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  • The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context
  • Gene Jarrett (bio)
Dash, Michael. The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context. 1998.

For Michael Dash to boast that his recent book, The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context (1998), represents the first Pan-Caribbean study of literature is daring, to say the least. Already cornerstones in that field are Edouard Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse (1989) and Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s Repeating Island (1992), both of which inform many of the conclusions Dash reaches in The Other America. But by no means does Dash’s book purport to be a comprehensive or theoretical study. Allegorical criticism, or criticism that posits literary works as cultural manifestations of ideological movements, helps organize Dash’s post-1492 comparative literary investigation of the Caribbean. Incisive readings of Oswald Durand’s “Choucoune,” arguably the first Haitian creole poem; of turn-of-the-century literature of La Ronde; of Aimé Césaire’s poetics of verrition, or his neologism describing the politics of tropological [End Page 1094] erasure, down to cultural and linguistic myths of origin; of Derek Walcott’s epistemological shift from Césaire’s poetics of verrition to a Glissantean one of transversality; of Caribbean women’s grotesque literature; and of Glissant’s poetry and literary and cultural criticism—all of these readings offer refreshing perspectives from which we can both historicize the Caribbean literary tradition and determine what such a tradition means in larger New World disciplinary terms.

The Other America, Dash underscores, conceptually deviates from other books he has written on Caribbean literature and culture, yet it is not so radical in light of the trajectory of his scholarship. The Other America frames the ideas presented in his prior two books on Haiti and Edouard Glissant: Literature and Ideology in Haiti, 1915–1961 (1981) and Edouard Glissant (1995). Actually, Dash’s interpretation of the Caribbean as “the other America” in The Other America begins with Haiti in the second chapter, “Modernism, Modernity, and Otherness: Self-Fashioning in Nineteenth-Century Haiti,” and ends with Glissant and Martinique in the sixth, “A Poetics of Liminality: Another Caribbean Fin de Siècle,” and in “Conclusion.” Francophone theory and criticism provide the argumentative bridge from Haiti to Martinique. The concept “the other America,” for example, gains definition in the first chapter, “Tropes and Tropicality,” through a Derridean concept of the New World as always latent and unstable within given discursive practices. By way of Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things (1973), we learn that hegemonic discourse informs notions of otherness, an idea further crystallized in Julia Kristeva’s Freudian formulation in Etrangers à nous-mêmes (1988) of the exoticized other as an unconscious projection of the normalized self. However, the origins of exoticism presented in The Other America become less clear when Dash tries to identify a 19th-century discursive shift from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s utopian naturism, based on human prioritization of natural over political and technological order, to a near contradictory modernist (or exoticist) invention of the New World Tropics mediated by French colonial modernization (or monoculture). Dash’s eventual deference to Victor Segalen’s Essai sur l’exotisme (1908) proves helpful here.

Once we reach Haiti in the second chapter, Dash’s succinct reevaluation of Haitian history, particularly of the 1802 Haitian revolution, provides an excellent segue into a brief allegorical reading of Oswald Durand’s “Choucoune” (no date) as a Haitian poetic critique of colonialism. From here Dash argues eloquently the epistemological shifts in Caribbean literary discourse. For instance, his description of the transition from Durand’s “Choucoune” to the Caribbean Fin de Siècle, La Ronde, intervenes in scholarship on the emergence of turn-of-the-century aestheticist discourse. The Other America does for La Ronde what Gene H. Belle-Villada in Art for Art’s Sake and Literary Life (1996) does for Modernismo in Latin America: both interventions are not comprehensive but instead help illuminate understudied analogues to the more widely known Aesthetes and Decadence Movement in 1890s London, England.

Chapter Five, “Fields of Play: Parody and the Postmodern,” shows Dash at his best; here, comparative study verges on comprehensive...

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