In A Regarded Self Kaiama L. Glover champions unruly female protagonists who adamantly refuse the constraints of coercive communities. Reading novels by Marie Chauvet, Maryse Condé, René Depestre, Marlon James, and Jamaica Kincaid, Glover shows how these authors' women characters enact practices of freedom that privilege the self in ways unmediated and unrestricted by group affiliation. The women of these texts offend, disturb, and reorder the world around them. They challenge the primacy of the community over the individual and propose provocative forms of subjecthood. Highlighting the style and the stakes of these women's radical ethics of self-regard, Glover reframes Caribbean literary studies in ways that critique the moral principles, politicized perspectives, and established critical frameworks that so often govern contemporary reading practices. She asks readers and critics of postcolonial literature to question their own gendered expectations and to embrace less constrictive modes of theorization.

Contemporary research on Caribbean literature displays a rich variety of themes, literary and cultural categories, forms, genres, languages. Still, the concept of a unified Caribbean literary space remains questionable, depending upon whether one strictly limits it to the islands, enlarges it to adopt a Latin-American perspective, or even grants it inter-American dimensions. This book is an ambitious tentative to bring together specialists from various disciplines: neither just French, Spanish, English, or Comparative studies specialists, nor strictly “Caribbean literature” specialists, but also theoreticians, cultural studies scholars, historians of cultural translation and of intercultural transfers. The contributions tackle two major questions: what is the best possible division of labor between comparative literature, cultural anthropology and models of national or regional literary histories? how should one make use of “transversal” concepts such as: memory, space, linguistic awareness, intercultural translation, orature or hybridization? Case studies and concrete projects for integrated research alternate with theoretical and historiographical contributions. This volume is of utmost interest to students of Caribbean studies in general, but also to anyone interested in Caribbean literatures in Spanish, English and French, as well as to students in comparative literature, cultural studies and transfer research.

Slavery as depicted in literature and culture is examined in this wide-ranging collection. On 25 March 1807, the bill for the abolition of the Slave Trade within the British colonies was passed by an overwhelming majority in the House of Commons, becoming law from 1 May. This new collection of essays marks this crucialbut conflicted historical moment and its troublesome legacies. They discuss the literary and cultural manifestations of slavery, abolition and emancipation from the eighteenth century to the present day, addressing such subjects and issues as: the relationship between Christian and Islamic forms of slavery and the polemical and scholarly debates these have occasioned; the visual representations of the moment of emancipation; the representation of slave rebellion; discourses of race and slavery; memory and slavery; and captivity and slavery. Among the writers and thinkers discussed are: Frantz Fanon, William Earle Jr, Olaudah Equiano, Charlotte Smith, Caryl Phillips, Bryan Edwards, Elizabeth Marsh, as well as a wide range of other thinkers, writers and artists. The volume also contains the hitherto unpublished text of an essay by the naturalist Henry Smeathman, Oeconomy of the Slave Ship. Contributors: GEORGE BOULUKOS, DEIRDRE COLEMAN, MARAROULA JOANNOU, GERALD MACLEAN, FELICITY NUSSBAUM, DIANA PATON, SARA SALIH, LINCOLN SHLENSKY, MARCUS WOOD

In Blood at the Root, winner of the SUNY Press 2009 Dissertation/First Book Prize in African American Studies, Jennie Lightweis-Goff examines the centrality of lynching to American culture, focusing particularly on the ways in which literature, popular culture, and art have constructed the illusion of secrecy and obsolescence to conceal the memory of violence. Including critical study of writers and artists like Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Richard Wright, William Faulkner, George Schuyler, and Kara Walker, Lightweis-Goff also incorporates her personal experience in the form of a year-long travelogue of visits to lynching sites. Her research and travel move outside the American South and rural locales to demonstrate the fiction of confining racism to certain areas of the country and the denial of collective responsibility for racial violence. Lightweis-Goff seeks to implicate societal attitude in the actions of the few and to reveal the legacy of violence that has been obscured by more valiant memories in the public sphere. In exploring the ways that spatial and literary texts replace lynching with proclamations of innocence and regret, Lightweis-Goff argues that racial violence is an incompletely erupted trauma of American life whose very hiddenness links the past to still-present practices of segregation and exclusion.

This field-defining book offers an interpretation of the recent figurations of neo-Victorianism published over the last ten years. Using a range of critical and cultural viewpoints, it highlights the problematic nature of this 'new' genre and its relationship to re-interpretative critical perspectives on the nineteenth century.

Tracing the development of a new genre in contemporary American literature that was engendered in the civil rights, feminist, and ethnic empowerment struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, Bridges to Memory shows how these movements authorized African American and ethnic American women writers to reimagine the traumatic histories that form their ancestral inheritance and define their contemporary identities. Drawing on the concept of postmemory—a paradigm developed to describe the relationship that children of Holocaust survivors have to their parents' traumatic experiences—Maria Bellamy examines narrative representations of this inherited form of trauma in the work of contemporary African American and ethnic American women writers. Focusing on Gayl Jones's Corregidora, Octavia Butler's Kindred, Phyllis Alesia Perry's Stigmata, Cristina García's Dreaming in Cuban, Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman, and Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker, Bellamy shows how cultural context determines the ways in which traumatic history is remembered and transmitted to future generations. Taken together, these narratives of postmemory manifest the haunting presence of the past in the present and constitute an archive of textual witness and global relevance that builds cross-cultural understanding and ethical engagement with the suffering of others.

