Dante in Caribbean Poetics: Language, Power, Race

2021 ◽  
pp. 667-685
Author(s):  
Jason Allen-Paisant
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Caribbean Literature ◽  
Kamau Brathwaite ◽  
Edward Kamau Brathwaite ◽  
De Vulgari Eloquentia

This chapter considers the reception of Dante in Caribbean literature. It explores the works of two seminal Afro-Caribbean poets, the Barbadian Edward Kamau Brathwaite and the Jamaican Lorna Goodison, examining their relationship to Dante’s Commedia and De vulgari eloquentia. The chapter discusses the import of these two texts and of the figure of Dante in the articulation of Brathwaite’s seminal concept of ‘nation language’ and in Goodison’s theorizations of rhetoric, which highlight the epistemic dimensions of language, particularly in the colonial and postcolonial contexts. The chapter shows how the figure and work of Dante have been instrumental for these two writers in their exploration of the entangled concerns of language, race, and power in the colonial continuum. In so doing, the chapter highlights similarities, while underscoring differences, between Caribbean poets’ engagement with the figure and work of Dante and the reception of the Italian poet among African-American writers.

Calling the West Indies: Una Marson’s Wireless Black Atlantic

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Whittington
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
West Indian ◽  
Caribbean Literature ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
The West ◽  
Kamau Brathwaite ◽  
Cultural Autonomy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Edward Kamau Brathwaite ◽  
The Uk

As a colonial subject and woman of colour, Una Marson occupies a unique place in the history of wartime broadcasting in Britain. Her weekly programCalling the West Indies began as a “message home” program for Caribbean soldiers stationed in the UK but grew, as the war progressed, into a literary and cultural forum for writers from across the Black Atlantic. Though barred from advocating openly for independence, Marson used her program to promote West Indian cultural autonomy by spotlighting emerging Caribbean literary figures and forging connections with activists and intellectuals from the U.S., Britain, Africa, and elsewhere. Beyond building such transatlantic networks, Calling the West Indies afforded listeners in the Caribbean the first opportunities to hear literature spoken in the West Indian forms of English which Edward Kamau Brathwaite would go on to call “nation language.” By focusing on Marson’s wartime work, this chapter rectifies a persistent tendency, in histories of Caribbean literature and broadcasting, to omit not only the central role played by this progressive feminist intellectual, but also the role of the war itself as catalyst to the postwar literary renaissance in the West Indies.

Comparative Examination of Motifs and the Representation of Identies in Selected Works of Kamau Brathwaite and Helene Johnson

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-42
Author(s):  
Adetunji Adelokun
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Kamau Brathwaite ◽  
Identity Renegotiation ◽  
Comparative Examination

This paper is an attempt to consider the deployment of literary motifs to discuss the representation of identities in the selected works of Kamau Brathwaite and Helene Johnson. The analysis was informed by the need to identify the adherence to the preponderant theme of the quest for identity and the representation of identities in American Literary tradition. This study critically appraised and analyzed the development of the African-American and Caribbean literary traditions within the conscious space of displacement and identity renegotiation. The study revealed that the selected and critically pieces of the writers amplify the similarity or uniformity in the sociohistorical experiences of displacement from the root, search for identity and reinstatement of lost values in the enabling milieus of the writers.

Alternative Soundscape Paradigms from Kamau Brathwaite and the Mighty Sparrow

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 16-35
Author(s):  
Mark Harris
Keyword(s):  
Caribbean Literature ◽  
Sound Studies ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Economic Determinants ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Kamau Brathwaite ◽  
Atlantic Slavery ◽  
Jacques Attali ◽  
Alternative Practices ◽  
The Impact

This essay asks how the soundscapes represented in Caribbean literature and music provide alternative paradigms for conceptualizing noise and silence. As American and European sound studies have drawn from the writings of John Cage, Murray Schafer, and Jacques Attali to articulate alternative practices of listening and soundmaking, they have marginalized black experience. Caribbean noise, formed out of resistance to slavery and colonialism, has been excluded from informing those alternative practices. The depths of sonic experience revealed by soundscapes of Kamau Brathwaite’s poetry and the Mighty Sparrow’s calypsos concern the impact of centuries of Atlantic slavery on black hearing and speaking. They expose the racial and economic determinants of sound studies’ advocacy of indifferent listening and pure sound environments. In contrast, Caribbean histories of resourceful hearing and soundmaking bring distinctive sonic cultures to challenge established listening practices and provide ways of questioning canonical definitions of noise and silence.

scholarly journals Black Lives Matter in Brother: A Postcolonial Perspective

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eman Hussam
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black People ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Caribbean Literature ◽  
Black Diaspora ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
White Males ◽  
White Person

