of the "ideal" body.
Elizabeth DeLoughrey invokes the cyclical model of the continual movement and rhythm of the ocean (‘tidalectics’) to destabilize the national, ethnic, and even regional frameworks that have been the mainstays of literary study. The result is a privileging of alter/native epistemologies whereby island cultures are positioned where they should have been all along—at the forefront of the world historical process of transoceanic migration and landfall. The research, determination, and intellectual dexterity that infuse this nuanced and meticulous reading of Pacific and Caribbean literature invigorate and deepen our interest in and appreciation of island literature. —Vilsoni Hereniko, University of Hawai‘i "Elizabeth DeLoughrey brings contemporary hybridity, diaspora, and globalization theory to bear on ideas of indigeneity to show the complexities of ‘native’ identities and rights and their grounded opposition as ‘indigenous regionalism’ to free-floating globalized cosmopolitanism. Her models are instructive for all postcolonial readers in an age of transnational migrations." —Paul Sharrad, University of Wollongong, Australia Routes and Roots is the first comparative study of Caribbean and Pacific Island literatures and the first work to bring indigenous and diaspora literary studies together in a sustained dialogue. Taking the "tidalectic" between land and sea as a dynamic starting point, Elizabeth DeLoughrey foregrounds geography and history in her exploration of how island writers inscribe the complex relation between routes and roots. The first section looks at the sea as history in literatures of the Atlantic middle passage and Pacific Island voyaging, theorizing the transoceanic imaginary. The second section turns to the land to examine indigenous epistemologies in nation-building literatures. Both sections are particularly attentive to the ways in which the metaphors of routes and roots are gendered, exploring how masculine travelers are naturalized through their voyages across feminized lands and seas. This methodology of charting transoceanic migration and landfall helps elucidate how theories and people travel, positioning island cultures in the world historical process. In fact, DeLoughrey demonstrates how these tropical island cultures helped constitute the very metropoles that deemed them peripheral to modernity. Fresh in its ideas, original in its approach, Routes and Roots engages broadly with history, anthropology, and feminist, postcolonial, Caribbean, and Pacific literary and cultural studies. It productively traverses diaspora and indigenous studies in a way that will facilitate broader discussion between these often segregated disciplines.
In this second edition of The Repeating Island, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, a master of the historical novel, short story, and critical essay, continues to confront the legacy and myths of colonialism. This co-winner of the 1993 MLA Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize has been expanded to include three entirely new chapters that add a Lacanian perspective and a view of the carnivalesque to an already brilliant interpretive study of Caribbean culture. As he did in the first edition, Benítez-Rojo redefines the Caribbean by drawing on history, economics, sociology, cultural anthropology, psychoanalysis, literary theory, and nonlinear mathematics. His point of departure is chaos theory, which holds that order and disorder are not the antithesis of each other in nature but function as mutually generative phenomena. Benítez-Rojo argues that within the apparent disorder of the Caribbean—the area’s discontinuous landmasses, its different colonial histories, ethnic groups, languages, traditions, and politics—there emerges an “island” of paradoxes that repeats itself and gives shape to an unexpected and complex sociocultural archipelago. Benítez-Rojo illustrates this unique form of identity with powerful readings of texts by Las Casas, Guillén, Carpentier, García Márquez, Walcott, Harris, Buitrago, and Rodríguez Juliá.