In Consuming Stories, Rebecca Peabody uses the work of contemporary American artist Kara Walker to investigate a range of popular storytelling traditions with roots in the nineteenth century and ramifications in the present. Focusing on a few key pieces that range from a wall-size installation to a reworked photocopy in an artist’s book and from a theater curtain to a monumental sculpture, Peabody explores a significant yet neglected aspect of Walker’s production: her commitment to examining narrative depictions of race, gender, power, and desire. Consuming Stories considers Walker’s sustained visual engagement with literary genres such as the romance novel, the neo-slave narrative, and the fairy tale and with internationally known stories including Roots, Beloved, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Walker’s interruption of these familiar works , along with her generative use of the familiar in unexpected and destabilizing ways, reveals the extent to which genre-based narrative conventions depend on specific representations of race, especially when aligned with power and desire. Breaking these implicit rules makes them visible—and, in turn, highlights viewers’ reliance on them for narrative legibility. As this study reveals, Walker’s engagement with narrative continues beyond her early silhouette work as she moves into media such as film, video, and sculpture. Peabody also shows how Walker uses her tools and strategies to unsettle cultural histories abroad when she works outside the United States. These stories, Peabody reminds us, not only change the way people remember history but also shape the entertainment industry. Ultimately, Consuming Stories shifts the critical conversation away from the visual legacy of historical racism toward the present-day role of the entertainment industry—and its consumers—in processes of racialization.

Arguing that the fundamental, familiar, sexual violence of slavery and racialized subjugation have continued to shape black and white subjectivities into the present, Christina Sharpe interprets African diasporic and Black Atlantic visual and literary texts that address those “monstrous intimacies” and their repetition as constitutive of post-slavery subjectivity. Her illuminating readings juxtapose Frederick Douglass’s narrative of witnessing the brutal beating of his Aunt Hester with Essie Mae Washington-Williams’s declaration of freedom in Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond, as well as the “generational genital fantasies” depicted in Gayl Jones’s novel Corregidora with a firsthand account of such “monstrous intimacies” in the journals of an antebellum South Carolina senator, slaveholder, and vocal critic of miscegenation. Sharpe explores the South African–born writer Bessie Head’s novel Maru—about race, power, and liberation in Botswana—in light of the history of the KhoiSan woman Saartje Baartman, who was displayed in Europe as the “Hottentot Venus” in the nineteenth century. Reading Isaac Julien’s film The Attendant, Sharpe takes up issues of representation, slavery, and the sadomasochism of everyday black life. Her powerful meditation on intimacy, subjection, and subjectivity culminates in an analysis of Kara Walker’s black silhouettes, and the critiques leveled against both the silhouettes and the artist.

This book studies the creative discourse of the modern African diaspora by analyzing poems, novels, essays, hip-hop and dub poetry in the Caribbean, England, Spain, and Colombia, and capturing diasporan movement through mutually intersecting axes of dislocation and relocation, and efforts at political group affirmation and settlement, or “location.” Branche’s study connects London’s multimillion-dollar riots of 2011, and its antecedents associated with the West Indian settler community, to the discontent and harrowing conditions facing black immigrants to contemporary Spain as gateway to Fortress Europe. It links the brutal massacres that target Colombia’s dispossessed and displaced poor - and mainly black - “throwaway” citizens, victims of the drug trade and neoliberal expansionism, to older Caribbean stories that tell of the original spurts of capitalist greed, and the colonial cauldron it created, at the center of which lay the slave trade. In revisiting the question of what really has awaited Afro-descendants at the end of the Middle Passage, this volume brings transatlantic slavery, the making of weak postcolonial states that bleed people, and the needle’s eye of racial identification together through a close reading of rappers, black radicals, dub poetry, and novelists from Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Branche at once demonstrates the existence of an archive of Afro-modern diasporan, discursive production, and just as importantly, points toward a historically-rooted theoretical framework that would contain its liberatory trajectory.

Whether one thinks of the modern world or of more remote times, both seem to have been affected – if not moulded – by the interaction between the concepts of authority and displacement. Indeed, political and social sources of authority have often been the causes of major geographical displacements, as can be illustrated by the numerous waves of migration which have been observed in the past and which are still present today, such as the transportation of slaves from African to American coasts in colonial times. If displacement can often be understood as spatial displacement, it can also be synonymous with psychological, social, and even aesthetic displacement, for instance through different artistic means or through the use of stylistic discursive devices. Displacement also entails dis-placement, dis-location, as well as dislocation, or chaos. This suggests that the etymological meaning of the term authority, auctoritas, has to be highlighted, thus referring to the author of a particular work and to the different manifestations of the authorial persona in a work of art. This collection of essays in two volumes examines the relationships between the concepts of authority and displacement in the English-speaking world, without restricting the analysis to a particular area, or to the field of literature. Some essays do, indeed, deal with literature, from different spatial areas and temporal eras, while others look into these concepts from a more cultural or aesthetic point of view. Volume Two, Exploring American Shores, includes essays on the place of famous fugitives in American culture (notably through the story of Bonnie and Clyde) as well as on the links between displacement, authority and sculpture on the one hand (Placing and Replacing the Capitol Sculptures), and on the links between displacement and photography on the other, through a study of Joel Sternfeld’s Walking the High Line. In addition to investigations of Louise Erdrich’s novel Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country, Canadian “landscapes in transit” will be studied to highlight the displacement of the Western landscape tradition in English Canada. The volume concludes with a study of some literary works by several writers of Guyanese origin – first with an essay comparing Martin Carter’s and Léon-Gontran Damas’s literary productions, and then with an essay devoted to Fred D’Aguiar’s novel, The Longest Memory (1994).