Hamel, the Obeah Man
Hamel, the Obeah Man

Author: Cynric R. Williams

Publisher: Broadview Press

Published: 2010-10-05

Total Pages: 498

ISBN-13: 1770481389

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Hamel, the Obeah Man is set against the backdrop of early nineteenth-century Jamaica, and tells the story of a slave rebellion planned in the ruins of a plantation. Though the novel is sympathetic to white slaveholders and hostile to anti-slavery missionaries, it presents a complex picture of the culture and resistance of the island’s black majority. Hamel, the spiritual leader of the rebels, becomes more and more central to the story, and is a surprisingly powerful and ultimately ambiguous figure. This Broadview Edition includes a new foreword by Kamau Brathwaite, as well as a critical introduction and appendices. The extensive appendices include contemporary reviews of the novel, other authors’ and travellers’ descriptions of Jamaica, and historical documents related to slave insurrections and the debate over slavery.

Hamel the Obeah Man
Hamel the Obeah Man

Author:

Publisher: Macmillian Caribbean Publishing

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 468

ISBN-13:

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Who are the melancholy-looking horseman and boy making their way to an abandoned settlement as night and a tropical storm set in? The boy and the horse are swept away, and the stranger, a European, finds shelter in a cavewhere he finds disturbing signs of recent Obeah ceremonies. Then he encounters the Obeah man himself, the Hamel of the books title. So begins a novel very much in the Gothic tradition, its themes those of perverted faith, lust for power and self-aggrandizement, sexual desire for an innocent and virtuous woman, but set against the backdrop of slavery, black rebellion, and the rights of the white land-owning classes of Jamaica.

Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1800–1920: Volume 1
Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1800–1920: Volume 1

Author: Evelyn O'Callaghan

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-01-14

Total Pages: 501

ISBN-13: 1108678327

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This volume examines what Caribbean literature looked like before 1920 by surveying the print culture of the period. The emphasis is on narrative, including an enormous range of genres, in varying venues, and in multiple languages of the Caribbean. Essays examine lesser-known authors and writing previously marginalized as nonliterary: popular writing in newspapers and pamphlets; fiction and poetry such as romances, sentimental novels, and ballads; non-elite memoirs and letters, such as the narratives of the enslaved or the working classes, especially women. Many contributions are comparative, multilingual, and regional. Some infer the cultural presence of subaltern groups within the texts of the dominant classes. Almost all of the chapters move easily between time periods, linking texts, writers, and literary movements in ways that expand traditional notions of literary influence and canon formation. Using literary, cultural, and historical analyses, this book provides a complete re-examination of early Caribbean literature.

The Caribbean and the Medical Imagination, 1764–1834
The Caribbean and the Medical Imagination, 1764–1834

Author: Emily Senior

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-04-26

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1108271553

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During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Caribbean was known as the 'grave of Europeans'. At the apex of British colonialism in the region between 1764 and 1834, the rapid spread of disease amongst colonist, enslaved and indigenous populations made the Caribbean notorious as one of the deadliest places on earth. Drawing on historical accounts from physicians, surgeons and travellers alongside literary works, Emily Senior traces the cultural impact of such widespread disease and death during the Romantic age of exploration and medical and scientific discovery. Focusing on new fields of knowledge such as dermatology, medical geography and anatomy, Senior shows how literature was crucial to the development and circulation of new medical ideas, and that the Caribbean as the hub of empire played a significant role in the changing disciplines and literary forms associated with the transition to modernity.

Crossing the Line
Crossing the Line

Author: Candace Ward

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2017-08-17

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0813940028

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Crossing the Line examines a group of early nineteenth-century novels by white creoles, writers whose identities and perspectives were shaped by their experiences in Britain’s Caribbean colonies. Colonial subjects residing in the West Indian colonies "beyond the line," these writers were perceived by their metropolitan contemporaries as far removed—geographically and morally—from Britain and "true" Britons. Routinely portrayed as single-minded in their pursuit of money and irredeemably corrupted by their investment in slavery, white creoles faced a considerable challenge in showing they were driven by more than a desire for power and profit. Crossing the Line explores the integral role early creole novels played in this cultural labor. The emancipation-era novels that anchor this study of Britain's Caribbean colonies question categories of genre, historiography, politics, class, race, and identity. Revealing the contradictions embedded in the texts’ constructions of the Caribbean "realities" they seek to dramatize, Candace Ward shows how these white creole authors gave birth to characters and enlivened settings and situations in ways that shed light on the many sociopolitical fictions that shaped life in the anglophone Atlantic.