This book deconstructs androcentric approaches to spacetime inherited from western modernity through its theoretical frame of the chronotropics. It sheds light on the literary acts of archival disruption, radical remapping, and epistemic marronnage by twenty-first-century Caribbean women writers to restore a connection to spacetime, expanding it within and beyond the region. Arguing that the chronotropics points to a vocation for social justice and collective healing, this pan-Caribbean volume returns to autochthonous ontologies and epistemologies to propose a poetics and politics of the chronotropics that is anticolonial, gender inclusive, pluralistic, and non-anthropocentric. This is an open access book.
Nothing Mat(t)ers is a feminist critique of the theories of Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan, among others. Somer Brodribb analyzes the texts and the arguments that post-structuralism has nominated as central, in the process exposing the misogyny at their core. Brodribb provides a history of definitions of structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, and postmodernism. She considers feminist encounters with structuralism and existentialism. She evaluates the originality of Foucault's contributions and discusses feminist responses to his work. Turning to Derrida, she considers his fixation with dissemination and demeaning versus conception and new embodiment. She contrasts the work of Lacan and Irigaray on ethics before turning to the work of de Beauvoir, O'Brien, and other feminists as an authentic alternative to postmodern critical theory.
Erna Brodber and Velma Pollard, two sister-writers born and raised in Jamaica, re-create imagined and lived homelands in their literature by commemorating the history, culture, and religion of the Caribbean. Velma Pollard was born in St. Catherine, Jamaica. By the time she was three, her parents had moved to Woodside, St. Mary, in northeast Jamaica, where her sister, Erna, was born. Even though they both travel widely and often, the sisters both still live in Jamaica. The sisters write about their homeland as a series of memories and stories in their many works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. They center on their home village of Woodside in St. Mary Parish, Jamaica, occasionally moving the settings of their fiction and poetry to other regions of Jamaica and various Caribbean islands, as well as other parts of the diaspora in the United States, Canada, and England. The role of women in the patriarchal society of Jamaica and much of the Caribbean is also a subject of the sisters’ writing. Growing up in what Brodber calls the kumbla, the protective but restrictive environment of many women in the Anglo-Caribbean, is an important theme in their fiction. In her fiction, Pollard discusses the gender gaps in employment and the demands of marriage and the special contributions of women to family and community. Many scholars have also explored the significance of spirit in Brodber’s work, including the topics of “spirit theft,” “spirit possession,” and spirits existing through time, from Africa to the present. Brodber’s narratives also show communication between the living and the dead, from Jane and Louisa (1980) to Nothing’s Mat (2014). Yet, few scholars have examined Brodber’s work on par with her sister’s writing. Drawing upon interviews with the authors, this is the first book to give Brodber and Pollard their due and study the sisters’ important contributions.
Nothing?s Mat is told by a black British teenager ? ?every black girl? ? for she has no name until the very last chapters when she is teasingly called ?Princess? by her husband. Somewhere in the 1950s London-based Princess is allowed to complete her sixthform final exams by writing a long paper on the West Indian family instead of sitting an exam. She thinks this a godsend and that all she has to do is to interview her parents. Her father tries to help her with his side but they both find that their kin will not fit into the standard anthropological template. Her father thinks it a good time for her to go to Jamaica and meet her grandparents, who can better help her with her study.In Jamaica, much as her middle-class black Jamaican grandparents and her parents in England might not have liked it, Princess meets and spends time with her obscure cousin Nothing, called Conut. Conut introduces Princess to a plant that obeys certain divine principles and is available to humans to make artefacts for their comfort. Accordingly, they begin to make a mat and as they twist straw and bend it into intricate shapes, Conut tells her the family history so that their creation becomes for her a mat of anthropological template. The resulting shape presented to her teacher earns her an A and the comment that she has managed to project the West Indian family as a fractal rather than fractured as the published literature sees it.Her studies and subsequent academic career take her to London University and then back to Jamaica, but understimulated by the academy, she chooses to continue the family study from high school and to do so by crafting the information into the mat, which becomes for her a shield against spiritual and physical evil. Making the mat of ancestors takes her into myriad histories of young Englishmen in Jamaica, of Jamaican women in Panama, and of African Americans in Virginia, among others.This work is at once a fictional family history and a comment on anthropological methodology and African systems of thought.
