A World among These Islands
Essays on Literature, Race, and National Identity in Antillean America
Publication Year: 2010
Published by: University of Massachusetts Press
Cover
Download PDF (630.9 KB)
pp. i-iii
Title Page
Download PDF (99.3 KB)
p. iv-iv
Copyright Page
Download PDF (46.3 KB)
p. v-v
Table of Contents
Download PDF (65.5 KB)
pp. vii-viii
Acknowledgments
Download PDF (91.9 KB)
pp. ix-x
Originally presented as part of a (1975) conference “effort to rescue literary studies of the Caribbean from its long-standing invisibility and oblivion,” “Beyond a Critical Insularity” was first published in a special (Summer 1983) issue of Ideologies and Literature, edited by Ileana Rodríguez and Marc Zimmerman. The Latino(a) Research Review ...
Introduction
Download PDF (114.1 KB)
pp. 1-9
Foundational site and crucible of the European colonial (and later United States neocolonial) enterprise in the Americas, the Caribbean is also the world pioneering locale of that complex process of trans national globalization and “modernity” that was there first set in motion. It was in this archipelago of isles (rimlands, enclaves, and territories)1 coupled ...
I: Seeing the Caribbean Whole
Beyond a Critical Insularity
Download PDF (142.2 KB)
pp. 13-26
Speaking before a group of translators, literary critics, and teachers of literature gathered at a meeting of the Comparative Literature Association, some while ago now, and to all appearances the only Caribbeanist among this distinguished assembly, I took occasion to address what strikes me still as the obligation more fully to engage the Antillean ...
Raza, Racismo, E Historia: “Are All My Bones from There?”
Download PDF (185.1 KB)
pp. 27-48
It must now surely be apparent to all at the start of a new millennium that the strategies of artful dodging and denial which all too often tend still to meet provocative questions about race, racism, and history such as that lyrically posed by Nicol�s Guill�n in the early 1950s are now even more inadequate and untenable than they have always ...
Nationalism, Nation, and Ideology: Trends in the Emergence of a Caribbean Literature
Download PDF (340.1 KB)
pp. 49-100
Reading Derek Walcott’s (Saint Lucia, 1930) poetic meditation on the impact and legacy of the Enterprise of the Indies, “Origins,” one is struck by the holistic sweep of a single line: “Lost animist, I rechristened trees.”1 Resonant with multiple reference, it synthesizes as it points to a critical dimension in the historical and cultural evolution of the Caribbean: the continuous process of inventive and creatively adaptive ...
Seeing Fragments/Whole
Download PDF (149.7 KB)
pp. 101-112
Not so very long ago Caribbean literature and literary criticism, inclusively considered, looked a fractured, balkanized, “orbitally” segmented affair. In keeping with what historian Franklin Knight aptly describes as the “fragmented nationalism” evident in the archipelago’s diversity of political arrangements, states, territories, regional sub...
II: Notes of a ’Nother Rican
Sojourners, Settlers, Castaways, and Creators: Of Puerto Rico Past and Puerto Ricans Present
Download PDF (184.3 KB)
pp. 115-136
The history of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans in the Post-Indigenous Era, the peculiar character of their association with Europe and with what, with provocative imprecision, the nineteenth-century Cuban writer José Martí liked to call “the Other, Anglo-Saxon America,” properly begins with the second, 1493, voyage of Christopher Columbus. The first of his expeditions actually conceived and organized as a full-fledged colonizing...
One Boricua’s Baldwin
Download PDF (178.4 KB)
pp. 137-158
When the word finally came, it was already dimly half-expected. He had been ill and, the bulletins of radio bemba (word of mouth) had it, the illness was serious, quite possibly life-threatening, nothing to be toyed with. Reports from Amherst—where until recently we had each found a relatively compatible, putatively temporary home—had lately turned ...
Boricuas, J�baras, and Jibaristas: of Memory, Memoir, and Mimicry
Download PDF (109.5 KB)
pp. 159-166
Appearing only a year after its English-language original and in the author’s own Boricua “translation,” the Spanish-language version of Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican includes a brief fore-word, absent from the American first edition. The new preface explicitly articulates the specific cultural context, process of genesis, and narrative ...
III: Occasions, Views, and Reviews
“Soul of a Continent”
Download PDF (127.3 KB)
pp. 169-179
Writing in 1888 from his exile of more than seven years in New York, the intellectual architect and political organizer of Cuban independence, José Martí, then only thirty-five years old, privately disclosed the broad outlines of an enterprise to which his omnivorous attention was consistently and ineluctably drawn. “Do you know that, after eighteen years of thinking about it,” he confided to his friend and colleague, ...
A Poet’s Century
Download PDF (117.0 KB)
pp. 180-188
The year 2002 marks the centennial anniversary of the birth of Cuba’s internationally acclaimed national poet Nicolás Guillén. Born in the provincial city of Camaguey on July 10, 1902, Guillén was the son of a silversmith turned journalist and newspaper editor who, as a member of the island’s black middle class, became a leader in the local branch of the National Liberal Party. His father’s assassination ...
The Stoic and the Sisyphean: John Hearne and the Angel of History
Download PDF (276.2 KB)
pp. 189-227
Undoubtedly one of the most accomplished, articulate, and distinguished of contemporary writers from the Caribbean, John Hearne is also, after V. S. Naipaul, quite possibly the most controversial and enigmatic. Though he is less internationally celebrated than his Trinidadian colleague, Hearne’s fiction has, nonetheless, been an object of the most ...
Grenada: History, Neocolonialism, and Culture in the Contemporary Caribbean
Download PDF (147.7 KB)
pp. 228-242
Seen in the context of a long progression of imperious intrusions into the archipelago by external metropolitan powers and empire-builders, the invasion of Grenada on October 25, 1983, by a final total of approximately 6,000 U.S. Marines, Rangers, and paratroopers supported by heavy artillery, tanks, and the most sophisticated weaponry gives one a rather bluntly palpable appreciation
El Se�or Presidente
Download PDF (98.4 KB)
pp. 243-246
Dominican President Joaqu�n Balaguer has, surely, never been in any serious danger of being mistaken for a man of even moderately liberal ideology or opinions. Octogenarian dean of the most pusillanimously colonial and racially pretentious wing of the Dominican Right, Balaguer has devoted more than half a century to the rationalization and defense ...
“The Pirate Ambush of Remorse”
Download PDF (104.5 KB)
pp. 247-252
Between 1929 and the mid-fifties the Caribbean saw a succession of historic, transitional, sociopolitical, and cultural realignments. Eclipsed by the vigorously imperial presence of the United States after 1898, European hegemony in the region was decisively, if not absolutely, superseded by a neocolonial Pax Americana. Seigniorial economies ...
Index
Download PDF (796.4 KB)
pp. 253-264
Back Cover
Download PDF (690.5 KB)
p. 265-265
E-ISBN-13: 9781613760291
E-ISBN-10: 1613760299
Print-ISBN-13: 9781558498501
Print-ISBN-10: 1558498508
Page Count: 280
Illustrations: N/A
Publication Year: 2010
