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{ 173 } Notes Introduction 1. See Jameson, Political Unconscious 98–99. 2. William Andrews issues “this call” in his essay “A Poetics of Afro-American Autobiography ,” 80. 3. Frederic Jameson describes genres as “literary institutions, or social contracts.” According to Jameson, generic rules are typically agreed upon by both writer and reading public (Political Unconscious 106). 4. Glissant capitalizes the “H” in History to refer specifically to dominant and officially sanctioned Western notions of history, which are conventionally presented as linear and chronological and are typically marked by Western ethnocentricity. My subsequent usage of “History,” “history,” and/or “histories” is intentional and tropes on Glissant’s ideologically inflected usage. 5. See Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 69–70. 6. Gloria Anzalduà’s Borderlands/La Frontera (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987); Homi Bhabha’s “DissemiNation: Time, Narration, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990); and Benìtez Rojo’s, The Repeating Island (Durham: Duke University, 1992) are a small sampling of the emphasis in postcolonial studies on margins, borders, and crossings. 7. Simon Gikandi argues that “the Caribbean imagination is sustained by the tug of both Europe and Africa,” the former of which he aligns with an “imposed metropolitan identity” (10). 8. See Michael Thelwell’s “Modernist Fallacies and the Responsibility of the Black Writer,” in Duties, Pleasures (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987) for an antimodernist critique. 9. Edward Brathwaite’s “Limbo,” in The Arrivants (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), is the poem that influences Wilson Harris’s configuration of the limbo dance as a metaphor for Caribbean modernity. “History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas,” in Selected Essays of Wilson Harris, ed. A. J. M. Bundy. (New York: Routledge, 1999). 10. For more information on Esu-Elegbara/Eshu/Legba and their aspects see Gates’s Signifying Monkey and Thompson’s Flash of the Spirit. 11. Ayodele Ogundipe argues that although Esu and Legba serve the same role for both the Yoruba and the Fon, Legba’s phallic characterization and hypersexuality appears to be more pronounced than Esu’s. In Karla Holloway’s Moorings and Metaphors , she argues that Gates understates Esu as a “phallic god of generation and fecundity ” and insists that he is renowned for his sexual misconduct (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992). Ogundipe rejects the idea that Esu is a “phallic deity,” arguing instead that one cannot use Western interpretations of West African iconography to arrive at conclusions about gender/sexuality construction. She further cautions readers, however, to not simply accept Legba’s hypersexualized characteristics at face value, since other characteristics of Esu and Legba, such as their roles as trickster and status as demonic, are also misrepresentations. There is sufficient evidence to suggest that Eshu embodies male and female aspects. Erik Davis argues that Eshu and Legba are essentially the same and he (like Gates) uses them interchangeably in his work. He does, however, suggest that Eshu is a more “malevolent being” than Legba. For more information see Ogundipe, “Esu Elegbara.” See also Davis, “Who Is Eleggua?” 4–6. 12. Houston Baker reads the exigencies of the deconstructionist scholar attuned to “vernacular possibilities” as akin to that of a “liminal trickster” (Blues 200). Wilson Harris reads the Caribbean modern poet/artist as necessarily risking convention and becoming a kind of discursive “trickster of limbo” (“History, Fable, and Myth” 166). 13. The following is a sample of publications, in addition to Pelton’s and Gates’s, devoted to the Trickster: Jeanne Campbell Reesman, Trickster Lives: Culture and Myth in American Fiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001); William Hynes and William Doty, Mythical Trickster Figures (University of Alabama Press, 1997); Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World (North Point Press, 1999); and Paul Radin, The Trickster : A Study in American Indian Mythology (Schocken, 1987). 14. See Thompson, Flash of the Spirit 18. 15. I am troping on C. L. R. James’s title from his book on cricket, politics, and colonialism, Beyond a Boundary (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1993; first published 1963). 16. See Baraka, Blues People. 17. See Boyce Davies and Savory Fido, Out of the Kumbla 6. 18. Gikandi makes the case that the “limbo” space within which Caribbean writers create—though anxiety producing—is reliant upon such angst to generate the kinds of modernist interventions it invariably produces and relies upon in order to discursively interrogate colonialism and postcolonialism. 19. Shakespeare, The Tempest. 20. Tobin and Dobard’s Hidden in Plain View...