In Fractal Repair, Matthew Chin investigates queerness in Jamaica from early colonial occupation to the present, critically responding to the island’s global reputation for extreme homophobia and anti-queer violence. Chin advances a theory and method of queer fractals to bring together genealogies of queer and Caribbean formation. Fractals—a kind of geometry in which patterns repeat but never exactly in the same way—make visible shifting accounts of Caribbean queerness in terms of race, gender, and sexual alterity. Drawing on this fractal orientation, Chin assembles and analyzes multigenre archives, ranging from mid-twentieth-century social science studies of the Caribbean to Jamaica’s National Dance Theatre Company to HIV/AIDS organizations, to write reparative histories of queerness. Chin’s proposal of a fractal politics of repair invests in the horizon of difference that repetition materializes, and it extends reparations discourses intent on overcoming the past and calculating economic compensation for survivors of violence.
A moving exploration of family, friendship, and how far we are willing to go for the ones we love, The Other Side of Nothing is a powerful read about loss, self-determination, and second chances. 2024 IPPY Awards Gold Medalist for Popular Fiction 2024 Zibby Summer Reads Selection? The day after her eighteenth birthday, Julia Reeves checks herself into a psychiatric facility, longing to find a way out of the grief and guilt that have engulfed her since her father’s untimely death. What she finds is fellow suicide attempt survivor Sam Lorenzo, a brilliant twenty-three-year-old photographer. Sam brings beauty and light back into Julia’s life, so when he asks her to escape with him on a cross-country odyssey, she agrees. Before Julia can process what she’s done, the two young lovers are on the run. When Julia’s mother, Laura, learns Julia has disappeared and authorities will do nothing to help find her, Laura forms an uneasy alliance with the sole person who has as much to lose as she does: Sam’s mother, Arabella. Armed with only a handful of clues, the two mothers embark on a journey of their own, desperately hoping to save their children before they are lost forever.
It’s been three months since Nate defeated John Craft for the championship and saved Sarah. Life has never been better, but nothing lasts forever. When Athena asks Nate to welcome three transfers from Ares’ territory, his peaceful world spins out of control again. He’s certain this is the next step in the dark god’s plot to destroy them. Especially when two of the transfers turn out to be people from he and Sarah’s pasts. No one else seems to see it though, even his girlfriend and best friend. Sarah is dealing with her own issues. Plagued by nightmares she can’t remember until they seem to come true and strange new abilities she doesn’t understand. She’d been looking for her place in this new world, but is this really it? Meanwhile, she’s caught between the love of family and the love of the man she can see her future in. Refusing to choose, she fears losing them both. War is in the air and Ares is bringing the attack to all fronts. Can they dig through the lies and deceit to find out what’s really going on without losing everything, and everyone, they love? A NOTE TO READER: While I would love for everyone to read my books, I realize there are things some people are sensitive to. Therefore, before you begin I would like to make it clear that these books deal with some heavy topics. Content warnings for this series include: - addiction, mention of drug use - mention of sexual assault (off page) - physical violence and injuries - gun violence - kidnapping - death of loved ones/family members - pregnancy and abortion - violence against animals/ animal injury Not everything on this list is in every book but they are somewhere in the series.
This is the story of how Maximum Rock'n'Roll Columnist Mykel Board spent a year teaching English at the Mongolian National University in Ulaanbaatar. From getting lost in the Gobi Desert to stirring fights in a Mongolian disco, Board teeters through the heart of contemporary Mongolian culture with the class, humor and buffoonery of a modern-day Charlie Chaplin.
This collection looks at Caribbean religious history from the late 18th century to the present including obeah, vodou, santeria, candomble, and brujeria. The contributors examine how these religions have been affected by many forces including colonialism, law, race, gender, class, state power, media represenation, and the academy.
Detective D. D. Warren must consult one killer to catch another in this taut thriller from the #1 New York Times bestselling “master of psychological suspense” (Associated Press). They were daughters of a monster—a father who slaughtered eight prostitutes before dying himself. Dr. Adeline Glen left the nightmare behind, and now she specializes in pain management. Her sister, Shana Day, followed in her father’s violent footsteps, first killing at age fourteen and being incarcerated for more than twenty-five years. After a brutal attack, Boston Detective D. D. Warren needs Adeline’s professional help to recover physically. But when a new psychopath known as the Rose Killer begins a reign of terror, D. D. must also consult the insane Shana—who claims she can help catch the madman. D. D. may not be back on the job, but she is back on the hunt. Because the Rose Killer isn’t just targeting lone women; he’s targeting D. D. And she knows there’s only one way to take him down...