This study aims to examine how the lives of blacks are reduced and eliminated in Brother (2017) by David Chariandy. Black Lives Matter is a hash tag that appears after the killing of Trayvon Martin (17 years old African American) in 2012 by the savage hands of George Zimmerman (white person). This hash-tag has become a social movement that calls for equality in order to stop the violence against black people because their live is as valuable as white’s. The movement comes into being to highlight the “hypocritical democracy in service to the white males whose freedom are openly depended upon the oppression of blacks” (Lebron, 2017, P. 1). Those who have started this movement try to redeem a state and its arbitrary actions against black who are exterminated since the slavery. Alicia Graza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi have established this movement to reveal the suffering of the blacks who have no rights to live their life. Chariandy is a Canadian writer who specialized in Caribbean literature, black diaspora, and postcolonial studies. The novel is analyzed through Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept (intersectionality) to show how the race, gender, and class are intersecting together to emphasize how the human beings will be treated accordingly.

scholarly journals The Answer is Paracritical: Caribbean Literature and The Limits of Critique

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 126
Author(s):  
Jay Rajiva
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Reader Response ◽  
Caribbean Literature ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Reading Experience ◽  
Black Art ◽  
Caribbean Art ◽  
Modes Of Engagement ◽  
Academic Discourses

I argue that both Rita Felski’s postcritical model (as articulated in The Limits of Critique) and its academic reception are made possible only by ignoring or erasing African-American and Afro-Caribbean modes of engagement with art that predate and complicate the critical-postcritical binary. To counteract the vanguardism of this trend in literary studies, I pair Caribbean philosopher-poet Edouard Glissant’s meditation on the origins of Creole speech as an indirect language of “detour” with Nathaniel Mackey’s theorizing of black art as “paracritical”—a mode that assimilates performance and critique, language and metalanguage, and that sits adjacent to (and not against or behind) traditionally academic discourses of engaging with literature. If Glissant provides the cultural and philosophical frame for an Afro-Caribbean way of reading literature, Mackey supplies the artistic metaphor par excellence of the paracritical hinge, voiced in the idioms of jazz and blues. Finally, I examine how Glissant and Mackey’s ideas find formal and aesthetic expression in Trinidadian-Canadian author Dionne Brand’s 2005 novel What We All Long For, paying attention to the reader response engendered by the adjacencies of violence, empowerment, possibility, and desire in the novel. In order to analyze What We All Long For, we must promote the liveliness and vivacity of the reading experience and put the text under ethical scrutiny, evincing the paracritical faculty that Afro-Caribbean art demands: commingling the twin pleasures of reading and interpretation, establishing a counter-hegemonic model of literary engagement that implicates the reader without stripping away reading’s pleasure.

scholarly journals Paule Marshall and the search for the African diaspora

1999 ◽  
Vol 73 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 83-88
Author(s):  
Simon Gikandi
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Paule Marshall ◽  
Kamau Brathwaite ◽  
Literary Figure ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The 1960S

[First paragraph]The Fiction of Paule Marshall: Reconstructions of History, Culture, and Gender. DOROTHY HAMER DENNISTON. Knoxville: University of Tennesee Press, 1995. xxii + 187 pp. (Paper US$ 15.00)Toward Wholeness in Paule Marshall's Fiction. JOYCE PETTIS.Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995. xi + 173 pp. (Cloth US$ 29.50)Black and Female: Essays on Writings by Black Women in the Diaspora. BRITA LINDBERG-SEYERSTED. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1994. 164 pp. (Paper n.p.)Literary history has not been very kind to Paule Marshall. Even in the early 1980s when literature produced by African-American women was gaining prominence among general readers and drawing the attention of critics, Marshall was still considered to be an enigmatic literary figure, somehow important in the canon but not one of its trend setters. As Mary Helen Washington observed in an influential afterword to Brown Girl, Brownstones, although Marshall had been publishing novels and short stories since the early 1950s, and was indeed the key link between African-American writers of the 1940s and those of the 1960s, she was just being "discovered" in the 1980s. While there has always been a small group of scholars, most notably Kamau Brathwaite, who have called attention to the indispensable role Marshall has played in the shaping of the literary canon of the African Diaspora, and of her profound understanding of the issues that have affected the complex formation and survival of African-derived cultures in the New World, many critics have found it difficult to locate her within the American, African-American, and Caribbean traditions that are the sources of her imagination and the subject of her major works. Marshall has embraced all these cultures in more profound ways than her more famous contemporaries have, but she has not gotten the accolades that have gone to lesser writers like Alice Walker. It is indeed one of the greatest injustices of our time that Walker's limited understanding of the cultures and peoples of the African Diaspora has become the point of reference for North American scholars of Africa, the Caribbean, and South America while Marshall's scholastic engagement with questions of Diaspora has not drawn the same kind of interest.

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