"Examines the literature of black Caribbean emigrant and island women including Dorothea Smartt, Edwidge Danticat, Paule Marshall, and others, who use the terminology and imagery of "sucking salt" as an articulation of a New World voice connoting adaptation, improvisation, and creativity, offering a new understanding of diaspora, literature, and feminism"--Provided by publisher.

This remarkable new dictionary represents the first attempt in some four centuries to record the state of development of English as used across the entire Caribbean region.

Dr. Waters is one of a new breed of analysts for whom the interpenetration of politics, culture, and national development is key to a larger integration of social research. Race, Class, and Political Symbols is a remarkably cogent examination of the uses of Rastafarian symbols and reggae music in Jamaican electoral campaigns. The author describes and analyzes the way Jamaican politicians effectively employ improbable strategies for electoral success. She includes interviews with reggae musicians, Rastafarian leaders, government and party officials, and campaign managers. Jamaican democracy and politics are fused to its culture; hence campaign advertisements, reggae songs, party pamphlets, and other documents are part of the larger picture of Caribbean life and letters. This volume centers and comes to rest on the adoption of Rastafarian symbols in the context of Jamaica's democratic institutions, which are characterized by vigorous campaigning, electoral fraud, and gang violence. In recent national elections, such violence claimed the lives of hundreds of people. Significant issues are dealt with in this cultural setting: race differentials among Whites, Browns, and Blacks; the rise of anti-Cubanism; the Rastafarians' response to the use of their symbols; and the current status of Rastafarian ideological legitimacy.

Symbols and tropes of liquidity have long been connected to notions of the feminine and, therefore, with orthodox constructions of femininity and womanhood. Underpinning these ideas is the vital importance of water as life force, which has given it a central place in cultural vocabularies worldwide. These symbolic economies, in turn, inform the discourses through which positive or negative associations of women with water come to bear impact on the social positioning of female gendered identities. Women and Water in Global Fiction brings together an array of studies of this phenomenon as seen in writing by and about women from around the world. The literature explored in this volume works to make visible, decodify, celebrate, and challenge the cultural associations made between female gendered identities and all kinds of watery tropes, as well as their consequences for key issues connected to women, society, and the environment. The collection investigates the roots of such symbolisms, examines how they inform women’s place in the socio-cultural orders of diverse global cultures, and shows how the female authors in question use these tropes in their work as ways of (re)articulating female identities and their correlative roles.